David Thayer

Dan Conaway knows about the enigma factor. An executive editor at Putnam, Dan electrified the lit blog community with his Mad Max blog and may have been the first publishing executive to wear a gorilla suit to BEA. He emerged from behind the Mad Max persona to blog about Sara Gran’s novel Dope; as far as I know he’s also one of the few senior editors to embrace the Repo Man Code. Dan has developed an idea called The Enigma Factor along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. He wonders how this element of mystery applies to blogging and now, thanks to Dan, I’m wondering the same thing.

Blink is about the two second rule of thinking, instant cognitions. I’ll post a link to an interview with Malcolm Gladwell rather than rehash his thesis. The genesis of this conversation is a remark I made about why this blog is popular in Japan; my theory is they don’t understand what I’m saying.

A more interesting idea is this: I don’t understand what I’m saying. If that sounds odd, let’s take a look at novelists, all novelists. I would be wiiling to bet that every novelist who has ever lived is astounded by the reaction to their work, amazed by the interpretation of critics and readers, that in their private selves examine their pages and think, “That isn’t what I said.”

The enigma factor is not limited to literature. Keith Richards fell out of a tree on Fiji. Aside from the fact that this is something I’d like to do, the simple headline generates mystery after mystery. Is Keith all right? The only news source seems to be the E! Network whose coverage of celebrities falling out of trees is suspect at best. Equally not up to the task are the police in Suva who simply confirm that Keith fell from a coconut palm. Did he want a coconut? Don’t coconuts fall when ripe? Wouldn’t a band like The Rolling Stones have experts on staff to answer questions like that?

Dan, I’m failing miserably at developing your thesis. Perhaps you, faithful reader, have thoughts about the enigma factor. I think we’re joined at the hip, we humans, in this collective misunderstanding, and that the enduring value of literature may be to capture moments of confusion and preserve them for future generations. They can say, boy, those people were really dense, they fell out of coconut trees when everyone knows that the coconut, it comes to you.

A common complaint about corporate owned publishers is that they value profit above all else, that they create products rather than books, brand authors, pump the handful at the peak of the pyramid. In this respect corporate publishers are like cereal makers, auto manufacturers, or steel fabricators, hell bent on beating or meeting quarterly targets, pressured by beancounters into compromising their standards for the sake of the bottom line. This profit motive has ruined the business, ushered in an era of mediocrity, rendered resistance futile through the sheer vitality of greed.

I’m going to say that it ain’t so. What drives corporations isn’t the desire for profit, but fear of uncertainty. I was able to capture one of these conglomerated beancounters in an imaginary smoke filled bar. We’ll call him Marty. In the third grade Marty and I sat next to one another; I wanted to be a fireman. Marty wanted to be an actuary. He’s still wary of me because he thinks I set his lunch bag on fire in the Sixth Grade. I’m like, Marty, get a hold of yourself and do this interview.

Marty works for Gigunda Corporation as CFO. Due to Sarbanes-Oxsley considerations Marty declined to be photographed. Gigunda owns every publisher in the world, has a toy division, centralized purchasing in Goa, which is accidentally cool, and manufacturers scissors that come with the warning, “don’t run with these, you knuckleheads.” Marty wants a Harley, but owns a Vespa, lives in New Jersey, works in Manhattan, is divorced, and believes his ex-wife may be cheating on him.

Marty, why did you buy all those publishers?

We have a corporate mandate to buy things and so, we do. The scissors division was throwing off excess cash flow and we had the litigation sequestered through aggressive use of finite risk, although, Jesus, they won’t stop running with scissors.

Well since you bought all those publishers literary culture is suffering. You guys keep shelling out huge advances for celebs. How come?

Uh, well, huge to me is a hundred million. Or five hundred million, unhedged. How big are the advances?

Alan Greenspan got seven million.

Uh huh, that’s not a lot of money. R&D for the second generation Slinky is over two billion. The new Slinky is made of a an alloy that deflects radar. What do we give the average author?

Five, ten grand.

Then what?

They deliver a book. You publish it.

What about children’s books?

Yeah you publish those.

We’re not employing children at those wages, are we?

No, the books are written by adults.

Man, you had me going. Well, I’m sorry that I ruined literary culture, but take a look at commodity pricing, take a look at the yuan imbalance, we all going to fall into that abyss, let me tell you. I could live with a bad quarter, or even consecutive bad quarters, but I can’t live with the negative arbitrage of literature versus derivatives at this point in the business cycle.

Marty, can I have a hundred million dollar advance for my next book?

It’s not up to me. We have a matrix of decision makers in each discipline and besides, you set my lunch bag on fire, creating an enduring sense of uncertainty that haunts me to this day. You made your bed, mister, you lie in it.

Wow, Marty destroyed literary culture because he was pissed off at me. My face is red.

Back in the day portable TVs sat on kitchen counters much the way your microwave does now. They had antennas that required constant attention from dad who muttered under his breath trying to tune the ballgame in and Regis Philbin out. The seventh inning stretch took on new meaning as the long trek from the bullpen revealed that coming in to pitch for the Yankees, number 57, Julia Child, cooking up a mess of Gulf prawns because someone bumped the antenna.

You might say that drama derived from the device, that the early days of television were all about the tv. My father routinely dismantled the television as a kind of ritual wherein we prayed it wasn’t the picture tube. Not the picture tube. It was the size and shape of a nuclear submarine, and without it, Ricky Ricardo would never come home. My job was to hand over screwdrivers and worry  about the small pile of components gathered on the carpet, and answer the door when a neighbor entered saying, “I hope it ain’t the picture tube.”

There were a lot of us, with friends and assorted strays there could be eight or ten kids in the house. Onc time the neighborhood was turned upside down in a search of a kid who lived across the street. No one could locate him. A posse of neighbors invaded the living room where my father, human legs and head of a television, was hard at work. My father had spanked the missing kid and sent him to bed. He emerged rubbing his eyes to great fanfare. We were excited that the great search had concluded in our house, that the drama unfolded as the neighbors confronted dad, demanding to know how he could spank the wrong kid. “He was the slowest,” my dad said.

Despite the pressure of reassembling the tv it always seemed to work out. Dad used pliers to change the channel because someone had swallowed the channel dial. His favorite question was which one of you touched the tv? We’d all run outside and scatter. Adults will only chase you a few steps, and with the opening strains of Lawrence Welk’s Polka Party audible from the stoop, we were good to go. Hey the show’s on. It wasn’t the picture tube.

Somehow this is the most depressing scandal in the recent spate of scandals. The rise and fall of Kaavya Viswanathan happened within the space of a few months, hardly a blink in the life of a teenage prodigy now just a teenager again. Little Brown is pulling How Opal Mehta got Kissed, got Wild and got a Life. I can’t work myself in a state of righteous indignation over the fact that Kaavya hijacked another author’s work; I’m focused on the fact that she was the only kid in a roomful of adults, packagers, agents, editors, publishers all of whom understand the consequences of joyriding at this level. Getting angry at Kaavya is like declaring war on Bolivia for trafficking in black market cigars.

Maybe I’m distracted by the subject matter of the novel, the life of a teenage girl, as written by a teenage girl packaged and designed for the marketplace by savvy grownups. Perhaps Kaavya felt a bit overwhelmed by the idea of writing a novel. Maybe she panicked. Panic is a natural response when confronting a task you don’t know how to complete, another brick in the wall. Meeting expectations is not the key to maturity, evaluating them is. Bright teens with impeccable credentials haven’t learned this lesson yet, and civilized societies protect the young from their dumber impulses, or they try to, which is why parents become handwringing wrecks during their children’s rite of passage.

I will retract my defense if Kaavya turns out to be a forty year old man from Elko Nevada who entered Harvard as an Indian-American girl from New Jersey. You can’t be too careful with literary scandals these days. Here’s looking at you kid, you got yourself tangled in the fame machine.

The LBC is back in business with essays from Carrie Frye and Kassia Krozser, aka Tingle Alley and Booksquare respectively discussing their Spring nominees for Read This. Carrie writes about Yannick Murphy’s Here They Come while Kassia recommends Gina Frangello’s My Sister’s Continent. Even if you’re not compelled by the titles it is worth reading both pieces for the writing. Carrie and Kassia are excellent writers, vivid, funny, and articulate. Not so much persuading you to their passions as taking you by the hand and depositing you there. I don’t pretend to know what their literary ambitions may be, but it does strike me that the ability to write might prove useful to a writing career.

I do suspect however that if Carrie and Kassia are this good there are others who are too; maybe they blog about books in an informal conspiracy of talent. Much of blogging is writing despite the new fangled podcasting and photo capabilities. Businessweek or Forbes or somebody had an article about corporations searching for talent to bring some life to their blogs. The problem is this: they don’t know where to look. Where might International Business Machines find talent? How much fun would an IBM blog be? How cool could FoMoCo be if only they could blog?

One solution might be The Blog Agency. Established in midtown Manhattan, the Blog Agency would audition bloggers for their corporate clients; beneath head shots of famous bloggers, agents would urge applicants to blog at will before narrowing the focus. After five minutes of furious typing the agent would say, “hey, that was great. How about five hundred words on ventilated disc brakes? Just feel it, people…disc brakes. Yeah, now you’re blogging dude.”

I read Ed Champion’s account of arrest and and being kept in a holding cell with a pot dealing sleepyhead named Jerome. Ed was surprised to be treated badly by the cops, but night time in the city is a bad time for an encounter with patrol officers. The rules are different at night when the legal system runs on one cylinder and all is forgiven in the morning.

When I lived in the Bronx everyone in the neighborhood was shaken down on the way to and from the subway. The turf was up for grabs. If you paid off the Commancheros, you had to deal with the Skulls; if you paid them off you had to deal with ducktailed white boys with gravity knives. I was a student with a job in lower Manhattan. Every morning my friend and I employed basic risk management techniques; say no habla espanol to the Commancheros, run like hell. Tell the sales rep from the Skulls that you’re paid in full, run like hell. See a cop pointing a nightstick at you, run like hell. Cops hated the sight of young men running. Up the stairs to the platform, vault the turnstile, get chased by a TA cop, jump into a car full of Skulls, grab a pole and watch the closing doors. My pal and I were in some kind of shape; tense, though, giving off a vibe that made people downtown duck their heads or cross the street when they saw us coming.

The turf war ended when the Skulls withdrew their forces north of the Harlem River. A Prague Spring followed where we strolled to the subway past all the cop cars cooping before roll call. Never commit a crime before shift change was a neighborhood motto; cops they want to go home. A few years later I was living elsewhere and watched my old building burn to the ground during a riot. It was a nice pre-war brick building that burned like a bastard. The cops suspected arson probably because of all the Molotov cocktails being thrown; the neighborhood rolled over and died.

A couple of years later I tripped over a dead guy at the foot of the stairs on a subway platform. Cops asked me if I had killed the guy and I said no I tripped over him. ME determined he had died of natural causes; he was homeless, never identified, buried in Potters Field. The cops kept asking me what I was doing on the platform at three in the morning. I said I was waiting for a train. How did I skin my knee? Tripping over a dead guy. Was he a friend? Did we argue? We were never formally introduced. Didn’t you see the dead guy? Yes, I saw him after I tripped over him. What was he doing there? Waiting for a train I guess. A local to be exact. I was released with a warning. Watch it, pal, they said. I think about that guy buried on an island in the East River. Sorry I didn’t see you man.

After a close encounter with those outstretched fingers in a book store recently it occured to me that authors need a new payscale. The inverse ratio between quality of prose and size of paycheck is based on the perspective that the audience craves inferior work. I didn’t get that; I had fallen into the trap of believing that you got paid for quality. Now that I’m turned around and facing front here are some suggestions to reform an entire industry.

Salary Cap: This won’t be popular among branded authors, but come on. You’re not even writing your own novels anymore. Call it the Dan Brown Rule: cap that income at two million a year.

Sign and Trade: Publishers can sign a branded author and then trade the rights for fifty unknowns. The gross sales from the unknown fifty will be divided by 24, the exact number of months in a two year period during which the unknown writers will have to make coffee for everyone else. If any of the fifty break out, the old deal will gave way to the New Deal.

Sticky Icky Maudlin Degenerate: this will appear on the cover of the book with a silver seal as a quality control designation. SIMD books will claim to devote a portion of their profits to charity although it isn’t clear how that might work. This goes double if the five people you met in rehab are all dead.

Popular voting for major literary awards: throw the National Book Awards open to the public. Informal polling in Wellington Leg reveals the likely winners: Carmen Elektra, James Frey and Macauley Caulkin. These people are accustomed to the spotlight and will provide hours of entertainment attracting a cable network deal and generating millions of dollars. Publishers will reinvest those millions in developing the careers of unknowns, ever mindful of the salary cap and the sign and trade potential imbedded in the deal. Show us the money, baby, the coffee pot is on.

Richard Curtis has the second installment of his series on the state of the publishing business. Curtis, a prominent literary agent, offers a substantial and depressing account of the business dating the current meltdown from the collapse of the paperback distribution system back in 1996. It’s grim reading but does not tell the informed insider anything new, it simply explains why the industry is so devoted to publishing high concept branded authors to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Between 1939 and 1996 paperback sales fueled a kind of fool’s paradise in publishing. Profits from the pocket sized books subsidized a whimsical acquisition process wherein no one was accountable for a book’s profitability. Now we’re at the other end of the spectrum where manuscripts are assigned P&L projections based on the corporate model of thinking. Corporate thinking is an exercise in arriving at a foregone conclusion without being fired; hence the introduction of ideas such as striped toothpaste. I like striped toothpaste. They knew I would.

Corporate thinking: here’s an exercise. You have a fairly idiotic novel submitted by strikingly handsome entrepeneur Miles Goodnight. Miles would be an ex-navy seal if the book featured navy seals or regular seals and would be marketed to current seals, their friends and families. Miles made a fortune in condo construction and has appeared Good Morning Akron. Miles is the complete package.

Cool novel submitted by Mrs. Enid Braithwaite of 34 Balmoral Drive Bonneville Ga. Enid is a good writer but to her lasting discredit is not a former navy seal, federal prosecutor, serial killer, or wonder weather girl on cable. Enid has no platform. This is the test question: which manuscript do we acquire?

Postscript: in an effort to launch her writing career Enid has joined the Navy. Now in command of a ‘boomer’ she isn’t sure if she’ll keep writing.

Booksquare has a discussion about whether bloggers are superproductive people. Hmm. Frank Wilson announced he’s going dark in order to do things like write articles, make a living. The conversation was triggered by the return of Mad Max on Bookangst 101 who confessed to being Dan Conaway editing Sara Gran’s novel Dope. I always assumed that bloggers did other things when not blogging, but then I always wondered what Rocky and Bullwinkle did on their day off. Maybe they blog.

Blogging is a profession for some, a new profession to be sure. I think most bloggers, though, are more like me. I started blogging at Collected Miscellany reviewing books. Why? I wanted to re-learn short form writing. That’s how we all start writing. One of my early novels, more of a novella, imagined a world controlled by the New York Transit Authority. Step lively and watch the closing doors was the nation’s slogan. That advice is still valid. After writing book length material for a long time I enjoyed the short stuff, write it, rewrite it, post it. A wind sprint. I never thought of blogging as a substitute for doing what I really want to do.

Since December I’ve been working on a historical novel, not in the research phase, not in the drafting phase but in the finishing stage. My first draft was a kind of narrative outline, 350 pages of ideas, some of which made the cut, some didn’t. I like the ending so this draft is easier because I’m writing to that ending. Most of my blog entries during this period of intense focus have nothing to do with writing a novel, yet they have something to do with my process. What that something might be is a mystery, but if you’re batting .400 in April you don’t want to over analyze because as Old Blue Eyes once said, you’ll get shot down in May.

To simplify the investigation into the Thuringian Dressmaker case, Mrs. Anderson-Cooper QC has banned the wearing of lederhosen. The announcement, read by heralds at the Tower’s South Portal, came just two days after Lloyds of London began offering Mockery Insurance for the fashion challenged. Both the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal were caught flatfooted by the edict. “None of our reporters wear lederhosen,” insisted FT spokesperson Gwendolyn Carbide-Wright. “In fact,” she added. “We discourage it.”

Brokers on the floor at Lloyds were required to confirm with the doormen that lederhosen insurance remained in full force and effect despite the ban. “No cancellations are forthcoming,” remarked Sir Peter of Elysian Fields. “We stand by our product.”

A spokesman for Die Welt am Sontag expressed bitterness. “What about Beefeater outfits? Or those tall furry hats? Why lederhosen?”

The Prosecutrix released a follow up statement: “The Earl has spoiled things for everyone else. Since our investigation began he has obfuscated at every turn. If he reports to the Tower voluntarily his summary beheading will put this matter to rest.”