Late last week, bestselling novelist James Patterson donated a million dollars to independent bookstores. The donation will go to selected bookstores without strings, though it will work for most as a kind of grant that will allow special programming, such as developing a children's author series, creating a book mobile kind of outreach, and the like. It is, simply put, a generous and wonderful gift. Patterson didn't have to do it.
Patterson has said that the future of American literature would be lost without independent booksellers. That statement may be a bit grandiose, for wherever writers ultimately sell their work, they will produce work and the there will be readers for that work, even if that segment of the population continues to shrink. However, his heart is in the right place. And the loss of independent booksellers will be extraordinarily sad and something vital for books, and for local communities, will be lost. Like Patterson, I am a fan of local independent booksellers, a fan of all things local really, but like most, I would be lying if I said I spend my book money exclusively with my local bookstore. And in the interest of full disclosure, my own work must be ordered by local booksellers, and it, absent a few fiery, risk-taking bookstore owners, will likely never be stocked on their shelves, for as an independent author, my fate, for better or worse, is mostly tied to eBooks and to print books sold via giants like Amazon. And this makes me incredibly sad. But my own situation points to some of the complications of current publishing and distribution streams, and the the Patterson donation offers strange evidence of much about the current book climate.
This situation is rife with irony and with telling details. (And while I am offering disclosures, I must admit that I have never read Patterson. What he writes simply isn't in keeping with what I look for in fiction. That's not a statement of elitism but one of personal taste. Indeed, writers like myself are in odd predicaments when it comes to big time bestsellers like Patterson, for publisher's devotion to such writers has eviscerated the mid-list among the Big 5, but at the same moment, writers like Patterson make so much money for their publishers that they essentially "carry" the mid-list writers publishers do still publish.) That last statement suggest one of the first ironies this news points towards. Here's another: while a percentage of Patterson's sales flow through independent booksellers, it's a tiny portion of his sales, for the Patterson brand is a billion dollar business. He cranks out more titles per year than is humanly possible, truly creating some kind of factory style of novel production for all ages and all markets, with YA titles alongside adult fiction with more than just a few titles that acknowledge writing partners. Patterson is a rare phenomena, an industrial sized writer who lands multiple titles on the bestseller list every year. His work is available in every format--eBook, audio, hardcover, large print, multiple languages, trade paperback and mass-market paperback and is sold everywhere--at the behemoths like Amazon and other Internet-based retailers, at Costco, at Walmart, in used bookstores and in independents, among others. Varying sources place Patterson's net worth at somewhere between $150 and $310 million. All this points to something else about the generosity of his donation--it must be genuine in its intent, for he has no need to maintain political capital with independent booksellers. Patterson is unique in his ability to try and sustain a foot in two worlds--in the shifting publishing climate of digital books and Internet sales, and in the old, charming world of small bookstores run by dedicated, knowledgeable bibliophiles. The book world is changing so fast most cannot keep up. Patterson sees steady sales growth because he has been very successful in the publishing new world even as he makes a gift to one element of the publishing old world.
Note something immediately obvious. We haven't exactly heard the story of publishers, let alone HIS publisher stepping up and matching his donation. This, despite that his titles have sold more than $1.5 billion in the US alone. Patterson is iconic, for he represents the sort of author in which both publishers and big box book retailers have placed all their eggs (and most of their marketing dollars). Yet this kind of focused investment of capital and marketing is much of what shifted the ground of the publishing industry, stripping the mid-list, and ultimately, once coupled with emergent technologies like digital publishing, Internet sales, and new distribution channels, paved the way for the book market that today is largely being shaped by Amazon. I've already disclosed my own dependencies on Amazon, and there is no accusation here towards Patterson, rather, Patterson has simply proven a genius at employing the market forces that exist and the forces of the modern market have combined to threaten independent booksellers with extinction.
Like most great entrepreneurs, the best of independent bookstore owners have proven crafty and resilient, and those that continue to survive have learned that they must own the niche markets, including selling the titles of small presses (to where many mid-list authors have fled), focusing more on children's books, developing community outreach, coupling with other enterprise (like coffee), and consistently outperforming all other book retailers with superior customer service. They will have to continue to be creative, including doing ever more to best represent authors local to their region, continuing to be the hub for writer and book events, developing (if financially possible) in-store print on demand ability, offering consignment sales for indie-publishers, and generally sustaining religious fervor for their support among the literati, the intellectuals, and the super-readers in their communities. There is little doubt that independent booksellers who gain direct benefit from Patterson's gift will put it to imaginative and productive use. Still, we have to ask, what does it say about the intellectual (and capitalistic) climate in the US when small business owners need donations to keep their doors open?
I do hope the independent bookstore will not just survive but will thrive. I want that. I want to sit among their selves in comfy chairs and read. I want to know that my money is going back into the community I live. But I fear, as my own publishing relationship with independents reflects, that we are living in the midst of change that will prove permanent. Indeed, with many reports that the giant Barnes & Noble may go the way of Borders, much of purchasing books has already changed. Perhaps there will be life in the niche markets for independents, but like schools, writers, small presses, and girl scouts, there will be more gifts and more bake sales needed to help make that happen.
I'll likely not read Patterson, but I certainly applaud his gift.
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Monday, February 24, 2014
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
New Book Published!
Please share news of this publication with your friends and via your social networks. If you purchase the novel and enjoy it, please offer a review at Amazon or Barnes and Noble. If you read ebooks on an Apple device, please consider downloading the free Kindle App offered through iTunes. You can visit my author page on Facebook. Thanks to all for your support and for helping to share news of this publication.
More about In the Chameleon's Shadow:
“For years he had trekked over the globe, passing everywhere
under a new identity, as if at the demarcation lines on maps that signaled the
boundaries of towns or provinces or countries he shed one skin and donned
another. He had tried on entire pasts, entire histories, wearing them as
loosely as borrowed shirts.”
Aaron Lugner is a chameleon. A skillful con-artist hidden in
plain sight, he creates camouflage by wearing his attractiveness like a kind of
cloak and blends within the visions those around him desire, preying upon their
vulnerabilities. He is despicable, yet why then, like the women he romances, do
we like him?
When reminders from his past return Aaron to the US, he
meets Myriam, a beautiful Amerasian, one of the “dust of life” orphaned by the
Vietnam War. Desiring to change and convinced he is in love, Aaron vows never
to lie to her. Away from Myriam, his lies begin to take on lives of their own.
With her, his split selves threaten to collide.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Borders Bankruptcy
As industry experts have been suggesting for months, Borders recently filled for bankruptcy. How this goes, we'll have to wait and see, but part of their initial reorganization is to close a number of stores. Having been back to our last hometown in Colorado last week, one begins to imagine the scenario, for there they have already announced that store's closing. In this instance, it will leave a town of something like 75,000 people without a retail store aside from a small independent primarily devoted to textbook sales near a college campus. I'm a great believer in independent book stores, and this one received a great deal of my business when I lived there, but it attracts a small and focused customer base at best. The real result will be a continued movement towards on-line purchase and ebook purchases. The only brick and mortar option will be a Barnes and Noble (aside from a B & N on campus where almost no one but students venture) some twenty miles away. I know this is the inevitable movement of the industry, and I've voiced my qualms of chain book stores before, however, will we all want to move towards electronic books all the time or the environmental expense of warehouse to doorstep delivery as we support one behemoth on-line retailer. I want a world back with options, one with quirky, independent retailers who know their books and know their community. Somehow the likely failure of Borders is likely to make my wants more remote rather than more possible. With every retail collapse, be it a giant or an independent, how many readers does the market lose?
Monday, December 20, 2010
Query Mistakes
Here is a link to an excellent article by JH Tohline compiled from interviews with agents about the most common mistakes they see from first time writers in query letters: http://www.jmtohline.com/2010/12/biggest-mistakes-writers-make-when.html
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Hurray for Small Presses!
The 2010 National Book Award for fiction goes to Jaimy Gordon for Lord of Misrule and published by McPherson and Company, a small New York press that typically plans print runs of 2,000 copies for literary titles (they bumped this one up to 8,000 for the first run when the nomination for Lord of Misrule was announced just before the first run, knees shaking, no doubt, with worries of unsold returns.)
On the bestseller list...the first volume (and a doorstop at that) of Mark Twain's autobiography, published by the University of California Press. It has now sold something over a quarter of a million copies after a planned initial print run of 7,500.
Another NBA finalist this year was I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita, published by Coffee House Press.
Just a few recent examples of wonderful success stories from small publishers. Good for the editors at these and other fine small presses.
Dare to be smart and buy books that fuel the imagination and challenge the mind. Don't let sales volume and marketing budgets determine what should be read. One way to see a more eclectic vision and read a greater breadth of work is to support small presses with your purchasing power.
On the bestseller list...the first volume (and a doorstop at that) of Mark Twain's autobiography, published by the University of California Press. It has now sold something over a quarter of a million copies after a planned initial print run of 7,500.
Another NBA finalist this year was I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita, published by Coffee House Press.
Just a few recent examples of wonderful success stories from small publishers. Good for the editors at these and other fine small presses.
Dare to be smart and buy books that fuel the imagination and challenge the mind. Don't let sales volume and marketing budgets determine what should be read. One way to see a more eclectic vision and read a greater breadth of work is to support small presses with your purchasing power.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Book Lovers, Carbon Footprints, and Moral Dilemmas
Among editors, agents, writers, and others associated in one form or another with the publishing industry, you can’t have a conversation or open a industry journal or blog post without encountering the varying debates on what e-books will do (are doing) to transform the medium of how reading materials are presented to the consumer. Every sort of argument is posted, from the economic impacts, the contractual language of book deals, the future for publishing houses, the role of gatekeepers, to the very structures and contents of books themselves. Forgetting aesthetics, personal preferences, individual fondness (the heft of a good book, the pace of turning real pages, the portability, the possession of a library built over years and years of reading…), e-book technology is here, it is growing exponentially, and it is quickly gaining real aficionados among serious readers and techies alike. For the first time in its history Amazon reported that last month the sales of e-book titles surpassed sales of physical books. According to Eco-Libris, e-reader sales saw a 176.8% increase in 2009. The world moves on. E-books will continue to become a growing presence in the publishing marketplace and likely will one day dominate book sales.
One question often lost in the debates among industry insiders is whether this explosion of e-books is good for the environment. The more studies one reads, the more unclear the answer often is, due in large part to most all of the voices weighing in on such debates having vested interests one way or another on the answer. (In the spirit of disclosure, I must reveal my own interests here, for as a writer, the price-per-item of initial e-book titles vs. physical books will almost certainly reduce my future earnings significantly should e-books outpace physical books.) While likely imperfect, a study put out by the Cleantech Group would seem to indicate that e-books can have substantial positive environmental impact. Their study finds that the carbon footprint of an e-reader (factoring in manufacture, energy use, delivery to consumer, raw materials, etc.) is equivalent to that of 22.5 physical books (which do not use vast quantities of paper but have extremely high transportation costs). There is a good deal of statistical data to weigh through in the full report and a good deal of base point assumptions about the reading habits of those who own e-readers, etc. but their initial findings seem to be generally corroborated elsewhere. Whatever may happen in the commercial market, and we probably would be guilty of mimicking ostriches if we don’t see the inevitability of this growth, e-books hold tremendous economic and environmental savings in large niche markets such as college textbooks (removing the paper waste associated with multiple editions with minimal changes) and medical texts, among others.
What we can know is that the traditional publishing industry hasn’t exactly been environmentally conscious, and only in recent years have major publishing houses made much of any push to increase their use of recycled paper. Even among those publishers who have made such commitments, we’re still talking about 25 – 30% recycled paper usage at best. Estimates vary, but even towards the conservative side, the book publishing industry alone is responsible for the harvest of 30 million trees annually (and this grows explosively once the newspaper and magazine publishers are added).
More hard evidence is needed, for the manufacturers of e-readers aren’t exactly forthcoming on all the component materials that go into the construction of their devices and the environmental impact of those materials. Debates continue; a good beginning place for further investigation is present at Eco-Libris (an organization with its own vested interests we must note) that offers links to a number of related articles about environmental sustainability and carbon footprints in traditional and in electronic publishing. As an aside, I will point out that Eco-Libris may be an organization lovers of physical books want to support, for their mission is to provide readers with easy means to plant trees to offset the physical books they own.
Like most issues, this one gets really complicated, and almost no scenarios for the future seem to bode well for local, independent booksellers or community libraries, to say nothing of emphasizing the quality of book content or the development of a serious literature. At the very least, it is my hope that consumers will become educated such that one of the leading questions they ask as they contemplate the purchase of a product or their participation in an industry is focused on the environmental impact of that decision. If the demographics among frequent book purchasers hold up and we are looking at consumers who tend to be highly educated, frequently urban, and typically upwardly mobile, the trickle-down effect of becoming environmentally educated consumers becomes even more critical. In a consumer culture, like it or not, where we spend our dollars matters a great deal. Our culture needs books. We need good books. And we need intelligent, curious readers. The medium by which we get those good books may mean a great deal to our collective future as well.
(This post also appears on last Wednesday's blog over at Earthstorys.org.)
One question often lost in the debates among industry insiders is whether this explosion of e-books is good for the environment. The more studies one reads, the more unclear the answer often is, due in large part to most all of the voices weighing in on such debates having vested interests one way or another on the answer. (In the spirit of disclosure, I must reveal my own interests here, for as a writer, the price-per-item of initial e-book titles vs. physical books will almost certainly reduce my future earnings significantly should e-books outpace physical books.) While likely imperfect, a study put out by the Cleantech Group would seem to indicate that e-books can have substantial positive environmental impact. Their study finds that the carbon footprint of an e-reader (factoring in manufacture, energy use, delivery to consumer, raw materials, etc.) is equivalent to that of 22.5 physical books (which do not use vast quantities of paper but have extremely high transportation costs). There is a good deal of statistical data to weigh through in the full report and a good deal of base point assumptions about the reading habits of those who own e-readers, etc. but their initial findings seem to be generally corroborated elsewhere. Whatever may happen in the commercial market, and we probably would be guilty of mimicking ostriches if we don’t see the inevitability of this growth, e-books hold tremendous economic and environmental savings in large niche markets such as college textbooks (removing the paper waste associated with multiple editions with minimal changes) and medical texts, among others.
What we can know is that the traditional publishing industry hasn’t exactly been environmentally conscious, and only in recent years have major publishing houses made much of any push to increase their use of recycled paper. Even among those publishers who have made such commitments, we’re still talking about 25 – 30% recycled paper usage at best. Estimates vary, but even towards the conservative side, the book publishing industry alone is responsible for the harvest of 30 million trees annually (and this grows explosively once the newspaper and magazine publishers are added).
More hard evidence is needed, for the manufacturers of e-readers aren’t exactly forthcoming on all the component materials that go into the construction of their devices and the environmental impact of those materials. Debates continue; a good beginning place for further investigation is present at Eco-Libris (an organization with its own vested interests we must note) that offers links to a number of related articles about environmental sustainability and carbon footprints in traditional and in electronic publishing. As an aside, I will point out that Eco-Libris may be an organization lovers of physical books want to support, for their mission is to provide readers with easy means to plant trees to offset the physical books they own.
Like most issues, this one gets really complicated, and almost no scenarios for the future seem to bode well for local, independent booksellers or community libraries, to say nothing of emphasizing the quality of book content or the development of a serious literature. At the very least, it is my hope that consumers will become educated such that one of the leading questions they ask as they contemplate the purchase of a product or their participation in an industry is focused on the environmental impact of that decision. If the demographics among frequent book purchasers hold up and we are looking at consumers who tend to be highly educated, frequently urban, and typically upwardly mobile, the trickle-down effect of becoming environmentally educated consumers becomes even more critical. In a consumer culture, like it or not, where we spend our dollars matters a great deal. Our culture needs books. We need good books. And we need intelligent, curious readers. The medium by which we get those good books may mean a great deal to our collective future as well.
(This post also appears on last Wednesday's blog over at Earthstorys.org.)
Monday, April 12, 2010
On Publishing (or Not-Publishing)
“…I would advise you not to waste time feeling ashamed for being an unpublished writer. Each time you sit alone and give your most honest and complete effort, you’ve earned the title of writer, particularly on those days when you struggle the hardest, when you spend all afternoon and evening refining an idea or the precise phrasing of a few descriptions, when you’re pushing yourself beyond your own abilities. These hard-fought and seemingly inconsequential victories accumulate over time and make all the difference.”
--John Dalton
--John Dalton
Monday, February 1, 2010
Boycott Amazon
Okay. I've been an Amazon customer before like most of you. There are times the used book prices just look TOO good and the purchase is just a little too effortless. But really, why should an ebook cost less than a real book? (Don't bother me with the paper argument and the labor argument and all the rest; I get it.) The thing is that the book didn't cost the writer any less blood to produce. It didn't save the agent any time. It didn't remove the role of the editor both in selecting it or in making it better. Doesn't Amazon already get these services essentially for free?
Amazon has aleady largely run most of the best independent booksellers out of business. Now they want to dictate to publishers what they must charge to place their books on the precious Kindle. I'm sure some of you love your Kindles and certainly there must be a place for digital books in the marketplace, but hasn't Amazon become just a little too identical to Walmart? Yes, even those who have a bit more money like to save money, but haven't we learned the lesson of what is incurred when we always try and reduce commodities to the lowest common denominator? Mediocrity. (Doubt the role of mediocrity? Turn on the TV for a moment to any reality series or any network show; sample most of what lingers on the bestseller lists, try cutting a steak with some Soviet era East Bloc untensils...) If ever there was a demographic that can afford to pay real market value for a commodity, surely it is Kindle owners. The day Amazon wants to get the classics into every school kid's hands for, say $1.99, or if they decide to distruibute free, current textbooks to every high school science class, then maybe I'll cut them a break. Until then, if they continue to insist on telling publishers what they will publish and what they will charge, I say boycott. I'm not a Luddite, but books still read like books and there remain quality, sophisticated writers producing work if you are willing to look hard enough to find it (which, by the way, is a tougher search if limited to titles currently available on the Kindle). The digital age can be transformative, but let's make sure it is change for the better rather than change for the mediocre.
Amazon has aleady largely run most of the best independent booksellers out of business. Now they want to dictate to publishers what they must charge to place their books on the precious Kindle. I'm sure some of you love your Kindles and certainly there must be a place for digital books in the marketplace, but hasn't Amazon become just a little too identical to Walmart? Yes, even those who have a bit more money like to save money, but haven't we learned the lesson of what is incurred when we always try and reduce commodities to the lowest common denominator? Mediocrity. (Doubt the role of mediocrity? Turn on the TV for a moment to any reality series or any network show; sample most of what lingers on the bestseller lists, try cutting a steak with some Soviet era East Bloc untensils...) If ever there was a demographic that can afford to pay real market value for a commodity, surely it is Kindle owners. The day Amazon wants to get the classics into every school kid's hands for, say $1.99, or if they decide to distruibute free, current textbooks to every high school science class, then maybe I'll cut them a break. Until then, if they continue to insist on telling publishers what they will publish and what they will charge, I say boycott. I'm not a Luddite, but books still read like books and there remain quality, sophisticated writers producing work if you are willing to look hard enough to find it (which, by the way, is a tougher search if limited to titles currently available on the Kindle). The digital age can be transformative, but let's make sure it is change for the better rather than change for the mediocre.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Man, Underground: a new novel excerpt
While still in the early stages of revision, the first chapter of my new novel feels ready to share. So here it is, the premier of Man, Underground, a dark, contemporary comedy. Comments welcomed. I hope you enjoy and want to read more:
The world of men, like the world of trees, is overwhelmingly an upright world, one of verticality such that when isolated in a horizontal landscape—when we emerge from our cover like prey within the field of vision of hunters or snipers—we are always seen. Even if moving at a distance, we are visible, just as the upright things we build are visible, like our houses and our skyscrapers. While obviously we need rest and so we must join the horizontal world at regular intervals, we typically do so in private, and thus, encountering a man in public disobeying the expectations of the upright world, we find his presence incongruous, just as we find something awry, maybe even sad, in the tree that is no longer upright, knowing as we do, that life has gone out of it.
We are so accustomed to made objects that occupy only the vertical world, like walls and doors, we find them ordinary. Yet we become so conditioned to their function we don’t know how to respond when such objects adhere to our expectations of verticality but not to our perceptions of context, no more than we know how we are supposed to behave when we pass the homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk. Such as it is for people when they encounter my front door, a door that stands alone in a field, a door without visible walls, without the context of “house” as we’ve come to expect it. If you can’t picture such a thing or you imagine only a two dimensional world with a door in a frame standing isolated in space, go back a few generations and think root cellar where the door only provides entrance to what’s below and you will have a fair equivalent of my front door. Picture the entrance to a place meant to preserve vegetables within the consistent cool womb of the earth, only this one preserves the sanity of a man. Maybe it is easier for you to accept its presence if you consider it as belonging to another age, another function, or another context. Perhaps I am easier to accept if you consider me in the same way.
Most people build houses against space. Give them a hill where the wind never stops blowing and they’ll build a house on top of it. It can be a hilltop in the middle of the prairie or in an otherwise flat valley or one rising from a suburb and still they erect a two or three story monstrosity atop it. They’ll build a private road to it if they must, install guardrails and hire a sand truck in winter and they’re at risk of sliding off the side of their beloved hill. They’ll complain at how the wind whistles through gaps in window sills and door frames and bemoan how they can’t keep water on their lawn for the steepness of its slope. All the while they’ll tell you how much they admire the view, but the only evidence you’ll see that they are home up there on that hill above you is the constant blue flicker of their TV screens at night. I know. I live below several hills. I live in a place where it hasn’t forgotten how to snow in winter even if people have forgotten how to drive or how to wear sensible shoes that accommodate the weather, a place where the wind blows and where smart farmers from another century planted wind breaks, and where, once upon a time, root cellars were common.
It is no great mystery how people are, no more than it’s a mystery that people talk about anyone who is different from them. People who live atop hills know they are the topic of conversations. And it may be simple-mindedness on my part, but I have little doubt that, consciously or not, those who live atop hills feel a kind of superiority. The house on the hill is a concept nearly as old as time. Like I said, people like to talk about those who are different from themselves. The poor talk badly about the rich and the rich about the poor and the powerful about the powerless and on and on.
I know people talk about me. I’d be a fool not to know. The crazy man in his cave. The recluse who lives down there with his spiders and snakes. Mr. Underground Man. I know they talk about more than my little underground house. Funny how people who don’t have anything to say to you always have a lot to say about you. I say let them talk.
Now I don’t really live in a cave or a hole in the ground. Let’s set that clear from the start. My home may be unconventional but it’s not primitive. Quite the opposite: complete with two large freezers and a well-stocked pantry, not to mention high-end, energy efficient washer and dryer. In designer color no less. I just take advantage of what the good earth provides. Like insulation during cold winters and hot summers.
Few people have ever crossed my threshold, so mostly they make assumptions. Like they take one look at my front door and assume that I’m more than a few bricks short of a full load. I suppose I shouldn’t blame them. I’m not so thick-headed I can’t realize how funny a door sticking up out of a field looks to most. Because my front door is little more than a gap cut into a berm, a door that opens onto a down stairwell, maybe it’s natural that people assume I live in the dark. If only they’d take a moment to consider the landscape falls away beyond my field, that there is a view the berm intentionally blocks. If they’d only consider the perspective of my home they don’t have from the road, they’d see it is purposely built into the side of a tall cut-bank, that indeed the south side of my home is visible from above and is full of windows and that in the winter, when the sun is low on the horizon, I get long hours of good light and fine solar heat. They don’t see the overhung roof that blocks the angle of mid-day sun in summer of the tile near the windows that absorbs and retains the heat. I wasn’t mindless when I built this place. But most people see my lone doorway and know I must be stone crazy.
Not that I go out of my way to correct them. And not that I didn’t build that door in the style I did for a laugh too. You’ve got to find humor where you can. Sometimes you’ve got to take pleasure in what is not said, have some confidence in the conversations that will occur regardless of your absence.
I don’t talk much to folks. I stick mostly to myself. I like talking to kids and eccentrics best when I am out and about in the world because they aren’t afraid to say what’s on their mind, or to ask questions, or act on their curiosity. The curious just might learn something. They might just stumble into a fact or an answer that opens their mind a crack. So when children approach me when I’m out at the library or the grocery store or just out for a walk for exercise in good weather—contrary to popular belief, I do leave home fairly regularly—I make it a point to talk with them if they approach me and I answer their questions. Okay, I’ll admit that sometimes I tease them, and if they ask if I live with snakes like they’ve heard, I’ll tell them I do, that the place is rampant with poisonous diamondbacks and that I cook them for my supper and decorate my Christmas tree with their rattles. I like watching their eyes grow wide and then that wrinkle of healthy skepticism furrow their brows. Mostly though I answer their questions honestly—the way I like my questions answered—and mostly kids know when a guy is teasing them. So I don’t mind when they play on my roof, because what’s it going to bother me if some little kids are running around up there in a field or they use it as a place to throw a ball back and forth. Just so long as they stay out of my garden, I’m content. What do I care? It’s not like I hear them, what with two feet of earth and a field full of native grasses and a foot of concrete between me and them. It’s not like they’re going to set fire to the place. Just so long as they don’t come bearing shovels and a jackhammer and a desire to dig a deep grave.
Of course I know there are stories about how I bury people down here or commit some other atrocious crimes or that I’ve filled the walls with sacks of money, but those stories usually have their origins with adults and the stories get screwed up and turned over and twisted, kind of like how bible stories get handed on. You might have a hard time getting to where the story began by the time it gets passed along enough and everybody gets their own agenda tagged on. They certainly bear little resemblance to the truth. But in my experience most folks wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them on their backside. Such stories are a way of explaining what you don’t understand, a way of labeling and categorizing something or someone that seems outside of you and your range of experience. It’s like people who collect insects and keep them neatly labeled, the wings all shiny and rigid with shellac and safe inside their glass cases. They just seem to forget the pins stuck through the thorax that allow for this bit of otherness to seem permanently knowable and contained.
I realize I sound bitter and I don’t mean to. I really don’t. The truth is I don’t know much about other people any more than they know about me. I don’t really understand the rest of the culture, so largely I’ve withdrawn from it. I have a history like all of us do, and my particular history helped me to decide I’d had enough of the world’s patterns—the above ground world, as I call it—and I retired to this underground world.
Now don’t misunderstand that. I fear I can make it sound as if I’m making some grand political statement, that my decision to “unplug,” as it were, has significant attachments to it. It doesn’t. I’m not Ralph Elision’s invisible man. I pay for the electricity I use same as the next guy, only perhaps I’ve learned to use a lot less. I remain disillusioned with the culture we’ve created, maybe more than disillusioned, but I can’t claim that I was used for a greater cause or that I became a spokesman for those who are alienated and abused and dehumanized or that I came close to a power that I eventually saw as corrupting. No, I’m an ordinary man. Or I was an ordinary man if choosing to live one’s life by simpler patterns makes one extraordinary. I don’t think it does. Quite the opposite. I’m so ordinary you could clone me and I’d look just like the rest of us out wandering through our lives complaining about what hand we’ve been dealt, convinced that we’ve been disrespected for one trifle or another, living by the entirely ordinary, mundane patterns of our sleeping lives, each year a bit less hair where I want it and a bit more where I don’t. I’m no different from you other than you look at me with the same disdain as you do the guy with the sign at the off-ramp looking for a handout. No, mine is no political cause, no statement, no protest. Remember back in the day when Timothy Leary said “Tune in. Turn on. Drop out,” well I dropped out. Maybe I still wore cowboy pajamas when he said it and maybe it took me almost another forty years after he said it to heed his advice, but I finally did nonetheless, I dropped out, opted out as the insurance folks like to say.
Now perhaps I’m being unintentionally misleading. As I’ve suggested, I came along a good while after Leary. I grew up between wars, came of age in that time when America had visibly failed, yet it still wanted to believe it was required to pass its values around the world whether others wanted them or not but it allowed Coke and Pepsi and Exxon and Halliburton and McDonalds to fight the wars rather than employ planes and bombs and grunts on the ground. I was a Cold War kid all the way. Tuck your head and kiss your ass goodbye while presidents and premiers called each other names. By the time I cast my first ballot, we had already forgotten most of the lessons of Vietnam and, along with a few missing brain cells, we had pretty much forgotten Leary too. We’d hired an actor to pretend to be President and got our news from animated Max Headroom, who offered another version of that President. We’d killed Lennon. We’d long since stopped selling planes to Iran and started selling them to Iraq and had watched a Sea Stallion helicopter fly into its refueling plane. Yeah, those blissful, turn your head and cough days of “peace.” Even after the wall came down, those “peaceful days” prepped us for machete murders in the millions across Africa and snipers in an Olympic city, for “wars” on drugs and “wars” on terror.
I shouldn’t complain. I’ve got no room. I chose the path of inaction. I have become Melville’s Bartleby responding to the world around me with a continuous “I would prefer not to.” Buy this product. I would prefer not to. Follow this fad. I would prefer not to. Join this campaign. No thanks, I’d rather not. Sit and watch mindless drivel manufactured in the TV studio’s writer lounges and newsroom editing floors. Perhaps not. Join an on-line “social community” while an actual community lies beyond the computer connection. Pass. Accept the lies of our beloved and bribed elected officials. Thanks, no, I’ve had my fill.
I only encountered Melville’s Bartleby within the past year. I didn’t really use to be much of a reader, which is ironic given that my degree states otherwise. But I’ll admit I’ve taken much of my solace in the world of books in the last years, and when I met a character like Bartleby I had no difficulty understanding his actions, or his inactions as the case may be. Am I, like Bartleby, too lazy to fight a corrupted culture? Damn straight. For years I tried to tune it out, but the noise is cacophonous, so loud and so constant it still tries to creep in long after I opted out.
I get Bartleby. He makes perfect sense to me. Just as I get Elision’s invisible man much more clearly in his below ground squat than I do when he was the one behind the podium. I’ve long understood his blind rage more than I do his youthful hope. I get his silence more than I get the voice over the microphone. I understand silence. I crave it. There’s just so much noise in the world, like everyone is vying for your attention so they try and shout louder than the next guy. Have you noticed? When was the last time you heard quiet? My little place snug down here inside the earth helps. It can’t block out the world, but if you get enough insulation between yourself and all the noise, it helps.
The world of men, like the world of trees, is overwhelmingly an upright world, one of verticality such that when isolated in a horizontal landscape—when we emerge from our cover like prey within the field of vision of hunters or snipers—we are always seen. Even if moving at a distance, we are visible, just as the upright things we build are visible, like our houses and our skyscrapers. While obviously we need rest and so we must join the horizontal world at regular intervals, we typically do so in private, and thus, encountering a man in public disobeying the expectations of the upright world, we find his presence incongruous, just as we find something awry, maybe even sad, in the tree that is no longer upright, knowing as we do, that life has gone out of it.
We are so accustomed to made objects that occupy only the vertical world, like walls and doors, we find them ordinary. Yet we become so conditioned to their function we don’t know how to respond when such objects adhere to our expectations of verticality but not to our perceptions of context, no more than we know how we are supposed to behave when we pass the homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk. Such as it is for people when they encounter my front door, a door that stands alone in a field, a door without visible walls, without the context of “house” as we’ve come to expect it. If you can’t picture such a thing or you imagine only a two dimensional world with a door in a frame standing isolated in space, go back a few generations and think root cellar where the door only provides entrance to what’s below and you will have a fair equivalent of my front door. Picture the entrance to a place meant to preserve vegetables within the consistent cool womb of the earth, only this one preserves the sanity of a man. Maybe it is easier for you to accept its presence if you consider it as belonging to another age, another function, or another context. Perhaps I am easier to accept if you consider me in the same way.
Most people build houses against space. Give them a hill where the wind never stops blowing and they’ll build a house on top of it. It can be a hilltop in the middle of the prairie or in an otherwise flat valley or one rising from a suburb and still they erect a two or three story monstrosity atop it. They’ll build a private road to it if they must, install guardrails and hire a sand truck in winter and they’re at risk of sliding off the side of their beloved hill. They’ll complain at how the wind whistles through gaps in window sills and door frames and bemoan how they can’t keep water on their lawn for the steepness of its slope. All the while they’ll tell you how much they admire the view, but the only evidence you’ll see that they are home up there on that hill above you is the constant blue flicker of their TV screens at night. I know. I live below several hills. I live in a place where it hasn’t forgotten how to snow in winter even if people have forgotten how to drive or how to wear sensible shoes that accommodate the weather, a place where the wind blows and where smart farmers from another century planted wind breaks, and where, once upon a time, root cellars were common.
It is no great mystery how people are, no more than it’s a mystery that people talk about anyone who is different from them. People who live atop hills know they are the topic of conversations. And it may be simple-mindedness on my part, but I have little doubt that, consciously or not, those who live atop hills feel a kind of superiority. The house on the hill is a concept nearly as old as time. Like I said, people like to talk about those who are different from themselves. The poor talk badly about the rich and the rich about the poor and the powerful about the powerless and on and on.
I know people talk about me. I’d be a fool not to know. The crazy man in his cave. The recluse who lives down there with his spiders and snakes. Mr. Underground Man. I know they talk about more than my little underground house. Funny how people who don’t have anything to say to you always have a lot to say about you. I say let them talk.
Now I don’t really live in a cave or a hole in the ground. Let’s set that clear from the start. My home may be unconventional but it’s not primitive. Quite the opposite: complete with two large freezers and a well-stocked pantry, not to mention high-end, energy efficient washer and dryer. In designer color no less. I just take advantage of what the good earth provides. Like insulation during cold winters and hot summers.
Few people have ever crossed my threshold, so mostly they make assumptions. Like they take one look at my front door and assume that I’m more than a few bricks short of a full load. I suppose I shouldn’t blame them. I’m not so thick-headed I can’t realize how funny a door sticking up out of a field looks to most. Because my front door is little more than a gap cut into a berm, a door that opens onto a down stairwell, maybe it’s natural that people assume I live in the dark. If only they’d take a moment to consider the landscape falls away beyond my field, that there is a view the berm intentionally blocks. If they’d only consider the perspective of my home they don’t have from the road, they’d see it is purposely built into the side of a tall cut-bank, that indeed the south side of my home is visible from above and is full of windows and that in the winter, when the sun is low on the horizon, I get long hours of good light and fine solar heat. They don’t see the overhung roof that blocks the angle of mid-day sun in summer of the tile near the windows that absorbs and retains the heat. I wasn’t mindless when I built this place. But most people see my lone doorway and know I must be stone crazy.
Not that I go out of my way to correct them. And not that I didn’t build that door in the style I did for a laugh too. You’ve got to find humor where you can. Sometimes you’ve got to take pleasure in what is not said, have some confidence in the conversations that will occur regardless of your absence.
I don’t talk much to folks. I stick mostly to myself. I like talking to kids and eccentrics best when I am out and about in the world because they aren’t afraid to say what’s on their mind, or to ask questions, or act on their curiosity. The curious just might learn something. They might just stumble into a fact or an answer that opens their mind a crack. So when children approach me when I’m out at the library or the grocery store or just out for a walk for exercise in good weather—contrary to popular belief, I do leave home fairly regularly—I make it a point to talk with them if they approach me and I answer their questions. Okay, I’ll admit that sometimes I tease them, and if they ask if I live with snakes like they’ve heard, I’ll tell them I do, that the place is rampant with poisonous diamondbacks and that I cook them for my supper and decorate my Christmas tree with their rattles. I like watching their eyes grow wide and then that wrinkle of healthy skepticism furrow their brows. Mostly though I answer their questions honestly—the way I like my questions answered—and mostly kids know when a guy is teasing them. So I don’t mind when they play on my roof, because what’s it going to bother me if some little kids are running around up there in a field or they use it as a place to throw a ball back and forth. Just so long as they stay out of my garden, I’m content. What do I care? It’s not like I hear them, what with two feet of earth and a field full of native grasses and a foot of concrete between me and them. It’s not like they’re going to set fire to the place. Just so long as they don’t come bearing shovels and a jackhammer and a desire to dig a deep grave.
Of course I know there are stories about how I bury people down here or commit some other atrocious crimes or that I’ve filled the walls with sacks of money, but those stories usually have their origins with adults and the stories get screwed up and turned over and twisted, kind of like how bible stories get handed on. You might have a hard time getting to where the story began by the time it gets passed along enough and everybody gets their own agenda tagged on. They certainly bear little resemblance to the truth. But in my experience most folks wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them on their backside. Such stories are a way of explaining what you don’t understand, a way of labeling and categorizing something or someone that seems outside of you and your range of experience. It’s like people who collect insects and keep them neatly labeled, the wings all shiny and rigid with shellac and safe inside their glass cases. They just seem to forget the pins stuck through the thorax that allow for this bit of otherness to seem permanently knowable and contained.
I realize I sound bitter and I don’t mean to. I really don’t. The truth is I don’t know much about other people any more than they know about me. I don’t really understand the rest of the culture, so largely I’ve withdrawn from it. I have a history like all of us do, and my particular history helped me to decide I’d had enough of the world’s patterns—the above ground world, as I call it—and I retired to this underground world.
Now don’t misunderstand that. I fear I can make it sound as if I’m making some grand political statement, that my decision to “unplug,” as it were, has significant attachments to it. It doesn’t. I’m not Ralph Elision’s invisible man. I pay for the electricity I use same as the next guy, only perhaps I’ve learned to use a lot less. I remain disillusioned with the culture we’ve created, maybe more than disillusioned, but I can’t claim that I was used for a greater cause or that I became a spokesman for those who are alienated and abused and dehumanized or that I came close to a power that I eventually saw as corrupting. No, I’m an ordinary man. Or I was an ordinary man if choosing to live one’s life by simpler patterns makes one extraordinary. I don’t think it does. Quite the opposite. I’m so ordinary you could clone me and I’d look just like the rest of us out wandering through our lives complaining about what hand we’ve been dealt, convinced that we’ve been disrespected for one trifle or another, living by the entirely ordinary, mundane patterns of our sleeping lives, each year a bit less hair where I want it and a bit more where I don’t. I’m no different from you other than you look at me with the same disdain as you do the guy with the sign at the off-ramp looking for a handout. No, mine is no political cause, no statement, no protest. Remember back in the day when Timothy Leary said “Tune in. Turn on. Drop out,” well I dropped out. Maybe I still wore cowboy pajamas when he said it and maybe it took me almost another forty years after he said it to heed his advice, but I finally did nonetheless, I dropped out, opted out as the insurance folks like to say.
Now perhaps I’m being unintentionally misleading. As I’ve suggested, I came along a good while after Leary. I grew up between wars, came of age in that time when America had visibly failed, yet it still wanted to believe it was required to pass its values around the world whether others wanted them or not but it allowed Coke and Pepsi and Exxon and Halliburton and McDonalds to fight the wars rather than employ planes and bombs and grunts on the ground. I was a Cold War kid all the way. Tuck your head and kiss your ass goodbye while presidents and premiers called each other names. By the time I cast my first ballot, we had already forgotten most of the lessons of Vietnam and, along with a few missing brain cells, we had pretty much forgotten Leary too. We’d hired an actor to pretend to be President and got our news from animated Max Headroom, who offered another version of that President. We’d killed Lennon. We’d long since stopped selling planes to Iran and started selling them to Iraq and had watched a Sea Stallion helicopter fly into its refueling plane. Yeah, those blissful, turn your head and cough days of “peace.” Even after the wall came down, those “peaceful days” prepped us for machete murders in the millions across Africa and snipers in an Olympic city, for “wars” on drugs and “wars” on terror.
I shouldn’t complain. I’ve got no room. I chose the path of inaction. I have become Melville’s Bartleby responding to the world around me with a continuous “I would prefer not to.” Buy this product. I would prefer not to. Follow this fad. I would prefer not to. Join this campaign. No thanks, I’d rather not. Sit and watch mindless drivel manufactured in the TV studio’s writer lounges and newsroom editing floors. Perhaps not. Join an on-line “social community” while an actual community lies beyond the computer connection. Pass. Accept the lies of our beloved and bribed elected officials. Thanks, no, I’ve had my fill.
I only encountered Melville’s Bartleby within the past year. I didn’t really use to be much of a reader, which is ironic given that my degree states otherwise. But I’ll admit I’ve taken much of my solace in the world of books in the last years, and when I met a character like Bartleby I had no difficulty understanding his actions, or his inactions as the case may be. Am I, like Bartleby, too lazy to fight a corrupted culture? Damn straight. For years I tried to tune it out, but the noise is cacophonous, so loud and so constant it still tries to creep in long after I opted out.
I get Bartleby. He makes perfect sense to me. Just as I get Elision’s invisible man much more clearly in his below ground squat than I do when he was the one behind the podium. I’ve long understood his blind rage more than I do his youthful hope. I get his silence more than I get the voice over the microphone. I understand silence. I crave it. There’s just so much noise in the world, like everyone is vying for your attention so they try and shout louder than the next guy. Have you noticed? When was the last time you heard quiet? My little place snug down here inside the earth helps. It can’t block out the world, but if you get enough insulation between yourself and all the noise, it helps.
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