[NOTE TO THE READER: In Salon's Table Talk, Mr. Blue will take part in discussions of writing, the writer's life, publishing, love, romance, the erotic life, marriage and how to live life. Please do not ask for investment advice or help on your term paper. Letters will only appear in this space this week. In the future, Mr. Blue will write a brief introduction and the discussion will be carried out in Table Talk.]

Dear Mr. Blue,

Disappointed

Dear Dis,

I guess you could call it a lovelorn column, for writers and lovers, all of whom tend to have their hearts broken sometimes, and Mr. Blue has certainly had his tromped and left a trail of damp hankies in honky-tonks and Holiday Inns from here to Honolulu, and this is what qualifies him as a Romance Resource Person, a history of failure and rejection. Mr. Blue is an author who has survived seven major book tours and been interviewed on daytime television shows, sandwiched between Szechwan cooking demonstrations and the lady from the zoo with the pair of baby lemurs — Mr. Blue sat there as a TV person with large hair asked, “What exactly is it that people enjoy about your work?” and the camera zoomed in on Mr. Blue’s rumpled hair and weary eyes and the floor director held up 10 fingers, meaning that 10 seconds remained before the lemur segment. So Mr. Blue is qualified to feel the pain of others and reply appropriately. As for kissing on the first date, you should never date someone whom you would not wish to kiss immediately.

Dear Mr. Blue,

Fargo Dave

Dear Fargo Dave,

No, you’re not. This is the American Dream, and your Mom, bless her heart, has opened the door for you, and of course you should walk through it. If you get a part-time job, you can probably make your inheritance last you for three years, and that’s a good enough trial period to see if you can sell something. The market for serious essaying is somewhat thin today, so you might want to consider the humorous essay, if humor is something that interests you, or you could venture into memoirism, if you’ve had a full rich life, or, if you haven’t, you could write about health. There are a hundred health magazines out there, and more are on the way. The freelance life is a good life. Mr. Blue suggests that you walk into your principal’s office next week and give him a good tongue-lashing and act disgruntled — lean over the desk and keep touching your right pants pocket and look him in the eye but don’t quite focus — and this will serve to burn that bridge. Then you can write about doing it. Remember, for a writer there are no bad experiences, everything is material.

Dear Mr. Blue,

Distraught in Ithaca

Dear Distraught in Ithaca

No, it’s not all right, so don’t. There’s no friendly way to deal with this, and if you value your friend, don’t corner her. If you listen hard enough, you’ll always hear bad things about yourself, so don’t listen so hard. Time will pass, and this tripe will leave your mind.

Dear Mr. Blue,

Curious

Dear Curious,

Mr. Blue became a writer when he was 14 years old in order to express deep inexpressible feelings that he later learned were common as dirt, part of what is called adolescence, but by the time he discovered that he had nothing original to say whatsoever, he was enjoying the act of writing so much, he couldn’t bear to stop, and he has continued ever since, through periods of staleness and dullardry and mufflement, enduring tepid reviews (“a workmanlike book that certainly will be of interest to those who are interested in this sort of thing”) and the disinterest of awards committees and the misery of book tours (see last page).

Dear Mr. Blue,

Yellow

Dear Yellow,

Mr. Blue doubts that your status as a published author is what most interests Svend at this point. It’s a little white lie that can easily be confessed and surely will be forgiven, so if you’re interested in having a romantic fling with a Swede, perhaps this is your chance. There are women in Minnesota who might advise against it, but only you know what interests you about him. No, he can’t be in love with you on the basis of some e-mail, so put that out of your mind, but if he’s amusing and doesn’t seem dangerous and you want to have a Swede under your belt, then go ahead. The fact that you asked for Mr. Blue’s advice on this, however, should be a caution to you: People don’t usually ask for advice before having a wild, impetuous affair — ordinarily, there isn’t time — so perhaps you should count to 10 in Swedish and then see how you feel. If you do have the affair, and you still like him, under no circumstances should you agree to move to Sweden until you have asked Mr. Blue for his advice.

Dear Mr. Blue,

Fifteen

Dear Fifteen,

A young man who takes up prose fiction is making a wise choice that will stand him in good stead the rest of his life. Writing teaches a person humility: One thing you absolutely learn is to recognize when someone else has said something well, said it better than you could, and you learn to admire the success of other writers and savor their work, and of course the love of language is a pleasure that lasts all your life. And besides that, the ability to rearrange reality in a plausible manner is something that a person will often find useful. Your mother is wrong here, and you, as a young writer, are in a good position to show her that she is wrong by writing a work of fiction about her. Hold nothing back. If it’s published, then she should be happy for your success, and if it’s not published, then nobody’s the wiser.

For many reasons, “Sister Carrie” was a big book to us English
majors who studied it in the Modern American Novel course 30
years ago at the University of Minnesota. For one thing, it was
the first M.A.N. in the course —- Melville was considered 19th
century and he went into a different file drawer — and so, we
were led to believe, Lewis and Fitzgerald and Hemingway and
Faulkner all leaped to the fore over Dreiser’s shoulders and
benefited from his having fought the good fight before them.
Published in 1900, “Sister Carrie” stood at the gateway to our
century, the opening salvo in the struggle of American fiction
writers to portray the life of our time honestly, over the
harassment of prudes and philistines. We English majors were
drawn to “Sister Carrie” as well by the sweet story about its
origins: In 1883, Dreiser’s sister Emma had fled to Canada with a
married man who had stolen money from his employer, the clear
basis for the novel, an attempt by the author to redeem his
family from its shame and suffering by creating a great work of
art from the tale. “Sister Carrie,” our professor told us, had been
bowdlerized by the author’s wife (much as Mark Twain’s wife had
taken a blue pencil to “Huckleberry Finn”) and then was suppressed
by its own publisher, Doubleday, when it appeared, and sold less
than 500 copies. We were prepared to admire the book for
that reason alone.