Kevin Allman

"Unsolicited": advice from an editor

I've become a fan of "Unsolicited", a Gawker column written by an anonymous New York book editor. She (at least I think it's a she, unless it's a clever he) offers straight-dope, no-bull advice to authors and others about how the wheels of the publishing industry actually turn and occasionally jam. And it's useful for veteran authors and aspiring writers alike.

A few of "Unsolicited"'s greatest hits:

Unsolicited: Mommy, what's an editor?

"Editors don't find things in the slush pile. If you can't ally yourself with one of the ten bazillion agents who currently exist, there is something really wrong with you. Also, most publishing houses have ironclad no-unsolicited-submissions policies. So get an agent. It's not that hard! (to get a crappy one). It is hard to get a good one, but that's another Unsolicited....

"[Editors also don't] lead glamorous lives. Maybe there is, like, one rockstareditor left in this city, swilling hard liquor long into the night with his rockstarauthors while discussing, you know, Sartre v. Camus. He is statistically insignificant compared to the thousands of us who steal milk and toilet paper from the office because we can't afford our own, and go to readings for the free canapés."

Unsolicited: Why you don't want a big advance

"When people read the phrase 'six figure advance,' they usually pretty much stop reading after the first two words. But the word 'advance' means that your book has to sell enough copies to make your publisher that much money, plus production costs, plus more, or else it's a flop...."

Unsolicited: Why we can't be friends

"You can't trust me. My loyalties are inherently divided. Look. I care about your book. I do! I mean, I wouldn't have acquired it if I didn't. (Uh, probably) But there will come a time in the near future when I will have to put the publishing company's interests before yours. After all, you don't pay me -- they do. You will inevitably feel betrayed by my sudden businessy 'tude. And I will feel bad, and secretly resent you for putting me in that position...."

Good stuff; go read. And learn.

Book of the year club

Year-end lists are arriving early; The New York Times has issued its selections of the 100 notable books of 2006. And, as always, I'm surprised to find how few I've read...and how many I've never heard of.

The Frugal Traveler in New Orleans

The New York Times' Frugal Traveler columnist, Matt Gross, visits New Orleans in this week's column and finds the city open for business--and visitors. My favorite part of Gross' story was his visit to the Uptown music club Le Bon Temps Roule (he calls it "down-to-earth," which is politespeak for "a great old dump"):

In the back, a piano player was jamming modern Dixieland on an upright, accompanied by a percussionist who made use of everything around him: a bucket, a stool, a cardboard Budweiser box. Better yet, an oyster shucker was slicing open shells and doling them out free of charge. Was this, I wondered, a post-Katrina deal to lure back customers? Nope, the manager Laura Vidacovich told me later, free-oyster Fridays have been a Bon Temps tradition for years. In fact, she said, the Bon Temps was operating just as it had before the storm.

“We still have no cover for shows, we still have free oysters,” she said. “New Orleanians do not like change. They can barely get away with cleaning up the corrupt court system, let alone changing the prices at bars.”

Le Bon Temps is why people--frugal or extravagant--will always want to go to New Orleans.

But Gross is worried about one thing that I've heard before:

At the same time, the frugal New Orleans experience can weigh heavily on your mind: How can you enjoy yourself when ravaged buildings (and lives) lurk around every corner? In seeking out discounts, are you exploiting the crippled city’s economic straits? And can mere tourism really help improve New Orleans’s fortunes?

 

Yes, it can...particularly when the visitor keeps in mind the dichotomy between the ongoing misery and the human impulse to, well, laissez les bon temps rouler. I had a friend and his wife visit last summer, and they were hesitant for the same reasons. But once they got there, they found people happy to see them, eager to talk about their experiences, and grateful that people in the outside world actually cared.

The writer Susan Straight (who grew up in my hometown) went down in June for the American Library Association conference, the first big convention in New Orleans post-Katrina. Her travel story stuck with me for various reasons, but it was this one in particular that I found instructive:

On my last day, the young waitress who had befriended me during breakfasts approached me hesitantly. She said, “Are you with the librarians?” I told her I was a writer. “Oh,” she said, sounding disappointed. “My sister told me the librarians might be giving out books.”

The way she said the word — books — was as if they were gold. “My daughter loves to read,” she said softly. “But we don’t have any books.”...

At the time Straight met that waitress, only 2 of the city's 12 libraries were reopened. The rest were...well, this. It's a little better today. But 8 of the branches were devastated permanently, and 80% of the library staff was laid off. Hundreds of thousands of books rotted in the slurry.

So when people like Matt Gross wonder if they can (or should) enjoy New Orleans, I think the best thing they can do is go, have fun, eat dem oysters, drink in the music. But, maybe, before they leave, they could take a few minutes and a few dollars, meet someone like the waitress whose daughter had no books to read, and figure out a way to make things just a little better. Because that's part of the whole New Orleans experience these days, too, just as much as those free oysters.

He who steals my words...

An interesting piece this week in Slate: Paul Collins' "Dead Plagiarists' Society", the story of how a modern linguist used Google Book Search to unearth a case of 19th-century plagiarism:

To his surprise, he got more back than just Howlett: The search also revealed a suspiciously similar passage in Sabine Baring-Gould's 1892 book Strange Survivals. A lot of suspiciously similar passages.

Perhaps it's not too shocking that a small-time amateur like Howlett swiped from Baring-Gould, a frenetically prolific folklore scholar who published hundreds of books and articles. But, the search results revealed, this was not quite the end of the story. "Charmingly," MacBride e-mails, "Baring-Gould seems to have had sticky fingers himself." The wronged author, you see, had in turn used the unattributed quotation from a still earlier work: Benjamin Thorpe's 1851 study Northern Mythology.

You could file it under "nothing new under the sun," but Collins raises a more interesting question:

The most intriguing result of a digital dragnet would be if any deeply idiosyncratic last-person-you'd-guess authors get fingered—Emily Dickinson, anyone? Ben Franklin, perhaps? I'd bet that in the next decade at least one major literary work gets busted.

That never would have occurred to me. But how would the world of letters (not to mention high school English departments) react if it turned out that Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, or Ernest Hemingway was a big old word-stealer? And, if the work hadn't passed into the public domain, what impact would it have on the writers' heirs?

New links

An old friend and coworker, Ray Richmond, now writes a column for The Hollywood Reporter and has a related blog, Past Deadline, covering all manner of entertainment and culture news...

Thanks to Pam Spaulding of Pandagon and Pam's House Blend, who linked over here during the whole Michael Richards hoo-ha. Her commentary on the Ted Haggard affair in particular was insightful and hilarious...

Up here in Portland, howdy to Jack Bog and Worldwide Pablo, both chronicling the Portland scene, its delights, its outrages, its silliness...

And hello to a friend from high school days, Edward Fuentes: photographer, graphic designer, and artist, who surveys the landscape of downtown Los Angeles in his viewfromaloft.

The corrections

From this morning's New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Corrections & clarifications

Headline referred to trailers, not residents: In some Thursday editions, a headline on a story about illegal travel trailers said "Kenner targeting 'trailer trash'."

The phrase "trailer trash" was not used by anyone quoted in the story and was not intended in the headline to refer to Kenner residents living in FEMA trailers. The headline referred to the trailers themselves.

John Waters on Tennessee Williams

There's a reissue of Tennessee Williams' 1975 autobiography, Memoirs, with an introduction by John Waters, which was reprinted in last Sunday's New York Times.

I enjoyed it because it was very witty, of course, but it was also quite similar to this interview I conducted with Waters in 2005. He was in New Orleans for one of his art exhibitions at the Arthur Roger Gallery, and I wanted to talk to him for an article about the upcoming Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. The essays even begin the same way: "Tennessee Williams saved my life."

With every interview, there's always a "throw-out" question...the touchy subject that you save for the end, in case your interviewee decides to throw you out of the room. This whole interview was a "throw-out," because I had to start by saying "Your art is terrific, and I know you have a new movie coming out, but I really just want to talk to you about Tennessee Williams...." But Waters couldn't have been nicer about it.

Waters is so identified with Baltimore that most people don't know he lived in New Orleans for a while ("I moved to New Orleans because of Tennessee Williams, and because of the streetcar named Desire," he told me), in a house about a block from my old cottage, just off Elysian Fields Avenue.

Not so coincidentally, our other neighbors, at 632 Elysian Fields, were Stella and Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire; Tennessee Williams had put them down in what could charitably be called a blue-collar area. (It's now a barber shop, and the city hasn't even seen fit to put a plaque out front.) The streetcar was long gone, but Waters said that whenever he came to town, he always rode "the bus named Desire."

And now, post-Katrina, even the bus named Desire is gone too.

Michael Richards: I did it for the Katrina victims

Well, I didn't think Michael Richards could make things any worse, but I was wrong. You've got to give Mel Gibson one prop: He didn't try to drag Katrina victims into his apology:

"I’m concerned about more hate and more rage and more anger coming through, not just towards me but towards a black/white conflict. There’s a great deal of disturbance in this country and how blacks feel about what happened in Katrina, and, you know, many of the comics, many of performers are in Las Vegas and New Orleans trying to raise money for what happened there, and for this to happen, for me to be in a comedy club and flip out and say this crap, you know, I’m deeply, deeply sorry."

Yeah. If there’s one thing everyone affected by Katrina needed, 16 months later, it was to have a white Brentwood millionaire standing on a stage in Hollywood screaming:

“Throw his ass out. He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! A nigger, look, there’s a nigger!”

(Edited to add: Hi to the folks from Pandagon.)

 

Judith Regan: blood-spattered courtesy telephone, please

Out of all the Google searches that have brought people here this week, the vast majority of them have been for one of two things:

"judith regan"

"judith regan e-mail"

Memo to Judy: I think people want to talk to you.

It's all in response to this post, of course, which was written before Rupert Murdoch personally cancelled Regan's network television debut as America's newest murder amanuensis. I really have to wonder if Murdoch made sure his own name was attached to the cancellation after the publication of Tim Rutten's latest column in this morning's L.A. Times, which really needs to be read to be appreciated. A few snippets:

"Fox, ReganBooks and HarperCollins all have something important in common: They're owned by the predatory Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who has devoted his life to making money by making sure that news and entertainment are as coarse and vulgar as can be imagined in as many places as possible....

"Regan says that when she 'sat face to face with the killer, I wanted him to confess, to release us all from the wound of the conviction that was lost on that fall day in October of 1995.

"'For the girl who was left in the gutter, I wanted to make it right.'

The only gutter at issue here is the one where Judith Regan does business and, when you consider all the help she's getting from the rest of Rupert Murdoch's minions, it's a very crowded sewer."

Call me cynical -- but when you're a billionaire, cancelling a deal that earned you only a few million, but cost you billions in bad publicity, would seem to be a no-brainer.

The only no-brainer that might be bigger is why Murdoch thought it was a good idea in the first place.

The New York Times on Portland restaurants

Today's New York Times has a squib on up-and-coming Portland restaurants that specialize in organic foods, including Simpatica.

Haven't eaten there and probably won't, judging from the restaurant's website: sulky twentysomething chefs, a restaurant "philosophy," and the one restaurant feature Portland can't get enough of..."family dining," a.k.a. "eating with strangers." (That said, the menus do look delicious.)