With a heavy heart

Mr. Blue offers advice for getting through the Bush years.

By Garrison Keillor

You should know that Mr. Blue does not attempt to answer all questions that land in his box; many are simply beyond my ken. For example, the letter this week from the man who has found his life’s work but unfortunately he is incompetent at it; what to do? The letter from the lawyer who has developed a crush on a waitress and hesitates to speak to her because, after all, he is a lawyer and she a waitress. The very long letter from a lawyer about something to do with her taking a job at one firm and then trying to jump to another because the first was unethical — I read it twice and couldn’t understand the question. And the letters from folks who attempt to lay out their entire life situation in detail and then want to know, should they move to Cleveland or not, should they leave their job, should they go back to school and so forth. The only decent answer is, I don’t know, what do you think?

And then there was the sweet letter from a woman who said, “I enjoy the column, but is there something troubling you, Mr. Blue, that perhaps we could help you with?” Now there is an offer. Unfortunately, my problems tend to be the sort that have obvious solutions, which the sufferer knows along with everyone else. But the moment I come up with a good one, I’ll hang it out here for everyone to see.

A woman responds to Romantically Inhibited who can’t understand why women only see him as a friend: “The problem is, he and others like him focus on those very few trophy women (blond, blue-eyed, with six-figure salaries) that he and his friends view as worth attaining, though there are other women nearby who are attractive (but not whiplash inducing), smart and funny, with whom he has a lot in common. He should start looking at the real people in his life, not ‘Sex and the City’ fantasy people.” OK. But attraction is attraction, and it’s hard to ignore, and it’s impossible to fake.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I am writing to you not because I have marital woes, dysfunctional family problems, writer’s block, etc. but because on Jan. 21, I still feel as angry and despondent as I did on Dec. 12 when the Supreme Court handed the presidency (and therefore my country) to a candidate whose claim to victory shall ever remain dubious.

I consider myself a creative and resourceful person with a dry sense of humor, but my heart is so heavy now. My good friends all seem to be booked in steerage of the same boat I’m on. Part of me would love to drop out, but there is something within me preventing the luxury of dissociation So, Mr. Blue, what’s a fellow to do?

Leftover Sixties Idealist

Dear Leftover,

President Bush is in the Oval Office and nobody is so surprised and alarmed as he. His uncertainty is visible in the way he makes entrances and carries out the simplest public acts, and it’s sort of endearing, isn’t it? I mean, the guy is certainly aware of his own shallowness, he has to live with it every day of his life. Bill Clinton stole the show every time the two were together in public, right up to when the Bushes got the Clintons stuffed into the limo and sent them away. To attempt to govern from a set of bromides and applause lines is not a fulfilling or dignified life for a grown-up, and Mr. Bush’s greatest pleasures as president may be his encounters with tour groups in the White House. So save some despondency for him. As for anger, you can go be angry at the Supremes for their impulsive lurch into judicial activism, and yes, you could be angry at the Florida Republican machine for their brazenness, but where do you stop? Do you cut in Ralph Nader for some anger, and Donna Brazile, and Al Gore, and Colin Powell for vouching for a man he well knows is a lightweight, and Sen. McCain, and all the other folks responsible for this tongue-tied bozo? It’s too long a list. You’d wind up a sour embittered old coot snarling at the TV. Best to clean out the files and start fresh. Take a vacation from the media and do some good for yourself.

The two best antidotes, I think, are the outdoors and the classics. The inherent interest of the photo op and the sound bite and the focus group pale next to the beauty and grace of the natural world when you venture out into the woods and consult your immortal soul, or the majesty of Marcus Aurelius or Horace or Ovid. They speak to us from the ruins of cities that knew their own Dubyas, and they speak to our condition vividly and with powerful wit and conviction beyond anything you’ll find on the evening news. Just as soldiers might read the 23rd Psalm the night before battle, it suits you to listen to the ancients before you re-enter the lists. When you’re ready to resume citizenship, take a trip to Washington and poke around the Capitol, visit your congressman, see what sessions you can attend, try to cop a ticket to the Court, pull strings to get an inside glance. It isn’t that hard to get behind the ropes. But do know that the Supreme Court has no power to hand the country over to anybody, and Mr. Bush is not running the country. He is trying to manage the presidency, a very different thing. The country belongs to the people, and is in the hands of God, and in another year and a half, you can try to pull the levers in your direction. Courage.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I’m engaged to a wonderful man, and we’re getting married in July right after I finish college. Our life together looks like it will be wonderful, though we have always had a long-distance relationship since he’s English and I’m in New Mexico. But this isn’t really the problem. My father died eight years ago, and this wedding/relationship/marriage is bringing up a slew of emotions for my mother and me. Personally I have deep fears of losing my fiancé somehow, that he’ll be hit by a double-decker bus. (I used to have similar fears about my mother, but they’ve subsided.) I’ve tried therapists (since I was 14), but they just reassure me that everything’s OK and that I’m normal, etc. But this is really unhelpful. The stress in my life is nearly intolerable. I go to a tough school, am writing my thesis, am planning the wedding, and to top it off I can’t talk to my mother about any of this. She is of course terribly upset that my father didn’t live long enough to see my wedding and therefore can’t seem to bear thinking that I’m upset or depressed in any way. I don’t know what kind of advice I’m asking for here.

Stretched Thin

Dear Stretched,

Your fiancé is English and he knows to look right while crossing the street and not be struck by the double-decker bus. And anyway the streets have arrows painted for the benefit of American tourists, telling you where to look. And those buses are terribly underpowered anyway. They chug, they don’t zoom. If they hit him, they wouldn’t kill him, they’d only break his wrist, and those Brits are tough, and he probably wouldn’t even spend a night in the infirmary. So you may as well think about him being struck by a meteorite from space.

Seriously, I am sure the stress is indeed nearly intolerable, and I wonder if you can’t make it slightly more tolerable by asking your mother to plan the wedding for you — or just let the wedding plan itself — and you focus on your thesis. This is the main thing right now, your push to graduate. The wedding can be postponed, if necessary, and your loving fiancé will understand perfectly well, and so will your fragile mother. Perhaps other business can be set aside for the time being. Such as anxiety. Try getting up at 5 every morning and giving yourself the first few hours to work, free of anxiety. Worry at night, and get your work done in the morning. Do jumping jacks to help you relax, or do chicken singing. I sometimes do a chicken singing, “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” and it helps my mild case of the jim-jams. Grin at yourself in a mirror. Whatever it takes. Your mother can’t help you through this, and you can’t help her bad feelings, but you can finish the last six months of college and write the thesis and marry the gentleman sometime afterward. And then go and be English, dahling. It has its own plummy anxieties, but you can enjoy the ivy and stone walls, the sterling candlesticks and the wigs and footmen and everything.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I’m a woman in my 40s, independent with a good job. I have a friend of many years. There’s always been a special affection between us, and now, as he’s getting divorced after many years in a troubled marriage, he’s proclaimed his long-standing love for me. We kissed but that’s all. The floodgates opened on my feelings, though, and now I don’t know how to relate to him.

He’s been giving me mixed messages, at times saying how much he loves me, most of the time not contacting me at all. I know he’s in emotional turmoil as a result of his divorce, but I’ve been hurt by his avoidance of me and now I avoid him.

The problem is that we’re part of a circle of friends. No one else knows about this and so it’s difficult to avoid him, although I feel I must. When I’ve seen him in recent months as part of this group, things have been strained and we’ve hardly talked. I’m sad that I feel I have to avoid him and the sweet friendship we had seems to be ruined. I’m angry that I can’t hang out with my group of friends for fear of seeing him.

Can I find a way to go back to where I was and be at ease when I see him? Is there any way I can stuff back these feelings without having to avoid him? Should I tell any of my friends about this? (I think not.)

Caught in the Middle

Dear Caught,

I think that ratcheting those floodgates closed is the best course, and draining your heart of excess river water. Reason with yourself. The man was wounded, distraught, feeling desperate, and he blurted out his declaration of love, which was sincere — he loves you, you’re his friend — and which on the other hand means nothing because he’s in no shape to offer himself to you. He got some sort of comfort from proclaiming his love, but he has no idea what he meant by it. He doesn’t contact you because, frankly, his floodgates didn’t open at all. The declaration was simply something that happened that night; it didn’t mean to him nearly what it’s come to mean to you, and so you shouldn’t read anything into his “avoidance” of you — he’s simply feeling bad about the divorce. Forgive him this impetuous deed. Don’t tell a single one of your friends about it. Go back to where you were. He’s the same person you cared about before. Practice the habits of friendship, go through the motions, and in time the old friendly feelings will follow.

Dear Mr. Blue,

It sort of snuck up on me, midlife, and I don’t feel depressed, or tempted toward foolish behavior, though I am feeling quite reflective these days. I am very happily married, in fact, more in love today with a wonderful woman than I was when I first met her nearly 20 years ago. We have three great children, whom I thoroughly enjoy, most of the time. So, I guess my question is, when exactly should one expect a midlife crisis? I’ve been looking for one, but have not been able to find it.

Mystified in St. Louis

Dear Mystified,

Midlife is a long stretch of time, pal, depending on life expectancy, of course, and if you haven’t had your crisis yet, just wait. They can come anytime between 40 and 60, and when you postpone yours, it may be rougher. Instead of running away with the cocktail waitress, you may run away with her daughter, and wind up in Wyoming in a dingy Super 6 with your pockets full of crème brûlée and no memory of how you got there. I got my crisis out of the way 15 years ago. It was awful and it ate up a few years and tried the patience of friends, but now I’m done with it. You’re sitting there waiting for the shoe to drop. Maybe your children will create one for you. If three kids can’t create one good crisis between them, then I miss my bet. Stay tuned.

Dear Mr. Blue,

After years of prescribed hormones, creams, injections and skin patches, my partner of many years still finds herself almost completely uninterested in sex. We have one grown child. Once or twice a month we’ll have sex when I initiate, and she seems to enjoy it — except that only she can bring herself to orgasm. I am in shape, squeaky clean, smooth- and slow-handed, am not pushy or demanding. I send flowers and cards, remember anniversaries, clean up the dishes, do laundry, don’t wear reused underwear. I leave notes and sonnets under her pillow, surprise her with B&B getaways, take her dancing, gleefully sit through chick flicks, know all of her sizes when buying gifts, the works. I have suggested “tasteful” porn videos, three-ways, other women, public sex, fireplace weekends, lingerie for her, silk boxers for me, oils, dildos, vibrators, cuffs, edible goods, you name it. Nothing seems to interest her in having sex more than once or twice a month, and then it’s very bland — she says she has to lose five pounds before she feels good about herself. It’s rubbish since she has been 20 pounds heavier at other times. What’s the problem here? What am I doing wrong?

Please? Anything?

Tired of being the Monthly Missionary

Dear Tired,

When do you ever find time to shovel the walk or change the oil in your car, sir? Your wife’s indifference seems to have turned you into a madman, a sort of Marquis de Sex, a definite overachiever in the husband department. Unfortunately, your tremendous industry and ingenuity and diligence in the pursuit of her orgasm may be inhibiting her. Even terrifying her. It would terrify me if my wife were to come at me this way. Sex is something that happens between two people, it’s not a doctor-patient relationship. As they say in the men’s sex manuals, “Don’t rush the clitoris.” Skip the sonnets for a while, stop with the purchase of gifts, take a break from B&Bs, forget the next anniversary and for heaven’s sake stop bugging her about all these erotic tactics like three-ways. We have some of those lamps in our house, and they’re not as exciting as you might think. Relax. Get interested in the NBA, or Dickens, or writing in your journal, or cooking authentic Thai dishes. I don’t know what the problem might be, but you shouldn’t be trying nearly so hard. Give it a rest. Please. Lighten up. Sex without humor is no fun at all, I don’t care how many orgasms are involved.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I’m a newspaper reporter by day, and by night I spend an hour or two working on my first novel. I’ve got about five chapters done, roughly 20,000 words. I’ve spent the last few months developing my characters to a point where I finally feel like I know who these people are and what is motivating them. I have a vague idea of how I will end this story, but don’t really know yet how I’m going to get there. I’m just letting the story go where it will each time I sit down to write. So far it’s worked really well, and I’ve been surprised quite a few times by what happens when I let my mind wander. I’m pretty confident with what I have so far, but this is my first shot at it. Should I try to shop this book around now, in its uncompleted form, in the hope of getting some type of advance or deal that will enable me to quit my day job? Or should I complete it and then shop it around? Here’s my deep dark fear: What if I shop it around now and no one likes it? But then again, maybe I can hook up with an editor who can help guide me through the process. Do they do that, or is it just a pass/fail situation? What should I do, Mr. Blue?

Wannabe novelist

Dear Wannabe,

You’re going good now and I recommend you keep right on trucking, letting the story go where it will, cleaning up loose ends, listening to the characters, typing away and searching for the ending. This is one of life’s rare pleasures, writing in a free and uninhibited way, and by God you should enjoy it without worrying about what some Smith grad in Manhattan thinks of it. It’s wonderful, this stage of writing a book. You’re in a discovery process, you’ve learned enough to feel confident about the book, you’re getting your head, and so there’s no reason to call for help. Of course it’d be nice to have an advance, but it could also swamp your canoe. So long as things are going well, enjoy what you’re doing, stay on track, get your rest and don’t think about the commercial aspect just yet. Editors don’t do so much guiding as they do marketing and promotion, and it’s much too early to be troubled with all that. And you could get some truly dreadful guidance. Don’t risk it. Here’s another deep dark fear: What if someone gives you a $300,000 advance and Fox tosses in $500,000 for the film rights and suddenly the cold hand of Mammon clamps down on your shoulder and you find you’re unable to write another word? Enjoy the work and when it’s in shape, then think about shipping it off.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I am in love with a woman whom I planned to marry but then she broke it off. She said she loved me dearly, but there were things about me she couldn’t live with and she didn’t want to ask me to change who I am. However, the things she said were bothering her are just bad habits, little quirks. I wanted to patch things up, but she said that breaking up was so hard to do that she couldn’t risk getting back together too soon and then having to break up again. I believed we’d get back together but after about two weeks she found out a man she has been friends with since college has feelings for her, and began a relationship with him. She swears she had no idea before we broke up, but she is telling me I should move on. Am I nuts to believe she’s only with him because she’s lonely? I am still madly in love with her, and convinced we are meant for each other. How do I convince her of that when she doesn’t want to talk about it?

Impatient on the Sidelines

Dear Impatient,

You and she are romantic history, I’m afraid, and don’t try to rewrite it. She has moved on. Maybe she’s trying to spare your feelings by soft-pedaling things, but the simple fact is that she broke up with you for her own reasons and now is with someone else and there is nothing to talk to her about. It doesn’t matter why she’s with him. You will have to stop being madly in love with her, and just be mad for a while. Think of yourself as Al Gore and her as Sandra Day O’Connor. She has cast her vote. Don’t call up and ask her to change it. You only diminish yourself. Go out and have a beer with your pals and tell them everything you detest about her and this will help.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I’m a technical writer full-time and also a novelist. I’ve published two and am writing another one now. I am about to be a father for the first time, and I’m looking to buy a house. I would really like to quit my job and write full-time. I have two problems with this. The first one you can’t solve, the money problem: Mark Twain said you can make a fortune as a writer in America, but you can’t make a living. I earn more correcting the senior manager’s spelling errors than I do writing novels.

The other problem is a little more subtle. About two years ago, I did quit my job to write. And I found that with all that time to write, I didn’t write a thing. It seems I can only write when I don’t have time to write. Is this not perverse? What personal flaw causes this? I think that if I could solve this problem, I might produce enough material to earn a modest living. Please use your keen sense of the strange to diagnose my psychosis.

On the Verge

Dear Verge,

It’s no psychosis, just human nature. The freedom to do Anything and Everything can be confusing and get in the way of your accomplishing Something. It’s similar to the confusion that children of the wealthy experience: The world is open to them and it takes a long time to figure out a simple course of action. It’s similar to what happened to me when I quit the radio grind to write a novel and found myself in an empty room with a whole empty year ahead of me and I about soiled my drawers. I hustled out and got myself as many distractions as I needed to create more pressure. Adversity and pressure can be great stimuli. If you again quit your job to write, you could figure out how, but it might take a while. Meanwhile, you’ll be like the rest of us. We have our work to do and we keep getting up to sharpen pencils and empty wastebaskets and do our e-mail.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I’m really at a loss. My partner and I know a couple who we like a lot who are going through a divorce. We’d like to stay friends, but we have heard nasty rumors (promulgated by the husband’s new squeeze) that the wife had many dalliances, including one with my partner. There is no way that it could have happened. This friend does matter a whole lot to me, and I can see a lot of pain under the surface. But should we confront him about these rumors? If he’s as unstable as I know him to be, is there any point? We’re both a bit irritated about the whole thing, but don’t want to alienate him completely. This is a really sad situation, and the last thing I want to do is make it worse for no good reason, or alienate someone who’s going to a pretty dark place.

In the Middle

Dear Middle,

Since you know that the dalliance did not take place, there’s no point in pursuing the rumor. It’s like chasing a cloud of mosquitoes. Or hitting the Tar Baby. Anyone who leads an active life can assume that every day someone is saying something nasty about you, including Sundays and holidays. So what? It’s just static electricity. Let it pass. You’re right about it being a sad situation. Divorce is a nasty business and why become embroiled in someone else’s? Be glad you’re happy with your partner and let the friends drift back your way when they’re in a better humor.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I am now divorced from my wife (for over a year). She continues, however, to harass me until I think of seeking legal remedies. The sticking point is our sons: She uses them as an “excuse” to contact me and then once contact is made, she ridicules me, tells me what a horrible person I am, etc. Sometimes we engage in normal conversation, but it doesn’t last long. (Incidentally, I am always on time with child support and there is no incident that sets her rampages off. We also have joint custody, so we see each other frequently, much to my chagrin.) I myself have days when I think of just chucking it all and disappearing and building a cabin in Montana to get away from her, but then I always return to reality and think of my sons, whom I treasure and cannot live without. What do you think?

Prisoner

Dear Prisoner,

Don’t seek legal remedies except in the direst situation — for example, if you think she’s mentally unstable and a threat to the children. But this is ordinary garden-variety anger, and you play into it if you react to it angrily. Do as Scripture says and turn the other cheek and keep turning it. Be a monster of patience and good humor and ignore the insults and concentrate on the concrete details of shared child-rearing. And enjoy your sons. It takes some discipline, but you might be surprised how completely you can mentally dismiss a person who is only causing you trouble. Put her in a cabin in the Montana of your mind and don’t bother to react to her garbage. Don’t be chagrined. Grin and make small talk and look to the needs of your children.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I arrived in Denmark a year ago to take a research job and now I have a Swedish fiancée and plan to live in Stockholm with her after we’re married in August. I realize this is a different culture with traditions, rules, language and fish, and I know that I’ll need to create my own social, cultural and professional space here, and not just fit into my future wife’s life. Plus learning the language to talk to my in-laws. Can you advise me about building a base here with future wife and bairns?

Sleepless in Aebletoft

Dear Sleepless,

I sense that you’ve been seduced by the reasonableness of the Scandinavians — their good English, their nice manners, their Marimekko decor — into imagining how easy it would be to plop down in their midst and become one of them. Yes, it is a different culture, very different, and yes, you’ll need to create your own life. You say it as if you’re talking about laying a brick sidewalk. It’s a large undertaking to uproot oneself and replant, and in the end, it can’t be done. Not for love and not for money. You need to find a deeper motivation. If you’re under indictment for tax evasion and face 20 years in the clink if you return home, that would be good. Or if you despise your family and never want to be near them or their language again. Or if the Republicans of Florida have so disgusted you that you cannot bear to ever see Old Glory again. But you seem to be doing this as a lark, and I’m afraid that the survival rate for these larks is very, very low. You will learn the language well enough to be a sort of precocious 10-year-old and then you sort of stop there and don’t get any further. If that’s all you care to be in life, then go and enjoy your childhood.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I am a graduate student with hopes of becoming an academic. I am a real go-getter at my job, and my co-workers and friends would never think I have a shyness problem, but when it comes to speaking in class my face turns red, and I stammer and cannot keep my train of thought. I do well when I write, but I am a complete idiot in class. What can I do to become more confident? I feel that my inability to speak well in public will inhibit my future career. Is it hopeless?

Painfully Shy

Dear Shy,

It’s a terrible problem that yields slowly to repeated violations of your own boundaries. You keep going to the dark place you don’t dare go to and after a while it becomes familiar, your eyes adjust to the dark and it isn’t particularly scary anymore, no more so than for everyone else. Recognize, first, that shyness is darned near universal, especially among the young. Yes, there are idiots who leap to their feet and blather at the drop of a hat, but most of us feel our little hearts pound and our foreheads dampen. You can help yourself by organizing on paper what you think you want to say in class and then standing up and saying something like it. I know this seems artificial and it’s certainly more work, but it will help you be smarter on your feet and funnier and more concise, and you’ll feel good about this, and the pleasure will help your confidence. It’s far from hopeless — you can’t even see hopelessness from here.

Dear Mr. Blue,

I have been seeing an old colleague for lunch a few times and am feeling a strong attraction toward her, though she is married with children and so am I. But it’s a strong attraction nonetheless, and the other day, she mentioned to me that she’s sort of dissatisfied with her husband who doesn’t pay much attention to her anymore. Was this an invitation for me to tell her I’d like to sleep with her? I would, you know.

Brooding

Dear Brooding,

The next time you have lunch with her, wear your black velour shirt and your leather pants and your suede boots, and unbutton the shirt down to your sternum and wear a lot of gold chains around your neck. Put every ring on your finger that will fit, and comb your hair straight back and secure it with hairspray. Put on mirror shades. Spritz yourself with Brut. Get the motel room and put the key on your gold chain where she can see it, nestled among your chest hairs. Take her to lunch and when she says she’s dissatisfied with her husband, lean forward, press your lips to hers, put your tongue in her mouth, grab her left breast and give it a half-turn to the right. This does the trick nine times out of 10.

: Garrison Keillor is the author of the Lake Wobegon novel "Liberty" (Viking) and the creator and host of the nationally syndicated radio show "A Prairie Home Companion," broadcast on more than 500 public radio stations nationwide. For more columns by Keillor, visit his column archive. More Garrison Keillor

- 0Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

Is gay literature over?

In an era of same-sex marriage and "Modern Family," the role of gay writers is changing. An expert explains how

By Thomas Rogers

Gore Vidal, Tony Kushner and James Baldwin (Credit: Library of Congress/Carl Van Vechten/Reuters/Phil McCarten/Miami Dade College)

Topics:LGBT, Writers and Writing, Editor's Picks

Gay life in America has utterly transformed itself since World War II. In the 1950s, homosexuality was a crime. Now, openly gay people are everywhere in popular culture, gay kids are coming out as early as elementary school and we can get even get married in a half-dozen states (including, soon, Washington). One of the most crucial, but least-talked about, reasons for this change is gay literature. Starting in the 1940s, a coterie of bold writers — Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Armistead Maupin and Tony Kushner, among many others — played a central role in creating what we now think of as gay life. Their words gave voice to a segment of the American population that, for much of its history, was hidden away.

In his new book, “Eminent Outlaws,” novelist Christopher Bram uses a series of complex portraits of America’s most influential gay literary lions to argue for their position in the pantheon of American culture. The book covers expansive territory, charting the tumultuous relationship between Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, whose passionate hatred for one another lasted until the latter’s death (Vidal called it a “good career move”). It describes Tennessee Williams’ tortured relationship with his sexuality and gradual descent into alcoholic misery, James Baldwin’s struggles against racism and Edmund White’s eloquent reactions to the terror of AIDS. For anybody interested in gay culture, “Eminent Outlaws” offers a crucial and fascinating overview of decades of American literary history. It also raises the question: In an era when being gay is considered mainstream, does gay writing still matter?

Salon spoke to Bram (who is also the author of “The Father of Frankenstein,” which was later turned into the film “Gods and Monsters”) over the phone about Gore Vidal’s importance, the death of the gay bookstore and the problem with gay men today.

As you point out in the book, literature has had an outsize role in the evolution of gay culture. Why do you think that is?

For the longest time, there were no gay characters or story lines in television or in the movies, so people had nowhere else to go but books for stories of gay life. After WWII there was suddenly a slew of them. It was surprising how many came so quickly. People could and wanted to write about it and the publishers would publish it. In my book I emphasize Capote’s “Other Voices, Other Rooms” and Gore Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar,” but there were others. The mainstream houses backed away from gay material in the ’50s but it was picked up by smaller presses, like Greenberg and Guild. Once it started it couldn’t stop.

Why do you think the gay literary explosion happened right after World War II?

It was partly WWII itself. Gay boys who had grown up in the middle of nowhere entered the service, and found out they weren’t alone. Alan Berube, in his book “Coming Out Under Fire,” does a great job of painting this sudden awareness and huge change. Gay people also wanted to read about each other, and after WWII censorship for books loosened. Before, cities would ban any book with sexual content, and after WWII people could write about sex, even gay sex.

Gore Vidal is the major thread connecting the book. Do you think he’s the most important figure in gay literature of the last 50 years?

Yes, but almost by accident. It’s not a role he wanted. “The City and the Pillar” is a very gay book published early on in 1948. It sold very well but he got kicked in the teeth for writing it, and after that he played a little more coy. He adopted the strategy that there’s no such thing as a homosexual, there’s only a homosexual act; homosexual is an adjective and not a noun. He wrote “Myra Breckinridge” in the ’60s, which is this wonderfully polymorphously perverse novel about a transsexual who rapes a straight man at one point. It’s over the top and out there and was a huge bestseller. Then he started writing historical novels, which hardly dealt with homosexuality. But one of the most amazing things he wrote from a gay political point of view is the essay “Pink Triangle, Yellow Star,” which was sparked by a very foolish bizarre essay by Midge Decter about gay men and their identity. He tore her essay to shreds, but he also argued that Jews and homosexuals had a lot in common, that they were both minorities that are in the same boat.

In the last few years we’ve seen the disappearance of a lot of gay bookstores around the country. What do you think this says about the state of gay literature?

That is a major change and it’s an important and worrisome one. There are a couple of factors causing it. Independent bookstores have been in trouble for a while, struggling to compete first with super-chains and then Amazon and the Internet. Now the whole book business is going to transition, and even the super-chains are in trouble. Gay bookstores were always just keeping their heads above water. But I don’t think it says so much about gay books in particular as it does about the book business.

Edmund White once wrote that “‘Will & Grace’ killed gay literature.” Do you think he’s right — that the rise of gay TV and movies has made gay writing less appealing?

I think it’s reduced the gay readership by 10 or 15 percent — not a huge amount. And those were the people who didn’t really enjoy reading anyway. For them, it was their only way to get gay stories. Now they don’t have to. Independent film has dried up the same way indie bookstores have, so there’s not as much gay film as there used to be just 4-5 years ago, but the change in TV is phenomenal. These shows matter-of-factly include gay story lines and characters and do really good jobs with them. They’re not just here as comic relief, they’re really fully fleshed out, well-drawn characters. These TV shows are following in the footsteps of Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” by including gay characters in this larger world.

Larry Kramer has very forcefully argued that young gay people these days don’t respect their elders or their history. Do you get the sense that young gay men today are less interested in gay culture and literature than they were in the past?

Not really. I don’t think the current younger generation is different from mine or even Larry’s. In my generation, we hated our elders. We might like Christopher Isherwood, but there was a dislike of the older generation: “They got it all wrong, we’re going to get it right.” I think that’s a natural generational dynamic; as time goes on you learn to keep what was good from the older generations and drop what was bad. I like the generations being different. Every generation wants to carve out their own space and to some extent it’s going to mean rejecting the older generation.

But Larry Kramer isn’t alone in feeling hurt by this. What do you think spurs this particular kind of anger among older gay men?

You’re getting older and you know you’re going to die, and you’re not happy about that, so you take out your anger on the generation coming behind you. I teach at NYU, so I work with people in their early 20s and I expect us to have nothing in common but I’m always surprised by the books they like, the movies they like, the things we do have in common.

I also think older gay men are pissed off that young gay men seem entitled and don’t seem to know what gay life was like in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and especially the ’80s, during the first wave of the AIDS crisis.

Why should they know it? When they are aware of it, I’m pleased but I don’t expect them to. They’re lucky they didn’t grow up with the hardships Larry’s generation grew up with. My generation didn’t have it as harsh as Larry’s did, but I had it a little harsher than yours. It’s only natural. You just kind of have to accept that.

In his famous essay in the Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan argued that we’re witnessing the “end of gay culture,” that it’s splintering and dissolving as a result of mainstream acceptance.

Old gay culture wasn’t that solid to begin with, and [literary gay men] were always a minority within a minority. Even when gay books were the only game in town, there were plenty of gay people who didn’t read. For them being gay was about sex and going to bars and dancing. There’s still gay culture around and it takes different shapes and forms. Gay bars don’t play the same role in gay life they once did 10-15 years ago. The Internet has changed that too. I miss the gay bookstores, but I like the difference and the variety.

Do you think there’s such a thing as a gay sensibility in literature?

When Jeff Weinstein, the New York culture critic, was asked if there was a gay sensibility and if it affected culture, he said, “No, there’s no such thing as a gay sensibility and yes, it does affect culture.” I feel that way. The only thing holding these men together is that these were men who were sexually attracted to men who would write about it and about how that mixed with the rest of their lives. For some writers, [their gayness] was just one more ingredient in the stew, like Armistead Maupin. For some, sex and love with other men was everything, like Edmund White. But even he mixed things up. His new book is about the friendship between a gay man and a straight man (though I think his best writing is his sexual writing).

Speaking of Edmund White, he has very strong feelings about writers, like Susan Sontag, who were famous but did not come out of the closet.

I think if she had actually written as a lesbian about lesbian life it would have given a whole other dimension to her work and she would have been a much more interesting and exciting writer than she was. But I just think of her as a writer [not a gay writer]. The other writer he talks about is Harold Brodky. Being unable to write directly about gay life made his prose weird and baroque and really blocked him as a writer. For me, their being in the closet becomes its own punishment.

A friend of mine recently told me that he thought we just don’t have the kinds of great gay literary writers that we used to. I think we do, they’re just not known as primarily gay writers. Do you think that’s true?

There’s good stuff being done by younger writers than the old war horses. It just hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. Paul Russell just did an amazing book last year called “The Unreal life of Sergei Nabokov,” following Vladimir Nabokov’s gay brother from pre-revolutionary Russia to Paris in the time of Cocteau to Nazi Germany. Peter Cameron’s last book, “Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You,” was very smart and beautifully written. Bob Smith, a comedian, did a wonderful novel called “Remembrance of Things I Forgot,” about a gay man who travels through time to help his family and discovers he’s been pursued by that arch-villain Dick Cheney. And then there’s Rakesh Satyal, and the novel he published two years ago, “Blue Boy,” about a gay 12-year-old boy in an Indian family in Cincinnati.

What gay books would you recommend as must-reads to a gay kid coming of age right now.

You could do far worse than Armistead’s Maupin’s “Tales of the City”; the entire series would be a great education in itself. Maupin imagines and records this world in San Francisco where gay people are just one more piece of the puzzle and accepted as such. And there’s “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin. It’s set in Paris in the 1950s, about a gay man who almost comes out but doesn’t. It’s very painful, beautifully written and it would show him what we’ve come away from. I’ll be selfish and recommend one of mine, “Surprising Myself.” It was my first novel, published in like 1987, and it’s set in New York in the ’70s — the sexual golden age.

: Thomas Rogers is Salon's deputy arts editor. More Thomas Rogers

- 65Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

Spoiler alert! What makes a great ending?

Books with terrific conclusions are hard to find, but they're even harder to talk about

By Laura Miller

Topics:Fiction, Books, Jeffrey Eugenides, Writers and Writing

The endings of novels are, in their own way, as crucial as the endings of years, but they are much less discussed. Any bibliophile can rattle off at least a handful of famous first lines (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…;” “It is a truth universally acknowledged…; ” “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” and so on), but ask someone to quote a memorable closer and chances are all they can come up with is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (from “The Great Gatsby”) or James Joyce’s rhapsodic “…and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

The trick of a good ending, of course, is that it must capture and equal everything that has gone before. The line “He loved Big Brother” (from a novel that ends as masterfully as it begins) means very little until you understand exactly who Big Brother is. A first line or opening scene need only arrest a reader’s attention and stoke her curiosity; a final scene or paragraph is expected to provide that sensation so rare in real life: completion. The better the book, the more nuanced and persuasive, the more difficult this is. We want a novel to swell with a sense of limitless possibility at the start and in the middle, but we also want it to zero in to a point of inevitability as it ends.

For this reason, last lines, like first ones, often suffer from a bad case of Trying Too Hard. Any writer can swoop up from the particularities of character or story to assert a magisterial generality and come across as terribly grand. If you like the 100,000 words that come before it, this tactic sorta works. Yet so many endings sound a note of profundity without actually being profound. (I confess that, lovely as Fitzgerald’s famous last sentence is, it doesn’t strike me as any truer than his equally famous remark about there being no second acts in American life.)

Better the last line or final scene that’s more modest in its language yet still packs a wallop; the success of such endings, when they succeed, is fully earned. Take the closing of “The Marriage Plot,” by Jeffrey Eugenides, one of my favorite novels of 2011. The last word, in a witty riposte to “Ulysses” (for this is a book that’s partly about other books), is “Yes,” but it has a very different import. Alas, only those of you who have already read the novel will understand what I mean.

The main drawback to swapping notes about favorite endings is the spoiler problem. The last line of Sarah Waters’ sublime 2009 ghost story “The Little Stranger” is like a key that unlocks the entire narrative, but I can’t tell you why in case you haven’t yet read it. Earlier this year, researchers demonstrated that readers enjoyed stories more when they knew in advance how they would end, but the belief persists that an untimely revelation of plot points will ruin the experience.

Even if we set such objections aside, when you wish to make the case for a particular ending, you still have to summarize the novel for whoever hasn’t already read it, and what summary is ever as good as the book itself? An exception, which can be related without giving much away, is the ironic last scene from Matthew Kneale’s excellent historical novel, “English Passengers,” a book, published in 2000, that captures the absurd hubris and brutal practice of colonialism in Tasmania. One of the supporting characters is a British scientist intent on proving the inferiority of nonwhite races by examining their skulls. By the novel’s last page, he is dead, and via a series of mix-ups, his own bones are displayed in an exhibition in a London museum, marked “Unknown male, presumed Tasmanian aborigine, possible victim of human sacrifice.” Yes, it’s essentially a joke, but one that distills the self-delusion of racialism in a single placard, and one that’s perfectly in tune with the novel behind it.

What are your favorite fictional endings, Salon readers? Share them in the comments thread below.

Further reading:

The Association for Psychological Science on how stories aren’t spoiled by spoilers

Salon’s review of “The Marriage Plot” by Jeffrey Eugenides

Salon’s review of “English Passengers” by Matthew Kneale

Salon’s review of “The Little Stranger” by Sarah Waters

: Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller

- 76Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

Writing class from hell

As "Seminar" hits Broadway, novelist Ben Marcus judges the tyrannical writing teachers of stage and screen

By Laura Miller

Alan Rickman appears at the curtain call for the opening night performance of the Broadway play "Seminar," on Nov. 20, 2011. (Credit: AP/Charles Sykes)

Topics:Writers and Writing, Ben Marcus, Alan Rickman, Theater, Books

“Seminar,” a play starring Alan Rickman as a preening, acid-tongued teacher running roughshod over a group of tender aspiring writers, opened a few weeks ago on Broadway. Reviews have prompted all the usual observations about the difficulty of dramatizing both writing and reading, activities so internally momentous yet so physically inert. Why, then, do people keep doing it? And do the depictions of writing classes in stage, film and television — from “Wonder Boys” to “Bored to Death” — bear any relationship to real life?

To hash this out, I invited Ben Marcus — a novelist and an associate professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he teaches fiction writing — to see “Seminar” with me and talk afterward about the ways writing workshops are depicted in the performing arts. His first novel was acquired by the writer, editor and teacher Gordon Lish, considered to be the inspiration for the character played by Rickman, and Marcus also attended one of Lish’s legendary seminars, conducted in private homes, like the class in the play. (Marcus’ fourth book, the novel “The Flame Alphabet,” will be published in January.)

We found Theresa Rebeck’s play amusing and pointed — right down to a reference to the bi-coastal literary magazine Tin House — despite the fact that it doesn’t bear much resemblance to any writing class we’d ever encountered. That, we concluded, might be for the best.

When characters are discussing writing in a dramatic work like “Seminar,” the things they say are so sweeping compared to the more detailed focus of an actual writing class. But what also struck me in this play is how the concept of writing and of being a writer is so intensely romanticized.

Also, the students have no ability to determine their own value for themselves. That’s the great conceit the whole play is riding on, that these people can’t begin to make a decision for themselves. That makes them funny, silly and ultimately vulnerable.

I noticed some of that with Gordon Lish. There were degrees of vulnerability around him. On one hand, it was easy for some people to blame him for his forcefulness, but with people who weren’t quite as vulnerable, I think that they thrived and got a lot more out of it. They got to listen to him talk inside and out about a piece of writing and to see that he could be deeply perceptive and that he cared about fiction more than anything else in the world.

The people who got caught up in the theater of winning his approval instead of, say, deriving their own system of self-worth, they didn’t seem to fare so well.

Would you say that some of the people who went to his seminars were like the characters in this play? Like a lot of writing students in movies and TV, they seem to be in the class for the sole purpose of getting a verdict on their work from some big-time authority figure.

In the students, I didn’t really recognize anybody I’ve ever seen. There are little bits here and there, but the thing I really didn’t recognize is the sort of blatant and publicly articulated desperation. There’s one character, the one who’s using his connection to his famous uncle, who is a very enjoyable stereotype. But anyone who behaved that way in front of any writing student I know — people would be horrified by that. Most people are self-aware enough not to behave the way that guy does.

But even if people don’t behave that way that doesn’t necessarily mean …

… that they don’t think that way, no. You could argue that it’s the play’s job to externalize that stuff because it’s funnier to see everybody acting on their demons and their craven desires. It’s more entertaining.

There’s stuff that, as the teacher, you don’t necessarily see. I once taught this class, maybe five years ago. It just never gelled. There was something strange about it. I just thought that I sucked because I couldn’t get them going. The semester ended, and I ran into someone who’d been in the class. That person then told me about this elaborate set of dramas that was going on among the students. There was a broken love triangle, someone who tried to kill someone else and they hated each other. It was just insane! I had no idea. They were consumed by their own drama.

Speaking of drama, the play takes the position that writing is a completely tortured experience.

Tortured and joyless, with no possible good outcome for anyone. One of the funny things that Alan Rickman’s character does is that he gives these predictions about everyone else’s future: This is what your life will be, in these funny monologues. The most talented one, who was writing the best work, he’s got a miserable future ahead, totally miserable. There’s no redeeming thing about it at all!

He’s going to end up like the Alan Rickman character.

A big difference that I would cite from Gordon Lish, is that he didn’t have any of the buffoonery of the Rickman character. He wasn’t self-important or grandiose, with the bragging, the travel and the overt sexual stuff. I think there was clearly a big ego there, but he was also very modest in person. His feeling was, “I will never do really great work, but maybe you will. If you think about these things, maybe you will. It’s too late for me.” The drama was about whether or not you could get behind his enthusiasms.

The thing he did that might be construed as abusive was that he was interested in pitting people against each other. Let’s say we have Smith and Dale: Smith might write something interesting and Gordon would say, “Dale, what’s your answer to that? How are you going to sleep at night knowing that your buddy here has written something so good?”

I think the pedagogical idea is that you might work harder if you feel competitive with your peers. Sometimes he would create competitions, but other times the students just weren’t biting.

What the Alan Rickman character does — his long, irrelevant, self-glorifying digressions about his adventures in various kinds of disaster tourism — well, maybe Gordon Lish didn’t do that, but I’ve certainly heard about a lot of writing teachers who do.

It struck me as a more old-fashioned, first-wave creative-writing model. The famous writer is trucked into the Midwestern university. He’s drunk all the time and he makes these pronouncements. You don’t even get your work read, but you sit at his feet and listen to these drunken tales and that counts as some kind of instruction.

I got my MFA about 20 years ago, a little more. Then, there wasn’t much of an established tradition of actual instruction. Now, 20 years later, if there are 12 students in the class, the students are getting back 11 copies of a submitted work, plus the instructor’s, with intensive line editing and one-and-a-half to two-page, single-spaced typed criticism — more criticism on this apprentice work of fiction than you get when you publish a book. This feedback machine has been created, giving students some pretty substantive criticism. That, I think, takes the spotlight away from the instructor as this Svengali figure who makes these pronouncements that are going to lead to some shattering revelation.

Enjoyable as those revelations are to watch on stage! Another thing you don’t see in the play is the idea that there are different types of literary traditions, each equally valid, the idea that good writing can be something other than opening a vein on the page. One of the characters writes a fake memoir about a transvestite Cuban gang member that completely deceives them all until she tells them with great amusement that she’s the one who wrote it. They all think it’s fantastic before that, but it’s still presented as a debased thing for her to do.

Well, she’s taking a sort of superficial bait by going for this supposedly gritty, real-world authenticity that the teacher wants. There’s a little bit of satire in there, right, because she can actually ape this form perfectly and she makes a successful piece of writing. It says something about how we value the personal stories behind the writers. If it’s a book about the streets, we want the writer to be …

… of the streets.

Yeah. You see that when you’re promoting a book. No one’s interested in talking about the actual book. They want to talk about the person who wrote it. What bad things happened to you that we can talk about? So the play does some funny satire about our desire for the “real” by also showing that someone can fake it. It’s just a style. It’s artificial and anyone can do it.

Then there’s the figure of the young woman who writes a lot about sex, and she’s very pretty and fully prepared to capitalize on that, and this generates a lot of bogus interest in her work. Now, that’s not an unfamiliar kind of writer, but sometimes the writers who fit that profile are actually really good writers as well.

They are.

They’re more mediagenic, and many people resent them for that, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be talented, too. In the play, that character is sympathetic, very grounded. But she’s also a slapdash person who isn’t committed to doing good work. She’s likable, but she’s supposed to be a contemptible writer.

She didn’t have any gravitas at all. But then gravitas is often an awful thing to encounter when you’re teaching. It doesn’t correlate to anything. When it’s attached to really poor work, it’s torture.

Each of the students had to play a certain type, right? They all play really well. There is the glib, competent, self-promotional one. And there’s the sullen genius who refuses to show his work to anyone — but that’s where it all starts to fall apart. He, in the end, is immune to the praise that he’s so covetous of.

It’s meant to show his integrity, I guess.

Yet he was still there, still soaking it all in.

He’s the character who dissents from the seminar and has a distance from it in a way that the audience shares. He’s a skeptic about everyone else’s shtick, recognizing it as shtick, which is what the audience is doing, too.

It’s funny to see these types, but it would have been funnier if their writing didn’t correspond to their type in such an obvious way. Because, too often, the self-important, brooding genius type — that guy is bad. He’s so bad.

Yes! In real life, the guy who is melodramatic and idealistic and angry about the importance of writing, and just so grandiose about it, is also the person who lacks the subtlety or wit or humor or perspective to be a really good writer.

There’s really the biggest myth of all that’s propagated by the play, which is that somebody’s persona has a lot to do with the quality of their writing. That’s just never true. Sometimes, it’s the dull, plain person who turns in totally killer, electrifying writing. Sometimes the really dynamic, witty, amazing person just dies on the page after the first sentence. Or, sometimes the really talented person is just a complete sweetheart. Just a really nice person. The whole notion of equating somebody’s personality with what they’re capable of creatively just falls apart very, very quickly.

One of the characters takes a job as a ghostwriter, and that’s treated as a fatal deal with the devil. Once you take a step in that direction, you are doomed as an Artist. She couldn’t possibly learn anything from it. That doesn’t take into account how Hemingway’s early work as a reporter affected his fiction, let alone the fact that a number of revered novelists — Don DeLillo, Peter Carey — started out working in advertising.

It’s really a portrait of a certain kind of idealism that you can only have before you’ve done anything. It’s of a certain age and a certain stage.

But if you’ve never gotten past that stage, or have only seen it from the outside, it might seem like the way all writers are. Which is why the play convinces its audience, perhaps.

Everybody was laughing.

Laughing in a very knowing way, too! I get the impression that the image many people have of writing classes comes from this sort of depiction.

What’s funny to me is that, as far as I know, instruction in some of the other art forms doesn’t seem as available for satire and derision. Why aren’t we making fun of people making mud sculptures and the pretensions of teaching in the visual arts world?

That’s especially puzzling because when it comes to visual arts, you can actually show the audience what the characters are making.

And, oh my God, it’s even worse. I’ve seen it firsthand. They say things that, if you wrote them down — there’s nothing there. The kind of faux theory shit that comes up is so crazy and meaningless. It should be made fun of so much more! And yet, we don’t treat the formal study of painting as if it were a joke. We don’t question that someone might want to go to art school.

Or music school.

Boy, that just seems like it would be the last subject for comedy, right? A music class in graduate school. And yet, when it comes to writing classes: “Ha, ha, ha! What morons! They think they can get together and talk about writing!”

What is that? There’s the whole “Writing can’t be taught” thing. I was once at a dinner, and at the other end of the table there was a gray eminence writer, whom I won’t name, who said, when asked if he taught, “Writing can’t be taught.” And I, a smartass 20-something, leaned over and said, “You mean you can’t teach it.” Because how does he know? That’s like me announcing, “Cello can’t be taught!” because I can’t teach it.

I think a lot of stuff does get taught and it can be talked about. I think writing is a craft. Language is the medium and you make things with it. But, you’re right. This play isn’t for people like me. It’s for people who have a vague idea about what goes on in a writing class. It’s a rough enough sketch, and it’s funny enough. It would be dour to demand realism from that play. It would be ridiculous. It would just take the entertainment away. I would never go to a play that was accurate about teaching. My God!

: Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller

- 3Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

How my book became part of the “satanic sex stabbing”

My werewolf guide was found at the scene of a gruesome crime, but what chilled me was the media panic that followed

By Ritch Duncan

My book became part of a satanic sex stabbing

Left, Rebecca Chandler (left) and right, Raven "Scarlett" Larrabee (Credit: thesmokinggun.com)

Topics:Writers and Writing

On the night I heard about my connection to a “satanic sex ritual stabbing,” I had just finished the dishes with my wife. It was about 10 p.m. on a Wednesday, my 2-year-old daughter was asleep in bed, and I was in the living room, casually catching up on email. “I assume you’ve seen this,” a friend wrote. The link took me to a headline on Gawker.com:

“Satanic Sex Ritual Threesome Not as Awesome as It Sounds.”

The post was accompanied by the menacing mugshots of two young, dark-haired Goth chicks. The first girl, Rebecca Chandler, defiantly faced down the camera with piercing eyes, her angular face tightened into a spiteful glare. The second, Raven “Scarlett” Larrabee, looked a little less aggressive, instead opting for a well-practiced look of high school derision, accentuated by wavy black hair that almost completely obscured the right side of her face. The pictures looked like casting photos from the clever feminist horror flick of the early 2000s, “Ginger Snaps,” about two teenage sisters coping not only with periods and puberty but the fact that one of them was slowly turning into a werewolf.

I know all about this film, and dozens of others like it, as I’m something of a werewolf expert. In 2009, along with fellow comedy writer Bob Powers, I wrote a humorous self-help book for werewolves, titled “The Werewolf’s Guide to Life: A Manual for the Newly Bitten.” It included friendly tips for lycanthropes to safely manage their condition, survive their “moons,” and live safe, productive, nonviolent lives. It included dozens of helpful graphs and charts and featured illustrations by the very funny cartoonist Emily Flake. This illustration, for example, demonstrates the perils of leaving one’s wedding ring on during a transformation:

But back to the blog post:

Last week, a 19-year-old guy from Arizona took the bus to Milwaukee to meet a girl (Chandler) he knew from the internet. On arrival, he discovered that she and her roommate wanted to have a kinky, possibly Satanic, threesome. So far, so awesome. And then came the part where he was stabbed and slashed 300 times.

Well, that just got a lot less funny. But the real sucker punch came when I got to the part about the reading material on their table.

According to Chandler, the sex and stabbing were both consensual, but “got out of hand” (at least, the stabbing did). Chandler also says that Larrabee did “the majority of” the cutting, and that Larrabee was “involved in satanic or occult activities”; in their apartment, the cops found a bunch of books that sounds like they were purchased at the local Hot Topic, including The Necromantic Ritual Book and The Werewolf’s Guide to Life.

That was my book. At a crime scene. Seized by police and entered into evidence at a bloody, murderous crime scene. A bloody, murderous satanic crime scene. A bloody, murderous satanic sexual crime scene.

My body went numb. Was there another “Werewolf’s Guide to Life” out there – like, an evil one? No, that was stupid. Of course it was my book. My stomach ached, and I grew dizzy. It was the same creeping nausea I used to get when I was bombing onstage as a standup comic, but this had an added horror. My joke wasn’t just being misunderstood; underneath my minor panic attack was far darker question: Could my humor book about nonexistent monsters inspire a real-life murder?

I called my coauthor Bob, and after rereading the article and several others, I was relieved to discover that the victim of the encounter was not dead, would apparently make a full recovery, and did not appear to be pressing charges. None of this information was apparent from any of the sensational headlines.

I began to calm down a little. Bob reminded me that our book is shelved in the humor section, and there is nothing in it that encourages violence. Even if one were deluded enough to believe it was true, it’s still 200 pages of instruction on how NOT to hurt yourself or others. If those two girls were into the occult (an assertion that is by no means proven), it’s possible they might also enjoy a funny werewolf book. But it makes about as much sense to include that book as evidence that a satanic sexual bloodletting took place as it would a VHS copy of “Teen Wolf Too” starring Jason Bateman. (And yes, “too” is the proper spelling.)

Over the next 24 hours, we watched powerlessly as the story went viral. MSNBC published a story ominously stating that police recovered “a copy of a necromantic ritual book titled ‘Werewolf’s Guide to Life.’”

They weren’t alone. Our book was repeatedly positioned in story after story as though it contained ancient satanic secrets, or was torn straight from the pages of Aleister Crowley’s diary. England’s Daily Mail featured the cover of our book under a headline that screamed: “Two female room-mates ‘tied up teenager and cut him 300 times during two-day satanic sex torture marathon.” The caption for the book’s picture read: “Odd books including ‘The Werewolf’s Guide to Life’ were found in the pair’s apartment.”

Glenn Beck went on the radio and amazingly used the incident to align Wisconsin satanism with the union organization in that state, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and an ancient god named Baal — and even threw in Hitler at the end, because that is an entirely normal and logical leap to make. The original title of Beck’s post, by the way, was “Man Killed in Satanic Ritual.” A correction added later thanked Internet commenters for pointing out his error.

Our book went on to be misrepresented in many different languages, including Chinese and Dutch, the latter of which (according to Google translator) claimed “The Werewolf’s Guide to Life” was “A book of black magic rituals.” No one mentioned that our book came out in 2009, maybe because the story doesn’t sound as sexy if the terrifying occult book found at the blood-drenched altar of Satan came out the same year as “Ice Age 3.”

We eventually found our sense of humor about it. I wrote an official response for our blog. Bob joked about it on Facebook, and we hoped it would help us sell thousands of books (so far, no luck).

But fun as it was to be swept along in this, it also kind of sucked. There may be no such thing as bad publicity, but the book these articles described certainly wasn’t ours. If you did happen to be looking for a step-by-step guide on how to murder people for Satan as part of a two-day sex binge, one look on Amazon would tell you our book wasn’t that.

Even worse than being misrepresented in the media was how lazy it all seemed to be. If the reporters charged with covering this story actually spent five seconds looking up what the book was about (they certainly had the time to do a Google search and steal an image of the cover), they could have mentioned it was filed under the “humor/parody” section. To be fair, some journalists, including the Smoking Gun, did. Gawker came close, questioning the book’s real-life satanic qualifications with the Hot Topic quip.

But as I read more of these stories, I came to the depressing conclusion that it wasn’t laziness to blame, it was tailoring. In story after story, the facts of the case actually seemed less important than the details that appealed to a particular website’s niche. Those that worked were pushed forward, and those that weren’t got held back. And if I were going to complain of shoddy treatment, I got off easy compared to what those girls had to endure. Just to pick one example, a website called BroBible ran the mugshots, of course, and then opened with these lines: “How kinky are these sluts? Better yet, how pathetic is the poor bastard who took a bus FROM ARIZONA to Milwaukee just to have sex with them?”

It’s safe to say that something strange and horrible happened that night in Wisconsin, but something strange and horrible is also going on when the images of two young girls who haven’t been convicted of any crime can be rocketed around the globe, and the facts of their lives ignored or twisted. What happened for sure was those of us clucking our tongues, gasping and laughing as we read this story weren’t getting the truth about those girls, not by any stretch. And that certainly isn’t a new phenomenon.

Earlier this year, the men known as the West Memphis Three were released after almost two decades in prison. Their story, popularized in the award-winning documentary “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills,” told the tale of three teenagers convicted of child murder despite a notoriously bungled investigation. Though the crimes were different, that story has a fair bit in common with the satanic-sex tale: The defendants had scary mug shots. They were “weird kids” who never seemed to have their act together. They were outsiders. In that particular case, the boys listened to scary-sounding music like Metallica, while Chandler and Larrabee read scary-sounding things like “Intro to Sigilborne Spirits” and — GASP — “The Werewolf’s Guide to Life.” But both stories thrived on a fundamental mistrust of what is different.

No one wants to look at the story of Chandler and Larrabee as the story of two people. Instead, it’s another piece of Internet content, and showing the whole truth takes the fun out of it. In the age of the hit count, this story had all the elements of a traffic monster: blood, sex, Satan, and a couple of evil-looking young girls straight out of central casting. Their mug shots made for a splendid movie poster, and our book was the cardboard standup in the lobby. Whatever really happened was so much less entertaining than what could have happened, so why not use technically true words that make the story what they wanted it to be?

Why use words like “poked” or “pricked” 300 times when you can say “slashed” or “stabbed”? Why mention that the victim went there of his own free will when you can say he was “lured by the promise of sex”? Why frontload the fact that he wasn’t pressing charges, or was recovering at home, when it’s so much more delicious to let the reader believe he’d been murdered? And what the hell, if there’s a book that sounds dangerous, why let people know that it’s supposed to be funny?

Whether Rebecca Chandler and Raven Larrabee are guilty of a crime, I don’t know. Was this the story of two cold-blooded, evil satanists whose ritual of sex, blood and murder was thwarted by police? Or was it a case of two relatively harmless wannabe wiccans who hadn’t mastered the concept of a safe word? Likely, the truth lies somewhere in between. But if we don’t know the answer to that question, it is worth asking: How good was this story? Was it worth the treatment those young women received as story after story about them filled with lies and half-truths spread all over the world? Because that’s what these ghastly novelty articles look like to me — a grievous wounding, by hundreds of little cuts.

: Ritch Duncan is a writer and comedian living in New York City. Manageable samples of his vast body of work can be found at twitter.com/ritchied. More Ritch Duncan

- 63Comments
- Permalink
- Print
- Short URL
Share:
- Email
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Digg
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- ShareThis

My Brilliant Second Career: The surprising leap from Viagra sales to journalism

After I was laid off from a Fortune 100 company, I gave up the corporate dream -- and began pursuing my own

By Amy McVay Abbott

(Credit: Maisei Raman via Shutterstock)

Topics:My Brilliant Second Career, Life stories, Writers and Writing, Great Recession

This is a series about people who stared down the Great Recession -- and reinvented themselves along the way. Do you have a great Plan B success story? Post it on Open Salon, tag it "My Brilliant Second Career," and we might publish it on Salon -- and pay you for it.

Jon Stewart was particularly pithy that Thursday night in January 2009. For weeks, my husband and I had been witnessing the economic roller coaster on television. But now, as we watched Stewart joke on “The Daily Show” about the Fortune 100 companies who’d laid off workers, it was horrifyingly personal. I was among them.

For nearly a decade, I had the mother of all sales jobs as a pharmaceutical sales representative; I sold Viagra and other medicines to urologists, family practice and internal medicine doctors. That Thursday morning, I’d been instructed to sit at home by my phone from 9 to 9:30 a.m. and wait for the call that would determine my professional future. The phone rang at 9 sharp; my district manager, awkward and stuttering, read a prepared text to inform me that I had been terminated. Later, I learned that he’d lost his own job the day before.

So, after years making great money, enjoying “Cadillac benefits” and the opportunity to travel the country on someone else’s dime, I found myself at a crossroads: an unemployed 50-something woman whose only child had recently left for college 1,000 miles away. I had worked in healthcare marketing and sales for nearly 30 years. What was I going to do now?

The change not only threw my life path and family finances into question, but it also shook up the ground rules we had lived by in our two-and-a-half decade marriage. Since I could barely hard-boil an egg, my husband, a college librarian, had always done the cooking. But now it only made sense for me to take on that responsibility. Meanwhile, my husband had grown accustomed to having time alone in the evenings after a long day at the university. Now, he found me practically charging him at the door with the outdated words: “How was your day, dear?” Our marriage seemed headed back to the 1950s, a prospect we both found disconcerting.

During the dull, gray days of that Indiana winter, I sat alone in our big, quiet house, wondering what to do next. I completed the company’s outplacement training and perfected my résumé. But there were no jobs for me, despite my decades of experience; going back into pharma sales would be nearly impossible. My company cut nearly 4,000 reps that day, and competitors were doing the same thing.

The thought of carving out a new territory at this stage of my life was daunting. But there was one dream I’d been putting off in favor of the more stable and lucrative life in the corporate world: to be a writer. Long ago, I’d been a journalism major in college. During my last few years in college, I interned at a small daily, the Columbia City Post and Mail. The 1970s newsroom was straight out of a movie. Edwin, our police reporter, wandered in and out of the office in his rumpled suit, holding a lit cigarette with an inch of ash hanging off the end. Eloise, on the copy desk, lit me up when I turned in my first story with several misspellings.

As I applied for jobs that didn’t interest me, or that screamed “Wanted: Beautiful twenty-something with Ivy League education,” I couldn’t help thinking back to Fitzgerald’s fabled advice to Faulkner, “Write what you know.” I know it sounds hackneyed. And I know that no sane person would want to work for newspapers, which were folding all over the country. But maybe that’s what ultimately sold me on the plan: What did I have to lose?

Three decades after I walked out of the Post and Mail’s newsroom, I tried to find my way back in. I contacted the managing editor and offered a free biweekly column. I had been journaling on my own, and already had a ready-made stack of essays on everything from angst over job loss to my defiant hatred of pickles. The managing editor was excited to get new content. She told me she would try it for a few months.

Why write for free? That’s an easy answer. Small papers don’t have the budget for columns, and more than income at that point, I needed an audience. It’s the same calculation made by countless bloggers, hoping that once people read my material they’d eventually be willing to pay for more; it’s just that my forum was a bit more old-fashioned than the Internet and, it turned out, so was my content. I wrote about growing up in small-town Indiana in the 1960s. I wrote about the people and places that nurtured me, the strange and endearing characters of that village, like the piano teacher with the full concert grand in her living room or the perennially young manager of the skating arena who whipped around the rink in his white, sparkling skates to classic skating tunes like “Louie Louie.”

Sometimes, I wrote about nothing. I wrote about disposing of kitty litter that had frozen in a huge, obscene clump in a garbage bag in the snow. I wrote about learning to cook, and the various mistakes I made along the way. It was working: I started getting letters from people with whom my reflections resonated. People told me their own stories, and they asked me to write more.

I suppose that it’s strange that the success of my new job involved nostalgia for another time. But so much about our lives now is harried and ever-changing; I think my columns were a way to remember and take comfort in a not-too-distant past. I’m not sure if life actually was easier then; but in our memory, it certainly feels like it was.

Armed with new clips, I landed a real assignment at a local woman’s magazine, one that paid. More articles spawned more work, and I began to write for an increasing number of area and regional publications. Last July, I self-published a book, “The Luxury of Daydreams,” which earned solid local reviews and brought more income, which I supplement by writing Web content and editorial material for healthcare organizations, a remnant from my prior work life.

While I’ll never make the salary I earned, I am making a living. As an independent contractor I can turn down assignments I don’t like and focus on the ones I do. I’m no longer chained to the golden handcuffs of corporate culture. There is no annual territory restructuring, no competitive intel on the new erectile dysfunction drug. I control my destiny.

Work fulfillment does not, however, pay the bills. I drive an 11-year-old Accord with peeling paint and nearly 100,000 miles. Going out for dinner is a special occasion, instead of the way I cope with frequent exhaustion and stress from a rigorous and inflexible corporate culture.

Working for myself is challenging, but life can accommodate more change and growth than we realize. Just three years ago I made an excellent living selling promises of sexual fulfillment and freedom from incontinence. The money rolled in, but I always wanted a new purse, or shoes, or a vintage fountain pen. There was always a bonus next quarter, a carrot dangling on the end of a stick. Now, I’m cautious with every dollar I’ve earned. It’s not easy. But I’m no longer selling someone else’s dream; I’m living my own.

: Amy McVay Abbott is a freelance writer in southern Indiana. Her book "The Luxury of Daydreams" is available at all major online sites and for immediate download on Nook and Kindle. More Amy McVay Abbott