Wow, people, thanks for all the page views (which are huge for me)

Updated July, 2016. And come visit me at Pluot, where I have decided to do my part in re-booting Western civilization from the ground up. 



Well, who knew that I get 1,100 people coming here every month? Perhaps it's all just search engine "dings" -- does that still happen? -- or perhaps it's people who come for ten seconds and leave because they're disappointed. I used to have a terrible "bounce rate" when I kept track of such things.

Anyway I return too, just now, because I noticed another comment on my Pond's cold cream saga and I had to take care of it. Then I took a look around, noticed my page views, and thought I should give everyone a wave hello, and maybe alert you to my movements. 

I've finished my novel/memoir, after three years of work (plus my day job). I'm rather proud of it, even beyond the fact that it's my second. (You have access to Pearls and Roses, which I uploaded here after its I think fortieth rejection. Do all those rejections mean my writing stinks? One thinks not.)

Oddly enough I did have one person, a sales rep at my job where I am a wine buyer, very excited to read this, which is why after I printed it out, I brought it to the local FedEx office along with some pretty arts-and-crafts papers to serve as the cover, and had it bound for $5.72. Considering the price of paper and ink, the book you see pictured above cost about $30 to produce; if I wanted to make a respectable retail profit of 30% I should have charged my one reader/friend exactly $42.99 for it. But, she was so very insistent and I was so flattered that I gave just this one away. Besides, at least now there is another copy in the world, in case God forbid there is a flood (I don't say fire) in my house.

So that, dear ones, is where I have been and what I have been doing for a good part of my time, while I relinquished this blog and decided to concentrate all my writing at the food-wine-and-life blog At First Glass, which then crashed in January 2014 when I could not renew my domain name through Google. I think the problem was it required a smart phone and an app to renew, and I don't have either. So you can still find me at Pluot, rebooted and still eating, drinking, and living. Since I have finished my second book, above -- it's called Now Comes the Petitioner: the Story of an Internet Divorce -- I have confessed to my readers there that they must endure a bit more relaxed, unpolished stuff for a while, while I just sort of write what I feel like without all sorts of proofing and correcting. So I suppose I must warn you the same. Expect and pardon, please, the tag "unpolished."

In case you're wondering --

-- where I am, chances are it's here. Do drop by,  and have a pisco sour maybe.

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For quite a while, and beginning fairly early I remember, I had it in mind to invent a new type of literature. Well, naturally, who wouldn't? I think it was a childhood dinner table conversation that set me off, although it sounds obnoxious to claim so. One night, someone at the table said there are only three basic plots in either books or movies: man against nature, man against man, and man against himself. (Make no mistake, our dinner conversations were rarely so exalted; possibly on this afternoon we had company, and somebody made a real effort to be bright.) I was startled and outraged by this pronouncement. Do you mean there is no new story to be told? But alas, probably, yes. Try thinking of any story that does not fit those three parameters. Man against space alien doesn't count -- that's just man against man, again.

But if there are only three basic plots, surely they have all been done to death, I reasoned. Of course my ten- or eleven-year-old self did not quite reason it out immediately that night. Later I did. And I stored up resentment, as I thought hard. It might help to know that my absolute favorite pleasure reading during these middle school years was Louise Fitzhugh's great diptych Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret. In one of the books, when Harriet and her preteen friends are confronted with an adult question about how they plan to solve the world's problems, Harriet, the writer, barks: " 'Well, we'll FIX it.' " I loved Harriet.

Eventually I fixed upon the mental image of literature as a sort of box drawn on paper, divided into four squares. Three of the squares are labeled. One is Prose, one is Poetry, one is Drama. (The dinner table conversation seems to have convinced me to dismiss all idea of coping with the established-plot problem. I went straight on to what seemed the real fundamentals now, the much huger genres of composition.) In that drawing, the fourth square gapes tantalizingly empty. Can it be filled with something new?

I thought perhaps a new language would do. Well, certainly, why not? Time was passing, I was reading other things besides Harriet the Spy -- though not much with as much pleasure -- I had met teachers and professors who remarked in passing how difficult it is to rhyme in English, but how lilting and fine old Chaucerian English used to be. "Whanne Aprille with his shour-ese swe-te," and so on. A new idea. Not a Romance language, modern English lacks the abundance of soft vowel endings gracing Italian or Spanish words, so I thought, why not tack some back on, Chaucer-like? Fill in the fourth square with a new and lovely sound, that will transform all the styles of composition and even the exhausted plot lines.

But "rhoses-e are red-e, violets-e are blue-e" is laughable. Besides, the point of language is to be understood.

I tried writing poetry, never a strength anyway, while actually listening to classical music, to see if I could at the least write in a rhythm that people would recognize as "why of course, that's the Fifth Symphony," or "it sounds just like she was listening to the Nutcracker Suite." The exercise failed.

Then a community college English literature class laid an anthology of experimental fiction in my lap. I pored over it, loved it and hated it, above all resented the evidence that other people besides me had thought recently of trying something new. And had already gotten published. None of the pieces in the book were enjoyable, and all have fled my memory now, except for one superlong paragraph by a 1960s icon (Joan Didion?) in which a girl chronicles a stay in a mental hospital, and a "story" that was only a list of the billboards the author had seen on a drive across America. The professor who assigned the book said he felt sure a new type of fiction was on the point of being invented, and that it likely would involve computers. He wanted to try writing stories in which the reader, with the push of a button on a computer console, chose plot twists and helped determine endings. I snorted inwardly: that couldn't be it.

My little project stayed alive enough in my thoughts for little things to keep sticking to it, just as you might add to an odd little snowman on a dull winter day, not by getting down on your knees and packing up and rolling snow in the usual way, but by throwing snow randomly at a sort of lumpy white goal in the middle of your yard. And letting other people do so, too. I collected helpful quotes. Some famed writer said, that if he could have mastered an economy of words as he wanted to, he would have become a poet; if he could at least have mastered brevity enough to become a short story writer, he would have done that; but since his talents were poor, he became a novelist. It may have been Faulkner.

Ah-hah, I thought. There's something in that. Stuff is too long. The original synopsis of Gone With the Wind, printed on the inside jacket flaps of the 1936 edition, is a superb condensation of the whole thing. The anonymous copywriter at MacMillan who wrote it had a talent as extraordinary, in its way, as Margaret Mitchell's, bless her. Why not let novels follow that genuinely new pattern? Later I thumbed through an obscure literary catalogue and saw a book for sale -- if memory serves -- titled something like On the Making of Books that are Too Long. The novel is finished, this author believed. Ah-hah, I thought. To be sure, this subset of the square labeled Prose in my diagram doesn't look like it's finished, not if you walk into a library or book store and see the fantastic wealth of product on the shelves, and all of it being of the proper, uniform, "serious" thickness. But is it possible that, when any product is so abundant, it is also inwardly empty of meaning? Can there be much too much of a good thing, long since?

Prose, poetry, drama. If you are confined by three basic human plots, if you can't create a new poetic language and novels are too long, what's the fourth square? I never did, incidentally, wrestle with drama, though I actually wrote one play and had fun doing it. (God knows if it would ever be considered produceable.) There seems not much to do to that Drama section of the foursquare. What the ancient Greeks established and Shakespeare perfected, is impervious to further fuss.

I still kept thinking. Once in a while, other things stuck to my little project, my interior literary snowman. The Harry Potter phenomenon descended on the world, and a local newspaper article quoted a local boy standing in line at a bookstore to buy his copy of The Sorcerer's Stone. "It's different from other books," he said. "In every other book, the kid has a problem, he solves the problem. But Harry is a wizard ...."

That's true. With the three basic plots inescapable for all mankind, the gatekeepers of literature, children's or adults, today seem to have given up, recognized this, and lowered their sights considerably. For them literature has whoomfed down in a corner like a dog who ignores three big identical roasts sitting on the kitchen table, and busies himself instead with a little random beef bone, the little insistence that the Protagonist shall Solve a Problem. Not that problem solving isn't a part of great literature and of the Plots, but as a mathematical formula it is now so overtaught in schools and so overdemanded in submission guidelines that it really has become dull and stifling. A starvation bone-diet for the little dog. The guidelines for a prestigious children's magazine used to insist not only that the kid solve a problem, but that it be a unisex problem -- one that either a boy or a girl could likely face -- not involving war, death, or illness. Even lacking such details, the simple rigidity of the Problem guideline insures that third-rate talents, whether editors or writers, clog the fountains of creativity with correctly assembled papers that seem to imitate art imitating life, but are instead just a correctly long traipse up and down what middle school teachers call Fiction Hill. Passionless; idea-less; and a lot of it.

I'm sure it wasn't always so. Try reading a few short stories from a different era and see how curiously older and fine writers, subservient as they were to mankind's plots, nevertheless did not just give their protagonists a problem. Somerset Maugham wrote a story about a woman at a dinner party shocked at the arrival of another woman wearing a fatally important pearl necklace. That's all. Rudyard Kipling, in Plain Tales from the Hills, wrote about the tragic, unseen life of a beautiful Indian girl whom an English sahib did not marry. She waited for him, he never returned, she married someone else, became a village crone, and died. That was all. I suppose in a way both protagonists -- let's call them heroines, that might help -- had problems, but they were not put through earnest paces as problem-solving professionals. They were observed as heroines. I wrote a little story, which I haven't looked at for a long time but which was a favorite, in which a male character -- a hero -- was also simply observed being what he was. An editor wrote on it, "Style in the piece needs development." I smiled, in not too superior a fashion I hope, and muttered at the rejection slip, "Very good! That was the point."

I submitted the thing because after some years puzzling over my foursquare pattern, I had what seemed a revelation, something to fill the empty space. I think it must have come after one last little fling of snow got added to my inner literary snowman. This one was the best: it's the scene in the old movie The Women, in which a very garrulous salon manicurist discusses good books with the patient and regal Mrs. Stephen Haines (Norma Shearer). Mrs. Haines is trying to read, as she soaks her fingertips in the bowl and then submits to the file. "Don't you just love to read?" the little manicurist gushes. "How do they ever think up those plots? Of course, I guess everyone's life would be a plot if it had an exciting finish."

Yes. God, yes, brilliant. Everyone's life would be a plot if it had an exciting finish. But there often aren't any. I'll be brilliant now -- I shall invent the Half-story. Life is full of half-stories -- people you know for a time and then never see again, titillating rumors you never hear confirmed or denied, strange or even quite ordinary scenes which could mean nothing, but could be ripe with hidden secrets. The man answers the department store P.A. system at a certain woman's checkout station ... it is an isolated part of the store and he leans in closely to her after his phone call, hunching his shoulders and lowering his head to whisper something private near her bright blond curls. They both grin down at the countertop littered with wrapping paper and pens and scissors, friendly, at ease, a little excited but totally intimate. Both deep into middle age, he rough and pock marked, she drawn and thin and grey at the roots, but bright eyed. The young woman striding by glances and sees a world, a past, -- but not a plot. Write what you know, the literary rules say. But what can she know? She wonders, have they slept together? An employee Christmas party -- years ago -- too much to drink -- a mistake, yes, spouses told and not told, guilt, regrets maybe. Maybe not. No real harm done. And ever afterward, this little lightning leaping between them, this little fizz of excitement and pride and affection. The End.

For who on earth is really an omniscient narrator? and anyway, after every denouement, life goes on. Especially for us. We live in this big country where people, family, friends move away for good, or for forty years, which amounts to the same thing. In a light-hearted book called Entre Nous, all about the differences between American and French culture (especially for women), writer Debra Ollivier tossed off a seemingly offhand, even lazily phrased comment about American families. And yet it's also the most bitterly profound imagery in her book, which I'll bet is why her editors kept it despite the literal vagueness. She says: touch an American family, "and you touch the edge of a continent and faded memories."

That's all. We're also reputed to be not good at intense friendships. Perhaps we treasure our privacy; perhaps we hide because we know we'll all move, and we like to forestall the pain of everlasting goodbyes. We walk past the couple hunched over no connection stronger than a long past secret -- we know only illusions, half understood denouements, half stories. Our main entertainment lies in watching shifting pictures on a screen, shifting, literally flashing fast enough to create the illusion of movement and reality, purporting to tell stories and to show life. Watch an old movie, and see the sunlight of seventy years ago, individual pictures of it flashing, angling on the face of a starlet long dead. She acts out a story about something else; illusion upon illusion upon illusion. Shouldn't whatever is put in the foursquare of a new literature, shouldn't literature in general, reflect all this? Why the continuing mania for tight plotting and satisfying endings? That was all very well for our ancestors, who lived life fast and straight ahead and dealt every day with master and slave, work and rest, priest and saint, farm and famine, winter and summer, beginnings and endings. Death at thirty. Perhaps we're different, and need different stories. The strictures of the old ones seem so tired, and so false.

Oh, and by the way. I excuse historical fiction from my questions and my rigorous non-rules. I was only reminded of historical fiction because I see by Debra Ollivier's website that she is working on a historical novel. That's different. With history, you know what happened. A life there tends to have an exciting finish.

And so I have never yet been able to fill in that fourth square. I admit to being partly stymied, long since, by the discouraging information that the best people consider the search for newness in the arts to be the sign of an immature mind. My early master Louise Fitzhugh expressed that judgment herself, in a way. In The Long Secret, Harriet, the writer, nags her moony and artistic friend Beth Ellen into confessing the details of her first day with her long-lost and wildly glamorous mother, newly arrived from Biarritz. Beth Ellen shyly and resentfully answers questions but then clams up at what Harriet considers the high point of the day -- the top of Fiction Hill, as it were. " 'There's nothing more to tell,' " she says. Harriet gapes at her, inwardly fuming that "it's a good thing she doesn't want to be a writer. Her books would all get thrown across the room."

Indeed they would. Beth Ellen had all her facts and wasn't even paralyzed by the useless desire to create something new. She just couldn't bother finishing up a well-told tale. And everybody wants a well-told tale. Never mind complaining about mankind's basic plots and his inescapable genres -- never mind, perhaps, singling out those examples, like Maugham and Kipling, whose excursions into gentle plotlessness probably are the exceptions proving the rule that tighter stories will always naturally enter mankind's beloved canon, as Plain Tales from the Hills has not. We may as well quibble over there being only two sexes, or over the conventions of walking upright.

But I still like to think my foursquare gapes open, for a better mind to fill. Beth Ellen's halting answers, her trying to gauge information and relationships she half understands, and chronicle a day with people she hardly knows, accurately reflect what life is like even for the writer who then delves into the inventive joy of omniscient narration. Her books would be real, even if they were thrown across the room. Or vice versa.

Learning to love winter?

Writing project ideas sometimes come from the most ridiculous sources. Years ago while reading aloud to my children in the Madeline series of books by Ludwig Bemelmans, I encountered the phrase "she loved winter, snow, and ice...."

There's an arresting thought. You don't often find, in life or books, people who love winter. By late February, say, people are sick of it, especially in a year like this when the snow has fallen thick and fast -- what a cliche -- and the days have been gray and gray and more gray, and the trees have looked dead for four months and the cold and the ice underfoot and the tiresome dangerous driving conditions just go on and on. The season does occupy, or seems to, such an inordinately large part of the year. To which brilliant observation the clever reader replies "Well, duh!" But wait, I have a point: what a pity to hate half the year, if only there were some way we could train ourselves not to.

I suppose the most straightforward way to do it would be to develop, or be born with, a love for winter sports. Imagine speaking on Madeline's behalf: "She loved skiing, and ice fishing, and coming in to the fireside for hot chocolate and sandwiches afterward...." But even people who love winter sports can't do them all the time, and anyway, does the love for the sport translate into a love for the weather and the season, all the time? And what about the rest of us, who aren't interested in athletics but don't want to hate half the year?

When I settled into some research on this topic -- researching winter, no kidding -- I see by my old notes that I found myself starting out by exploring ancient writers to learn what they thought winter was. Why did it occur, -- did they wonder? And I wanted to know what farm work people did during the season, how they survived, what they ate, what holidays they enjoyed. It seems Herodotus thought winter came because the cold north winds blew the sun far down south in the sky. "During winter," he wrote, "the sun is driven out of his course by storms toward the upper parts of Libya" (The Histories, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, 1954). And, centuries later, Tacitus claimed that the barbarian German tribes "had only winter, spring and summer" because they produced only one crop. They did not "know" autumn because they did no particular autumn work in orchard or garden (the Agricola and the Germania, translated by Harold Mattingly, 1948). Isn't it funny to think of the seasons as abstractions that people haven't always known alike.

I envisioned carrying on with this, arranging chapters and topics and someday holding a delightful little work of belles lettres in my hand, Learning to Love Winter. It would make no pretensions to scholarly depth or world importance but would still be unique, entertaining, and who knows? possibly even help a few quirky readers to not hate half the year.



Ah, but how, how does one go about such a project as efficiently as possible? Although writing shop talk is dull, let me indulge myself just for a moment. Every writer faces the three-pronged problem, a sort of vicious triangle of opportunity costs: what shall I do today? Shall I research more, write more, or query editors more? Good research gives you a good case to present to an editor. Stopping research to turn to writing gets the actual job done. Querying editors lets you know whether or not there may be the slightest chance whatsoever for your project to be remotely worth all those opportunity costs. If they all say no, or if you can be almost certain that they will, do you pursue your project anyway, because you are such an artiste?

And how do you answer the question that undergraduates are told to grapple with in their writing classes? -- "So what?" Of course that's a good and challenging question. But I've always liked information for its own sake, too -- show me to the Trivial Pursuit board, and stand back -- an attitude which seems to be frowned upon now. Now academics and everybody want information that is actionable, that tells the reader why he needs to know this. I doff my cap to those who can always write actionable things, but I should think, often times, that is merely the icing on the writing-cake. Why do you need to learn to love winter? Well, really, I -- . And can I make you do it?

I don't know. But if neither is possible, is the whole thing therefore better left undone?

Schwab's syndrome

A few months ago I was out with old friends and we exchanged notes on our careers. I was just then between day jobs and busy claiming titles and writing articles for Demand Studios to make a little extra money. I've stopped doing that since I now, thankfully, have a new day job, and thanks to its paycheck can now write what I want to write rather than, for example, writing on the titles Demand has to offer. Like the history of Biwa pearls (not that that wasn't interesting).

My friends said "why don't I write a book." Instead of all sorts of little articles here and there, and blogging, you know.

Well, yes. Why don't I. (I did write a novel which earned me over forty rejections before I decided simply to post it here. Then there is what seems a basement full of boxes of unfinished and painful crud.) It seems to me that there are only a few paths to that nirvana, a career of book-writing, and people who are not writers understandably have no clue what these paths look like and what it takes to traverse them. You've got to parcel out your time so, and of course your first handicap is that you are unknown. It's the known people who get to live the nirvana of writing what they like with the guarantee that it will come out, in thick respectable book form, and see daylight in stores. They aren't struggling with the whole time-wasting, opportunity cost thing. They aren't asking, research first? Queries first? Marketing first? Write to a passion -- I've seen books published just on certain kinds of apples from certain states -- and then hunt for a publisher, while your topic perhaps goes years out of date, or perhaps never could have interested anybody but you? Catch hold of something newsworthy, trendy, and face stiff competition while working on something personally unfulfilling? Build up unrelated, workaday credentials first, so as to be able to sell yourself?

Or wait to be discovered? That, I think, is the prime path most successful writers follow. The secondary path is that followed by academics, who finish their degrees, and labor to get published because the wolf is at the door until they do. They can't earn teaching tenure without a Ph.D. and a book. And incidentally, the universities where they teach as adjuncts do nothing to help them birth a book into the world. I was amazed and disheartened when I learned this. Professor Saint, who wrote her dissertation at Yale and then gets a job at the University of Illinois, must spend her summer driving all over the midwest doing original research for the book she hopes might come out from Princeton University Press in three years. And is she really all that interested in how the Choctaw chronicled their wars with pictographs on deer hides, or would she rather be writing bodice ripper romances (or reading them), or staying at home looking after her new baby? The limitations of time are so ... absolute. If you are remotely an artist, you want to choose to do what you must do. And what books live in people's memories, in the libraries of a civilization? Sometimes it's just one, written by someone who had only a quill and parchment, and died at fifty-three. Frankenstein.

But this academic path, I was saying, is the secondary one to publication. The main path is the path of suddenly getting yourself discovered. "I think we've all got Schwab's syndrome," I said to my friends those months ago. They blinked at me and I had to hurry to try and refresh their memories. Schwab's was the drugstore in Los Angeles where, legend has it, the beautiful young Lana Turner was spotted by a Hollywood agent who instantly plucked her from soda-counter obscurity to send her on her way to a career, fame, and riches. It's amazing how often that tale repeats itself in our culture. Pick a writer: Lauren Hillenbrand wrote an article for American Heritage on the racehorse Seabiscuit, which someone discovered. Book and movie deal followed. And all the while she had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome! Pick anybody: every issue of People magazine alone seems to have some rags to riches story of the ordinary person who started out in a basement, a garage, with nothing more than a hobby, an idea, a sewing machine, a charitable cause -- and rose to success, artistic or business fulfillment, and a new life just slopping over with philanthropy and leisure time as well. But they've got to get discovered. Someone else has to choose to make that phone call, write that email, approach the leggy blond at the soda counter.

I just love how the discovered ones are astonished and humbled by it. They never have any explanation of how did you do this. Julie Powell of Julie and Julia fame is one. I love the scene in the movie (no really) when she comes home from her day job and her husband tells her she has over sixty messages on her phone answering machine. She listens, dewy eyed with delight. "This is Mr. Editor from Random House, this is so and so from Super Agency, do you have representation?" Another is Molly of Orangette. She now has a FAQ page to her delicious website. To the question how did you get a book deal, a column in Bon Appetit, and a literary agent, she answers:

"The short answer is this: I got a book deal and magazine work because of my blog. My agent and my editors, at Simon & Schuster and at Bon Appétit and elsewhere, found me more or less directly through Orangette. I have been incredibly lucky. Crazy-lucky. I break a sweat just thinking about it.

"My best advice is just to write. Start a blog, keep a journal - whatever works for you. Just keep writing, and have fun with it. Read up on book proposals and literary agencies, research other books and writers in your field, work hard, and stick your neck out. Definitely stick your neck out. And keep your fingers crossed."

That's it. Okay, Molly. Stick your neck out? How so? I once submitted a manuscript to Princeton University Press. I forget what it was about. I was young. And I only just learned that you could submit your own blog to Blogger's "Blogs of Note" feature -- which is where I first found Orangette -- the day after Blogger closed self-nomination to that feature! Did she stick her neck out and nominate herself? Or was she discovered, properly?

No matter. On her FAQ page she is writing in the voice of someone who has already had Schwab's syndrome, and been cured of it by seeing it work in her life. I am close to fifteen years her senior, I can proudly remember receiving my first rejection slip from a major publisher when I was about twelve, and I'm thinking: you know what? There may come a time when you need to accept that you're not going to be discovered. Not in time to make any real money, not in time to help you sort out how you should best spend your writing day, your research day, your marketing day, your query day. It may be time to get up from the soda counter, walk out Schwab's doors, and say: I need a paycheck. I was here ten years ago -- I was here twenty years ago -- and I have no intention of being here next year, or ten years from now. It may be time to acknowledge, although it is a bit scary, that if a writer has any talent, what he chooses to write will in itself be valuable because it's his. Frankenstein, books on Choctaw pictographs, recipes, another mom blog. "Do what works for you and have fun with it." You may have to acknowledge, I know what I'm worth and it's more than a stool at the soda fountain.

All this matters at the moment because I've got a part-time day job which might, might, turn full time in a few months. In the past, full time work outside the home has not been congenial to me. (Both were office jobs, to be sure, and strangely, I detest office jobs. Who knew retail is preferable?) I like this one. But I also liked the pattern of life all summer, when I wrote and researched all day, albeit on Biwa pearls and pewter making, -- when I had a taste of the life that the Discovered Ones get to indulge in. She now writes full time. Well, isn't that nice. The writer who worries about parcelling out the opportunity costs of a writing day is bound to worry about the entire days and weeks lost to full time employment. Gad. Employment as a problem, and in this economy! Needless to say, I've long been accustomed to my husband's support.

What's funny is that just when possible full time work in the wine industry, which is what I wanted to return to if anything, looms before me, I've also had a brief refresher course in just what a black hole success in publishing can be. In the course of one recent month, I submitted to two properly printed publications, legitimate magazines, and received a yes from both of them. A yes -- and then nothing. I had forgotten how long and slowly and silently the time passes after the thrill of acceptance from a busy editor. And you need money during all that time, too. And busy editor doesn't necessarily have any clout, doesn't necessarily know anyone who might want to discover you. When I first began blogging someone told me how to use traffic feed engines to find out where my blog visitors were coming from. I had hits from New York City, from publishing houses I think, and my heart leaped up. Editors, trawling for content, for discoveries! It's all right, nothing happened.

The black hole magazines that said yes are called Relish and Pith. If you see my recipes on African desserts in one, or my review of Mark Twain's novel on Joan of Arc in the other, why -- you know more than I do. Maybe you should write that book. That is, if I haven't, in a way, beaten you to it.

• If you liked this: Paper writing, random thoughts -- and note here how wrong I was, in February 2009, about my fellow citizens' reacting to political events.

Sex and the Helium marketplace

See? This is what I'm talking about.

I write on Helium, when I can, which isn't as often as might be, because I am busy writing to earn the money that Helium doesn't provide unless you write night and day for Helium, earning those Writing Stars.

I used to be a Marketplace Premier Writer on Helium, and so able to write and submit articles for actual money for actual publishing firms which have begun to use Helium to find writers and content. No more. I logged on today to surf the Marketplace, found an interesting title from a new network called Theory Media Corp, wrote to it, and was all set to paste it in and submit. When I got this message: "We're sorry. You have to be a member of the group associated with this title to write to this title."

In other words, you have to be a Marketplace Premier Writer, which I no longer am because they've changed the rules and you have to have gobs of Writing Stars to be designated so. Which means writing day and night for Helium, for no money, to get the gobs of stars.

Frustration aboundeth. I thought I could sneak into Theory Media Corp through the back door, by simply finding them and submitting as myself anyway, but either this group is so new it can't be googled, or else it is a wholly owned subsidiary of you guessed it.

This is why I have this blog. You want my theory on why Sex and the City is popular, even though it's all about skinny fifty-year old adolescents of limited acting skills sleeping around Manhattan? Here you go, and my blessings.

By the way, the instructions said I should include one YouTube link and five other external links, but now I feel like I don't have to.

Word limit: "about 300"

Sex and the City shows America to be ...

There is a huge audience of middle-aged, middle-class (white) women out there, who want the fantasy of making it in New York. They also want the fantasy of having a close set of girlfriends with whom they share deep confidences. They want the fantasy of sleeping around.

They want the fantasy of a fabulous job and fabulous wealth and access to great restaurants and exciting “clubs” where you wear slinky clothes, sip cocktails, and watch a floor show of transvestite firemen dancing in feather boas. They want the fantasy of being able to walk around safely and even hop a ferry in a chic metropolitan area – the chicest of all – in a spangly dress and high heels at midnight, and not run into any trouble. They want ... but need I go on?

The women watching Sex and the City are, let’s see – well, let’s just pick one, out of all the “squillions” (I learned a new word from Vogue this month) of American households whose windows are flickering blue from the TV screen late at night, at whatever magic times La Sex is being shown in reruns. Our gal is about forty. She is married to a husband whose private life with her she would never divulge to anyone. She has two kids, and no nanny. Every day is a day of running errands, soccer practice, making dinner, cleaning. She looks like Kate Gosselin , before somebody gave Kate a makeover because she looked too much like a mom.

When our gal can sit down for her Me Time, she relishes the fantasy, the clothes, the expensive hair, the city, the men, the fun. And she gets the flip side of fantasy, too, which is always feeling superior to it after all. In the end, what did almost all four La Sex friends want, but marriage and kids? Our gal Kate, in her millions, was always way ahead of them.

Paper writing, random thoughts

I used to write and submit essays and short stories to the slush pile of all sorts of magazines, most of them big-time famous. (Why aim low?) Occasionally, they were accepted.

That was great fun, but to my surprise, none of it amounted to "getting my foot in the door," which my father always claimed was the key to success in any profession. In writing, unless one sets course for an editorial career first, in which case writing assignments are a part of the job -- every time is always the first time. I have never had an editor call me asking me to write something for him.

I mention this not to whine into the ether but because, first, the editor with whom I at least used to have some contact has retired after forty-odd years in the business, so I no longer have that one ear in New York that I was rather proud of having. And second, blogging is so different and makes me so productive -- for good or ill -- that I think I will never submit another paper esssay or story to anybody again. I look back and marvel that I used to offer things up to, for example, The North American Review. Ploughshares. Tin House. Black Warrior Review. The Atlantic and Harper's, of course. I submitted enough to The New Yorker to finally get a rejection slip, which I considered a small triumph after years and years of being ignored. Prestige publications, all. But I wonder if some of them are still in business and even if they are, I look back at them as if at dusty, cobweb-draped tombstones littering the road of my past. (Dear me, how picturesque.) What would be the point, now, of being embalmed in the North American Review? When was the last time anybody in the world ever read it?

Still, what I might call paper writing is different from blogging, and the difference makes me uneasy. It's not just that it is more formal. I wonder if paper writing must necessarily force you to create a denser, more interesting product than the screen which only shows you a few lines at a time as you scroll down into the bottom of the monitor, typing almost anything because you are your own editor and publisher and there's no one to stop you. Who knows, maybe you're being brilliant. Somebody might think so. The very difference in format makes all the difference between working on a substantive project and merely reacting to events and emotions, which is easier and more flattering to see in print. But any writer, any professional, wants to do the best he's capable of doing. But -- if your absolute best can only be done on paper that no editor will ever permit to see the light of day, why not adopt a new medium that reaches people, even a handful, despite the risk that this medium does sort of flatten out the peaks and valleys of your best?

I suppose the compromise is to make terribly deep and significant paper writing, polish it, finish it, and then transfer to one's blog. Which takes time. Which makes the blog look like it's not being updated. Which loses the handful of readers for whom one is serving as one's own editor. Sigh, and ;-> as all the bloggers say.

*******

Random thoughts on the stimulus package, or "generational theft" (John McCain) or "porkulus" (Rush Limbaugh -- and by the way, here's another problem with writing and blogging, or both. It's reacting to politics that can make you, as a writer, just as productive as hell. In my case the trouble with that is that I am, for the most part, only regurgitating other people's information and opinions, people who know more facts and can respond intelligently to events much faster and therefore more pertinently than I have ever been able to do. All I tend to be able to offer is a kind of woozy, speculative pre-nostalgia on how Future Historians will regard This. The good political writers amaze me, really. Even though I know they have their own little demons perched on top of the computer. Charles Krauthammer once acknowledged that he has spent his career following, week by week, hundreds of unfolding, miniscule events which future historians will not care a whit about. Then again, he's got a Pultizer, in this life.)

Beyond politics -- we're talking about writing again -- I've never had much interest in making up fictional stories although God knows I have tried. I am always too anxious to teach something. Trivia, sad to say, is my great love. And although I love history, I don't have access to the really interesting primary sources which would form the skeleton of original historical writing. (More whining? Possibly.) When younger I always envisioned myself in the British Museum, delving into medieval records and making some terrific discovery. My professors who wanted me to research local high school basketball statistics from the 1910s and 1920s were responding appropriately to what it's possible for the local historian to do, but they also reinforced my innate understanding that I do not want to do that. I could drive down to Kankakee and investigate how that poor Smith family all died of yellow fever in 1892 ... but I've not done it yet.

What's left, as far as writing is concerned, is the private diary, which is getting tiresome in all its sublime-to-ridiculous daily rhythms -- is there a God? I framed that picture today -- and blogging. About wine. About food. About anything. Rush Limbaugh complains that, back in the days of the Fairness Doctrine, radio stations learned quickly how to avoid giving over program direction to angry, boring amateur listeners insistent on their right to on-air "fairness." They did it by shunning politics and all controversy from the get-go, broadcasting shows on the best fruit cake recipe for the holidays, or how to clean your bathtub ring. In blogging on Wisconsin cheddar spoon bread, am I really doing the best I am capable of? What if I've always liked reading cookbooks and even descriptions of food in novels and stories, and always liked food photography? Does that make it all right?

Who knows? No editor would ever permit any of this and so here I am, my own editor. What's funny is that blog host editors still perform the paper editor's time honored functions, even though no money is changing hands, and there are no sales to consider. They still have an eagle eye and um, exacting standards. This will never be an Open Salon "Editor's Pick," although my recipes usually are.

To return to politics. The stimulus. I'd call it the great Democratic Enslavement Act of 2009, enforcing as it does a return to unfettered welfare benefits and the introduction of socialized health care, among who knows how many other provisions. Wait till the Baby Boomers turn elderly en masse, and find out nationalized health care means them, too. How they'll scream.

But I have hope that even this enslavement act will not cripple the economy, based on a couple of things. One is an observation culled from the blog Theory Bloc way back in the summer. That day's contributor wrote that a genuine new Great Depression is probably unlikely, if only because the United States' population now is double what it was in the 1930s. That means double the number of people who can potentially create wealth, and fend off government foolishness. Charles Krauthammer, or other smart political react-ers, could perhaps refute that with brilliant logic based on other, equally accurate modern day measurements. I wouldn't know. But it sounds comforting.

And I have faith, however idiotic it may be, in the breezy ignorance and unconcern of the American people. About politics, about this stimulus act, about a lot of things. Over the centuries of our nation's existence, our three greatest blessings -- personal freedom, wealth, and a civilization and state that are powerful for good in the world -- have been conflated in most people's minds. Most of us are on automatic pilot where politics is concerned, or we think the nation is, or we behave as if it is. We equate wealth and freedom with benign state power, and freedom with a wealthy state, and benign state power with the ability to create wealth. This last is the problem, since of course no state can make wealth. I remember being flabbergasted when an economics professor declared to all of us, oh by the way, "nations don't engage in trade." Then what the hell are all the news headlines about? They're about ignorant journalists for a start, but that's another story. Another whine.

But my faith. I wonder if it is just possible that the American people may breeze on with their lives and keep the economy going in spite of the Democratic party's gigantic attempt to make like an octopus and reach its suckers into everything we do every day. Can citizens successfully ignore and thus obviate government power, as they tend to ignore dull things like mid-term elections (and newspapers)? I'd guess a healthy proportion of the citizenry know nothing about the existence or composition of such a thing as a state legislature, for example. That's after being made to study the Constitution in junior high school and high school. I've not yet met anyone who knows that the stimulus bill includes nationalized health care. To be fair, Senator Specter didn't know about it, either, until the morning of a vote this past week. Can that kind of automatic-pilot life inoculate people against a government trying, once again, to be all- compassionate and all-predatory?

Perhaps not. Once a government bureaucracy is established, it's very hard to take down -- "like bombing a colony," as a pundit once said. All the countryside may blithely ignore what's going on in the sty, but once a pig or two attaches itself to a tit or two, it's unlikely to let go. And then that shapes policy, forever. Thomas Sowell pointed out recently at Townhall that we are still subsidizing millionaire farmers today, because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s and Roosevelt decided they couldn't fail. The next generation doesn't remember when that wasn't normal. And so government grows, and the money goes.

There may be grander and more depressing reactions to the course of events in the last few months, by which 53% of Americans voted, as if on a crack high, for The First Black President WOO HOOO Hope and Change. Voted for a man who is, so far, keeping his big promises. Nations wither and die inevitably. Spoiled, ignorant people become unworthy of freedom. Human beings may naturally divide themselves into ruling aristocracy and cared-for peasantry; perhaps the human psyche is more comfortable with those trammels than with the alarming bore of republican self-government. But these reactions are so grand as to be Gibbon-esque, not necessarily sensible when applied to mere mortals here and now. The national story is not over yet. He could even lose in 2012. And oh yes -- Americans do tend to overreact to stuff.

******

"The pitch of ecstasy." It's a wonderful phrase, which I first came across in reading a book about old movie stars. Among them was Norma Shearer, who described the life of a screen actress, her life, in those terms. She looked radiantly happy in the photograph on the opposite page.

Yesterday at work I saw a young woman who fit that description, too. Ah -- a stilted ejaculation, but useful -- ah, to be an American high school girl, with all flags flying! Eighteen years old. A graduating senior. Tall. Pretty, but not too freakishly pretty, not pretty enough to make other girls say "you could be a model" and then avoid you. Beautiful teeth, good eyesight or at least a tolerance for contacts. Happy. Able to wear workout sweats and carefully sloppy hair, and still look good. Full makeup. Moneyed parents, your own car, your cell phone, your boyfriend. Daring multiple piercings in and about the ears. Keys jingling. She came in to the store and chatted with the other young girls there for five minutes. Beautiful voice, too, throaty and lilting, and they talked almost in their own language, hard to make out amid the breathless laughter and the staccato code phrases -- creep, I was like, slut, get out, didja hang out? retard, I was like, whatever. Having been a quite ordinary teenage girl myself, I still look at a specimen like this and feel fourteen all over again, looking up at a big sister or a fairy princess. I say, yes, I'd gladly trade places with her, just for a day. This is the pitch of ecstasy.

*******
And the young woman I work with, in her early twenties, long auburn hair skinned back sleekly from a thin, mild, almond-eyed face that belongs in some cool, amber-green-and-grey Renaissance portrait -- the woman who might be a Borgia or an Orsini? She told me she had been kidnapped and held hostage for three months by a local gang member when she was eighteen. "I was raped every day for three months." She only got out when the police raided the house and took her to jail, too, on charges of visiting a public nuisance (as far as they could tell, she was living in a drug house). When her story came out and her broken bones and eardrums were treated, she chose not to testify against him, because his threats against her would have meant her entire family going into protective custody for who knew how long. She is now married and a mother of two, and looking forward to growing her family. Her serenity is mind-boggling.

Do I believe her?

The Invention of the Editor, part 3

So we have met our editor, at least according to Roberts' Earlier History. At the beginning of the modern age, he is the sober scholar who stands between the incapacitated printer and the public, making sure that what comes off the press is both legible and, in the case of difficult works like Shakespeare, the faithful reproduction of what Genius had long ago set down. We have also brushed against a changing circumstance that eventually helped ensure the editor a permanent place in publishing, long after (one hopes) the printer's drunkenness was no longer a constant problem. At some point, perhaps around the time Jane Austen was being asked to pay for the publication of her third novel even though her first two had been well-received, reputable publishing houses stopped helping writers self-publish. "No" didn't mean no, you will have to pony up; no meant No. Oblivion.

But not yet. Before Jane Austen, the editor is not yet rejecting neophytes' submissions on the grounds that, in his opinion, they are unsellable to the public via the publishing firm he represents, the firm which bears all costs and whose financial health he helps guard. He does not yet stand, squarely and unpleased, between the neophyte and money and fame (however slight).

Before Jane Austen, Harrison Steeves noted: "when issues of 500 copies were expected to show a profit, almost anybody could get almost anything published." When John Dryden needed money to print that translation of Virgil in 1695, he arranged for interested and wealthy parties to pay five guineas a head to have their arms printed at the base of the 102 illustration plates. He and the printer, Jacob Tonson, thus were able to cover costs and bring the book out themselves without using the services of a bookseller at all. Later, a printer, or an author, coped with printing costs via the selling of "subscriptions," variously defined. Readers could subscribe to a printer for a soon-to-be-released book. In short, they pre-ordered, paying half the price up front and half at delivery. By Samuel Johnson's day, a subscription could be something different and very nebulous, something a writer sold to his friends himself. All it amounted to was a man asking his friends for a loan, which he lived upon while he wrote. Eventually, he delivered them the book he had finished by way of repayment. One of Johnson's contemporaries wrote a scurrilous poem about it, criticizing Johnson himself for engaging in this practice. Apparently he was late on delivery.

There was money to be made from the demand of the fee-charging circulating libraries -- we recall that printers themselves had once provided this service to a public that did not want to buy -- and naturally, the spread of literacy increased the demand for books, albeit (with time) books of "lower taste." So, Sir or Madam Author wrote, anything, without the imp on their shoulder who sits there now, whispering or stating as plain fact, "this won't fly...." Sir or Madame Author knew, it seems, that they could reach the public at will. And thus, the crazy idea of the Alcotts and the Disraelis, that the cash strapped could "decide" to write for pay. Tracing the disappearance of that extraordinary circumstance is like watching a lizard-tail disappear into its hole.

The Invention of the Editor, part 1

The Invention of the Editor, part 2