Linguistic Ineptitude

Some Background on my Youth
I was writing an essay on Barack Obama’s campaign and his recent speech on race but my good will has been tested and those observations will have to wait. However, his name did come up and I have to get things off my chest. I am annoyed and frankly a bit worried about our Puerto Rican community and the society in general.
I have a friend whose health has taken a turn for the worst. His son and daughter and other friends decided to have an evening in his honor raise money for his care. I was asked to read from his work and something of mine. All the people on the program were poets. I believe there were fourteen poets in all. I was the only prose writer, not an unusual ratio in our community. I read about our youth in Spanish Harlem as we saw things then. If you want to read about the event you can go to this NY Times link.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/author/dgonzalez/?scp=1-b&sq=David+Gonzalez&st=nyt
My friend and I go back to the early 1950s when my parents moved from the Bronx, where we lived in a predominantly Irish neighborhood around St. Mary’s Park, to El Barrio or Spanish Harlem. I had only been in New York City three years but all I knew of the United States was the Shamrocks, later to become the Rebels, because of my presence on this Irish football team. All those Os and Mc created a problem so I become Eddie McVeigh rather than Vega. Yes, it was Irish wit. They didn’t really change my name but they referred to me jokingly by that name.
At that time the fashion in my Irish neighborhood were pegged pants and square-toed Thom McCann shoes. As such I conformed and that was my attire. Of course at fifteen, once I moved to Spanish Harlem, I quickly found out that the fashion there was bell bottoms and pointy shoes. I was an average athlete but I could play well enough to be of value. I had size and a certain abstractedness that a lot of people read as cool. Everything was clubs in those days. AC and SC. Everyone had jackets and if you belonged to an Athletic Club all you did was play sports and have dances. If you were a Social Club it was likely that you were a fighting gang. I lived on 104th Street between Lexington and Park Avenue. This was Dragons territory. The Dragons were a definite Social Club. Beyond 110th Street there were the Viceroys, another Social Club and enemies to the Dragons.
There was a girl I liked who lived on 112th Street. If I went to see her I was invariably stopped by the Viceroys and questioned about my allegiance to the Dragons. I would explain that I had no such fealty. I must have been so spaced out that I showed no fear and they wouldn’t bother me. However, upon my return to the block I was always asked why I was in Viceroy Territory. Between my block and Aurea’s block were the Senecas, an Athletic Club that had a collection of great, fun loving kids who went on to do pretty amazing things.

Dinner Conversation and Latino Agita
So after the event, a group of us went across the street to a Dominican restaurant to eat. We ordered and we were talking about one thing and another and I mention that I’d seen Senator Obama’s speech on race. We’re all extolling the virtues of the senator until I said what I have always thought to be a rather bland remark. I said: “He’s an amazing person, a genetic anomaly.” A young woman sitting across from me got a very strange look on her face and questioned my use of the phrase. “A genetic anomaly?” she said, visibly shocked. I insisted that Barack Obama is a genetic anomaly. From that moment on things became totally batty since political correctness is the order of the day. Evidently, this phrase has implications of which I was not aware in the somehow misguided planet of pop culture and the great sport not speaking openly in the hope of seeming to be a good person.
I should describe the seven people at the table. I’m not going to name names since this is about an overall malaise. Across from me on the extreme left was the person I consider the best US born Puerto Rican poet. He is also a lawyer and teaches English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has a number of poetry books to his credit and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last year. Across from him was another poet, short story writer and authority on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, who, by the way, had a Puerto Rican mother. He is a professor at Nassau Community College. Next to him is someone who teaches poetry at Fordham University and for more than three decades has been involved in avant garde theater. He is also a translator into English for alternative news outlets on Latin American issues. I was sitting next to him.
Across from me was a young woman, whom I thought to be Puerto Rican, but who I was informed later was of mixed ancestry with one white and one black parent. A lot of us are like that. Next to her was a very shy black woman whom I didn’t know and who did not participate in this linguistic mélange of misunderstanding. At the head of the table was the master of ceremonies for the event, a young man who is studying for his MFA at Rutgers University, a likable, jolly person whom I thought had managed the evening’s event rather well until we ran into the problem of parsing politically correct language.

Background to the Controversy
I will go into the misunderstanding in a minute, but I believe it is important to include certain elements that added to the problem. Two main factors clouded and created this unfortunate and sad breach in the tranquility of intellectual and artistic interchange. One was the issue of why in our Puerto Rican community and at an event like this there were fourteen or fifteen poets and sadly only one prose writer, yours truly. I asked the MFA candidate why he thought this was. He didn’t know. I put forth the idea that our community did not write prose because perhaps it didn’t read as much as it should.
Later the William Carlos William authority pointed out that the problem of non-reading was endemic to the United States. I had to agree. He added that our community, meaning the Puerto Rican community, is not yet a reading community. He added that in contrast to the Black community who for quite a while has had a tradition of letters and reading we’re in our infancy. I also agreed. The point on which I sort half-heartedly disagreed is that he believes that the black reading experience has been ruined by the hip-hop and rap phenomenon. I don’t know if that can be entirely substantiated.
However, let me return to the issue at hand. The fact remains that we produce more poets than prose writers. Other than some journalists who write for major newspapers and appear in National News Programs like The Jim Lehrer Hour, and who have books to their credit, we have few novelists in the subsequent to the generation that produced such works as Carlito’s Way, After Hours, Down These Mean Streets, Family Installments, Mendoza’s Dreams and Blood Fugues, and from our women someone who should have more recognition but does not: the author of the collection of short stories: The Eighth Continent, and her new novel, The Passion of Maria Magdalena Stein. Perhaps, not as many people know about her because she teaches in London, England and publishes there. Getting out of the ghetto is good once in a while.
The next generation has produced works of fiction such as The Boy Without a Flag, Spidertown, and When I was Puerto Rican. Please forgive me but nothing else comes to mind as a significant effort in fiction that remedies this imbalance in our literature between poets and prose writers. It should be pointed out that the latter of the above works is a memoir. The issue of whether the memoir is fiction has been addressed in a previous essay. It should also not be assumed that Puerto Ricans are not novelists since we have an extensive island tradition of novel writing. I think the problem has more to do with who we are in the diaspora and the stresses under which we live and what we consider important. And of course the need for attention and the expediency of a lines thrown together at the kitchen table rather than spending three or four years writing a novel, trying to get it sold and published, a process that could take years.
The next thing that took place is that in speaking about all this the phrase “people of color” surfaced. If there is an empty-headed agenda that has come down the pike in the last fifty years, is this phrase. I hear it and I might as well be plunged into a hell of incessant suffering. Heck no! It has very little to do with avoiding an African heritage. That fact is something to celebrate no matter who you are. Genetically, according to the British geneticist, Brian Sykes, we’re all descended from one ancestral mother in the plains of Africa. The whole kit and caboodle of the human race. Six billion of us loonies are descended from this one mama. Whoa! Heavy. Yes, you and Charlize Theron, Yao Ming, Oprah Winfrey, Caroline Kennedy, Denzel Washinton, and Sitting Bull are all related. That’s a heavy concept.

Homogenizing Culture
About twenty or twenty-five years ago, some empty-headed person decided that all of us who are fuzzy-wuzzies should be called is “people of color.” When I began hearing this, I was in PEN’s “Open Book” committee. I’ll go into this episode another time because it delayed the publication of one of my novels. However, I do go into it a bit in my new novel about which you will soon find out. I thought the term was absolute stupidity. What’s the difference between “colored people” and “people of color?” I asked. I was looked at as if I had suddenly taken leave of my senses. When I inquired further as to the purpose of this phrase I was told that it would unify all of the non-Europeans. To what end? I asked with my natural curiosity which people mistake for unbridled aggressiveness and ill humor. “For unity against oppression,” came the response. “All non-white people have the same grievances.”
Really? I thought. Okay, so Puerto Rico was invaded and colonized by the United States. But it’s also true that these same folks appropriated huge stretches of land from the Indians, did number on African slaves, created abject conditions for Chinese railroad workers during the 1800s and have treated their own white people with pretty much elitist disdain. I had to laugh. Ever since that moment I’ve rejected the term as the biggest chump agenda that has been perpetrated on the innocent of this country since snake oil. Today, the ill-constructed phrase has crept into all sorts of discourses. Even white people now use the term with great elegance and righteousness. And I keep thinking: this society is getting dumber and dumber every day.

Top 10 Reasons Why the POC Agenda is Bankrupt
When I heard the phrase at this table, I launched into one of my favorite diatribes of what I consider a truly misguided intellectual construct. On this occasion I did not utter one of my favorite bon mots which is: The problem with brotherhood is sibling rivalry. When I said that it was a chump agenda the younger people, all politically correct and aligned with this type of thinking were appalled. I explained the following points:
1. Skin color is not a determinant of worth and it is only a superficial element in the description of human beings.
2. There exists within the Hispanic community a wide range of skin colors and we have many European-descended people who are, for want of a better designation, white. We also have large numbers of Amerindians, African and people who are admixtures of two, or in cases, three of these branches of continental humanity. What unites us as a people is the Spanish language and not our skin color, so many of us don’t care for the designation and view it as political accommodation, even we think it’s nonsense.
3. There are more white people under the poverty line in the US than all the other groups put together. Of course the people with short brains say: “Of course. There are more white people.” This proves the point that it’s not color but class that determines poverty. Think of it. Does white skin make it easier for a child in a white ghetto to get a better education, or a child in white Appalachia to be well cared for on little money? Is the hunger of a white child less than that of an Indian, Latino or black child? Does their white skin translate into good nutrition? Obviously not.
4. Even under the most basic economic analysis, it is a fact that 92% of the wealth of the United States is controlled by at best 6% of the people. The 8% of the wealth that the government doles out in different supposed benefits for the 94% of us, we compete for in good American giddyap and go tradition. If someone can deny that this is true, please present an argument that is cogent and not full of nicefeel and goodthought but addresses the issue.
5. Senator Obama, to his credit, is not using the silly phrase since it’s going to piss Latinos off. In spite of arguments to the contrary, they already have serious sibling rivalry problems with blacks. If people want to blind themselves to this, well, in the words of that great late 20th Century philosopher, Annie Hall, la-di-dah.
6. Since the rich are exploiting the planet into extinction, we, the majority of us on the planet, are in this together. Why not quit fussing about white people and recognize that the rich are screwing us with as much impunity as they are other folks. Skin color is immaterial to the Gates and Buffets and Wall Street types of the country.
7. Culture, and here is where most people are blinded by lack of knowledge, is more important than color. The aim of the United States is to homogenize its entire people into a rather innocuous amalgam in which everyone speaks a brand of English that is infantile in its awareness of meaning. The main concern is training people to consume manufactured goods so presented by cunning advertising people. Result? I’m sorry for the cliché but it is true: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. They have convinced us that technology, overeating, burning large amounts of gasoline, and taking the right medications will help us to live better. Buy cute gadgets and you’ll be happier.
8. At one point there were red horses, brown horses, yellow horses, black horses, and white horses. They were frisky and wild and you had to keep them in their own corral. You can call some horses Black Panther, some Young Lords, another Weather Underground, Wounded Knee, and Manzanar. Whatever! The fact remains that the country had to deal with all these wild horses in their own corrals and on their own terms. And along comes someone, whom I have yet to identify, but I suspect that it had to be one of o black brothers of letters and dreams up this odious term: people of color with the notion of creating unity amongst us.
9. Karl Marx be damned! He’s just as goofy as Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo. What was done to African people during slavery will now be perpetrated on people with distinct and beautiful cultures whose identity depends on maintaining that culture and language.
10. Remember, slavery not only destroyed families, but language, traditions, cultural pride and dignity. No more drumming, no more broom jumping. No more Mandinke, Ibo, Ashanti, Yoruba, Fante. Ya’ll are now niggers, nigras, spooks, spades, coons, tar babies, colored folks and now you have the privilege of being PEOPLE OF COLOR. But, hey, why pass up an opportunity to be part of this great destruction of culture. We don’t just want Africans to be so lucky and become Americans for the glory of one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Forget being Ogalala Sioux, Mescalero Apache, Cherokee, Iroquois. Forget speaking Mandarin, Cantonese and Tagalog. Forget your tea ceremony. Forget Three Kings Day and the Day of the Dead. You, newly arrived from India, Bangladesh, Senegal, forget all of what your ancestors gave to you as your culture, just drive the cab and if anyone asks where you’re from just say: “Africa” because dumb Americans wouldn’t know Mozambique from Motorola or Mali from Mr. Magoo. All of you who are not WHITE are now people of color. Isn’t that lovely? All of us united in misery, scraping by on the crumbs of society, but at least we have our skin color. Hey, and we have an excuse. We can blame white people even though they’re just as clueless as to why they’re losing their savings, their homes, have no health insurance, their kids can’t do long division, and don’t know the capital of the state.

The Phrase that Produced the Acrimony
Anyway, I became professorial and didactic and what I thought was helpful and socially responsible. My mother called it insoportable. There is a similar word in English, but basically it’s synonymous with pedantic and annoying. To top this off, I said that the beauty of Obama is that he is a genetic anomaly. I might as well have spit on all that is holy about political correctness. I was shocked when this young woman reacted as she did. I asked her to please say back to me what she understood me to mean by genetic anomaly.
“It sounds so rejecting,” she said.
I replied that it simply means that he is a unique individual. I was then hit by the most ridiculous argument I’ve ever heard.
“Where were you during the 60s and 70s and all the craziness with eugenics and miscegenation?” asked the young woman who couldn’t have been born back then.
I wanted to say that in the 1960s and 1970s I was involved in radical politics and anti-war activities like helping nice kids who didn’t want to kill Vietnamese children to escape to Canada and Sweden; that I was attempting to write the great American novel while supporting a family. That my brother was a conscientious objector and was driving a Civil Rights van and knew Goodman, Cheney and Schwerner, assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan; that my brother was one of the last people to see and talk to Viola Liuzzo before she was also assassinated by the Klan. I wanted to say that along with their Swedish-German mother I was busy raising our cute not POCs but COMs (Children of Miscegenation).
I simply said that eugenics was associated with the Nazis and could not be placed in the same category as miscegenation since the latter simply means the mixing of race. It is simply a word of description and if people gave it moral connotations I never saw it that way. The young woman responded by using another one of the strategies for suspending discussion. She termed our differences as semantic arguments. How did semantics all of a sudden come to mean a difference of opinion when semantics as field is employed for the clarification of meaning?

Using English versus English Usage
Many people because they speak English believe that they understand all the nuances and levels of the language. English is a tricky tongue and if you don’t examine it fully you can encounter many traps. Just because a group of people has agreed on a meaning of a word, it doesn’t mean that they can bully others into believing that they’re right. A pack of people insisting that “people of color” is a good thing doesn’t mean that it is.
I offer the meaning of the word miscegenation for the edification of those interested.
1. sexual relations between races: sexual relations between people of different races, especially of different skin colors, leading to the birth of children. 2. intermarriage between races: marriage or cohabitation between people of different races. [Mid-19th century. Coined from Latin miscere “to mix” + genus “race” + -ation .] Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
There is no question that certain people were against miscegenation, but the word itself is simply a neutral one and to attach racist meanings to is the same as thinking that the word niggardly is somehow related to racism.
However, the word anomaly must have created in this young person’s mind the horror of horrors. I asked her what it meant to her. She said it had negative connotations as if I was saying that Barack Obama was abnormal because he came from the love between a black Kenyan father and a Euro-American Kansas mother.
I said that to me it simply meant that he is a unique individual, just like every human being born is unique. Mr. Obama seems to be more unique than most. I added that I thought Michael Jordan, who seems to be the offspring of the same people as those in Senegal and Mali today, and not at all mixed of race, is also a genetic anomaly since his skills with a basketball are so unusual and that genetic anomaly has nothing to do with the mixing of races. I also consider Derek Jeter, who is the product of an Irish mother and an African-American father, a genetic anomaly since his skills at the game of baseball are so outstanding. By the same token, Ted Williams, who was whiter than God, and the greatest hitter of baseballs ever, was also a genetic anomaly. He had 20-15 eyesight and could see the ball a microsecond ahead of most humans.
Here’s the definition of anomaly:
1.irregularity: something that deviates from the norm or from expectations. Looking for anomalies in the patient’s blood tests. 2. peculiarity: something strange and difficult to identify or classify. The space probe has encountered an anomaly. 3. astronomy angle in planet’s orbit: the angle between a planet’s position, the Sun, and the point in the planet’s orbit when it is closest to the Sun Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
I see no negative connotations in the definition. Is Obama a deviation from expectations? I would say that even if he were totally white instead of half white he’d be a deviation from expectations since he’s served in the US Senate for just three years and he’s a serious candidate for the presidency of the country, a truly gifted orator, a brilliant and passionate man and a formidable statesman and a breath of fresh air in US politics.
But the die had been cast and we were now embroiled in dealing with the powers of misguided notions, a limited linguistic education, and a need to find blame in the society for personal and group shortcomings. The young man studying for his MFA became irate and said he disagreed and further that I was insulting the young woman. I said he needed to show how I had done this. He replied by saying that he didn’t have to show me anything. I said that it seemed to me intellectually weak to not explain what he thought. And here is where I was shocked to hear his response. I’ve heard it before from people without a forma academic education but never from someone who was receiving an advanced education.
“All I have to do is disagree,” he said. “No matter what you say all I have to do is disagree.”
I could say no more since this is what it has come to in our society. This is the product of what most of us have been sold as our democratic right. Since we’re all equal, all of our opinions are equal. You no longer need to back up your opinions with facts, examples, support, and references. Simply because you’re American your opinion has the same intrinsic value and cannot be challenged. Surgeon or butcher since both deal with cutting flesh, have the same right to opine on blood issues, no matter how misguided. How had we come to this that you can say anything and by dint of popular acceptance of nonsense someone can me deemed wrong?
My only recourse was to tell the young man that he ought to study genetics and above all, if he was serious about being a poet and not a mouthpiece for empty-headed rhetoric and accommodating a system whose only interest is the elimination of culture in exchange for a passport to consumerism and radical stupidity was to study the meaning of words.
I left shortly after, having once again annoyed a few people.
Assignment: Look up the word curmudgeon.

It's the e-Mail, Stupid

We Have a Slight Problem
I’m no Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie but I think I’ve solved this one. It wasn’t the butler. It was the e-mail that done it. I’ll explain.
If you haven’t read or heard about it, there’s been another literary tragedy. No, Stephen King was not attacked by another rabid SUV. Nor is there a sequel to The Da Vinci Code. What happened is that someone by the name of Margaret Seltzer, a white young woman from Sherman Oaks, California, convinced a good portion of the literary establishment of sophisticated New York City that she was a half white, half Native American who was raised by a black foster family in South Central Los Angeles.
Such was the squalor and deprivation to which this waif was subjected that she ended up being a member of a gang. To earn money she was reduced to running drugs for the Bloods. I bet those brothers are majorly pissed that this cheeky wench has taken liberties with their good name. And she wasn’t even cutting them in on the book deal nor were they getting any leg out of it. Dickens must be chuckling in the beyond.
Under the pseudonym of Margaret B. Jones, this enterprising young scribe wrote a memoir aptly called Love and Consequences. According to the NY Times: “Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.” Can you imagine the number of e-mails that went back and forth between the duped parties during the time that the author finished her book and when this story broke? Beaucoup, is my guess.
My understanding is that the initial run of the memoir was 19,000 copies. I’m sure some of them will turn up on e-Bay for considerable dollars. By the way, the author was busted when her sister saw an article with her photo in a newspaper, called up and said that it was all highly elaborate fiction. Whoa! Talk about sibling rivalry. Now that’s a story worth reading about. No Brontes these girls.

It's Happened Before
This is not the first time a hoax has been perpetrated on the publishing world. On Sunday the Times published a few of these fiascos going back to the Civil War. In 1863 a white historian, Richard Hildreth, wrote a slave narrative penned by someone named Archy Moore. This should not be confused with The Confessions of Nat Turner, by the late William Styron, a fine novelist who was white but was writing about a rebellious slave. Styron received some criticism because a white shouldn’t be writing about blacks. Nonsense, an artist may write about whatever he pleases. Was Gaugin to be hounded because he painted Polynesian women? Styron was not hiding anything.
More recently, there was a confession by the memoirist of a touching holocaust tale titled, Misha: A Mémoir of the Holocaust Years, published in 1997. This was amazing because in it, Misha DeFonseca, the author, details how she survived the holocaust. She even had to kill a German soldier in self defense and get this--she had to live with wolves. I bet Stephen King was wondering why he didn’t think of that. Well, he tried with Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer. Recently, the author, whose name is not Misha DeFonseca, revealed that she was born a Belgian Catholic by the name of Monique De Wael.
I was surprised that the Times didn’t list two of my favorites: The Education of Little Tree, published by Delacorte in 1976. This was written by Forrest Carter, a pseudonym for Asa Earl Carter, a former Klansman. This was a coming-of-age tale about a Cherokee. What’s with people and the Indians? They steal their land, kill their buffalo to make designer coats, herd them into reservations, make funny movies about them, and want to steal their identities.
And of course, being a Latino, here’s my all time favorite. Published in 1983 by the Penguin Group: Famous All Over Town, by Danny Santiago, was supposedly the first Chicano novel. It is a coming of age story about a young innocent growing up in East L.A. Horse fecals. The dude’s name was Dan James, an old black-listed, witch hunt era, Hollywood screen writer. The book even won a literary prize. Anyway, both books are still selling on Amazon.com and in bookstores after all this time.

What Did the Woman do Wrong
Why not allow Ms. Seltzer’s tome the same courtesy? Excellent question. The answer is simple. Carter and James wrote novels under pseudonyms. That’s acceptable. Seltzer wrote a memoir, presently a more respected literary form since the author is supposedly telling the truth. Time was it that the memoir was left for someone to write at the end of a long and distinguished career, a sort of an addendum for academics to pore over and compare to the historical record of the person. Today, any unusual experience that can bring a reader vicarious sociological insight is acceptable. If it’s going to sell, go for it.
You see, the American novel has fallen into disrepute. The tradition of the novel as a way of uncovering injustice is no longer important except to a few intellectual purists and art lovers like us. No more Germinal or Grapes of Wrath. The truth is now left to people who lived through certain experiences and readers can “trust.” Today fiction is no longer the way to amplify societal ills and make the world see things differently. Today fiction is the purview of the fantastic and fanciful. Fiction today belongs to the world of witches, werewolves, super ecclesiastic detectives, and underwater defenders of freedom and democracy. That often these novels contain simplistic, inferior and banal writing that can be made into films and improved on by the myriad of crafts involved in movie making is a commercial fact and cannot be avoided in a society where success and even quality is measured in sales.
Directors, screen writers, actors, cinematographers, set designers, art and lighting directors all bring their talent to the task. Quite often a novel that is poorly written is made into a passable two hour entertainment. I’m not being fair? You say people have a right to entertainment? Honestly, you have to start doing a little thinking. If the United States were anymore entertained it would be comatose. So called genre novels breed compliance. Keep producing the stuff and watch the country turn into more of a capitalist dictatorship.

The eMail Problem
Anyway, here’s the thing. This Margaret Seltzer/Love and Consequences hoax was three, maybe four years in the making. I’m not going to name the agent or the editor, nor am I going to quote from the glowing reviews by critics. My concern is why this happened. By the way, the editor excused it all by saying, the author, Margaret Seltzer, was naïve. I don’t think so. If anyone is to be tagged with being naïve it should be a whole lot of folks. Agent, editor, publisher, critics and the people who now run publishing: public relations and marketing.
And why did this happen? It was the e-mail, stupid. That’s right. I bet none of these people ever looked into Peggy Seltzer’s eyes and asked some very pertinent questions. I’ve even heard that in the book she had a pretty telling tattoo that has now turned out to be bogus as well. An insistent line of curiosity could have provided some bona fides on this detail but no one asked to see the body art. Hey, girls can go into the ladies room and show tattoos. Why not, Ms. Agent? Why not, Ms. Editor? Why not, Ms. Critic. You see a female conspiracy? A coven? Rampant Feminism?
I don’t think so. It’s more serious than that. What you see is rampant dopiness.
I would love to find out the number of e-mails that went back and forth between the parties: author to agent, agent to publisher, editor to publisher, publisher to marketing, marketing to public relations, marketing to sales people, sales people to bookstores, public relations to critics and the responses. I have no idea, but I’m willing to bet hundreds of impersonal e-mails are at the bottom of this fiasco. I can see the whole progression of niceness with folks typing away, probably using emoticons and cute abbreviations like ur, ne1, and tx, in contrast to face to face meetings between the parties, particularly the author and the ones responsible for producing the book. In a way it’s hard for me to blame Margaret Seltzer for wishing to get ahead in the world of publishing today.
Couple the perfidy in today's society with the ever-growing atmosphere of not calling people on their games because you’ll be thought of as paranoid or not a team player and you have created further opportunities for a hoax to be perpetrated on the society. Mix in the fear of hurting the feelings of us benighted fuzzy-wuzzy people of Crayola and add to the mendacity of our world.
Dude, if the guy is obviously black and he tells you he’s a Norwegian Lapp, go with it. Maybe it’s true that he was engaged to a reindeer. I think Americans would jump at reading that kind of cross cultural love story. I don’t think Nicholas Spark is going to touch that one.
I suggest we have a prize for giving fuzzy-wuzzies a pass and not having standards of excellence that apply to everyone regardless of color, creed, or ethnicity. Let’s call it THE JAYSON BLAIR PENDEJO PRIZE and award it to the person who gives a pass to Crayolas because of some misguided affirmative action notion. By the way, to Ricans pendejo means fool even though it also has pubic connotations.

Other Causes for the Malaise
I could go on and on finding reasons for what’s happening to this society to permit such hoaxes. Here are a few. Have you noticed how a lot of advertising is about fooling others to get ahead? Workers deceiving their bosses, children lying to parents, couples lying to each other. Of course Bush lying to everyone, but that’s not a commercial. What about the reality shows? Contestants deceiving one another in order to get ahead and being rewarded for their cunning and lying. What about the competition in sports? I know. Sports are supposed to build character. At $25 million a year most of us would develop into quite a character? Year round, dog eat dog madness to establish supremacy. You have to ask yourself the question. What are sports really about at the professional level? Healthy, sweaty competition or a conditioning system to get you used to the rat race?

Margaret Seltzer Advocacy
I didn’t think I could feel sympathy for Margaret Seltzer but I do. Here’s a young woman with a fine imagination who has written a remarkable work of fiction, obviously worthy of publication. She saw clearly that there is a glut of novels and that most novels that deal with the plight of the downtrodden are dismissed as either preaching sociology or something deserving of a thirty second sound byte on CNN. Bottom line: She was going to be dismissed as just another white chick writer.
Why not take her shot at a memoir? Obviously, she was correct in her assessment of publishing today. It’s sad. It’s a shame and hypocritical not to publish her book. I say, let her write a preface and an apology. People do that all the time. It wasn't like she caused the death of almost 4,000 U.S. service men and women, nearly 30,000 U.S. casualties, hundreds of thousands of Iraqui dead, and over 3 trillion dollars in wasted dollars. Ooops! No weapons of mass destruction. Sorry. Dick and I misunderstood.
They screw up, say they’re sorry and CNN goes on spinning more bullshit. Why not give Sister Seltzer a break? Have a heart. She may have more novels in her. Maybe she’ll really tell us what it’s really like in white America these days. I bet it's not different than what Ricans have to go through except that they don't have salsa. Anyway, I don’t think it’s anything like the sitcoms.

The Solution
Here's the thing. I can’t believe how a place like New York City, famous for having bullshit detectors, has been taken over by halfwits. Give me a break. Here’s a suggestion for every publishing CEO in the United States. Hire yourself a couple of paranoids from one of our ghettos. You know, one of those: “I don’t even trust my motha” fellas. Just tell your executive paranoid the synopsis of the book and hip them to some background on the author. If the EP shakes his or her head and calls you a chump, send someone out to meet with the author. Hire some starving recent graduate from a School of Journalism with pretensions of being an investigative reporter and let him ferret out these literary vandals. Remember John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire? The editor would leave the manuscript on his desk. If the cleaning lady took it home to finish reading it, he knew he had a page turner. Well, this would be similar. Come on, you have luncheons to go to, marketing campaigns to plan, book fairs to attend. Don’t get caught with your pants down again. Go ahead and hire a paranoid.

Parting Shots
And oh, why is a memoir preferable to a well-written novel? Good question and one you have to ask the marketing department. I’ll go into that another time. But I am convinced that the expediency of e-mail and the lack of face to face contact with people are making this society even dopier. Good, well-written, idea novels that magnify the problems of society are important to the intellectual health of a people. Marketing has decided that the literary novel is another “genre.” Give me a break. Publishing people please do something smart before the suits take over completely and we become robots.
By the way, hats off to Hollywood for making films from real literary works in “No Country for Old Men,” and “There Will be Blood.”
Assignment: Find out from which literary novels the two films were adapted and read them.
Have a nice day unless you’ve made other plans.

The Aim

The purpose of this blog is to address social, political and literary issues that annoy me. I’ve resisted joining the blogging revolution and sticking to writing books, but the process is a tedious one and unless you’re writing about something important like fellatio in high places, it could take a book from contract signing to bookstore shelf anywhere from 18 to 24 months. Sometimes the process is longer.Often, unless you're writing fare designed to reassure people that bad guys never win, or you're too realistic and write about pertinent issues, you're told you're writing dark stuff and depressing people, and ignored as having a bad attitude or not being positive enough. And forget it if you're poking fun at certain aspects of United States life. The only way Americans seem to understand humor is in written form if someone invents a way of including a laugh track in a book. Don’t even think of it Bill Gates, you Draculian monster. File this under the whatever category: I need to vent so perhaps this will be therapeutic. I doubt it but it'll give me a break from worrying about what’s going to happen to this society.