My Very Emaciated Mother Just Served Us Nothing

You heard it here first, unless you also heard on NPR a few minutes ago. Pluto is going to be voted off the Island of the Planets.

High-traffic site

The normally quiet residential street where I live is, beginning today and for most of the next week and a half, the detour of choice for city buses, delivery trucks, and commuters. The thoroughfare a couple of blocks from here is closed so that a production company can film scenes for a feature film starring Uma Thurman and directed by Vadim Perelman.

We are advised that there will be actors dressed as policemen who will have fake guns on the set and we should not be alarmed. Okay. Color me not alarmed. I do not expect to encounter them.

I learned as a child that people whose names you see in the paper are, for the most part, hard-working, capable human beings who put their pants on one leg at a time just as you and I do. If you happen to meet one of them, you look them in the eye and shake hands as you would anyone else. They appreciate being respected for their work more than being gushed over. At least most of them do. I enjoy watching Thurman act on screen. I don’t need an autograph. I’ve seen movies being made before, and I prefer the finished product.

I’ll be at my desk, ignoring the traffic outside.

e's are on sale this month

Whither -or? First it was adviser. Then it was protester. Then it was imposter. Then it was vender (a few weeks ago in The New Yorker). Now, in this post on Critical Mass we have translater. Al Gore is right: The werld is ending.

I dunno about these doctors who think they can write

Maybe some day I’ll find out, but so far I can’t tell.

Don’t get me wrong. There are doctors who write beautifully. What has me puzzled at the moment are the last two doctors who contacted me about editing their novels.

The first of them, a podiatrist, sent me a few pages to look at. When I asked to see the rest of the manuscript so that I could provide a price quote for editing it, he expressed concern that I might steal it from him. I explained about copyright and then I offered to sign a nondisclosure agreement. He was going to email one to me and I would sign it and fax it back. A few days went by and I asked what was up. He said he’d selected another editor—based on price. This was a bit of a surprise as I had not quoted a price yet; he’d never sent me the manuscript.

The second doctor, a vascular surgeon, sent me a one-line email last night saying that his publicist (a woman I’ve never heard of), recommended me to edit his book and could I please call him? As it was dinnertime on Sunday in his area code, I wrote back asking when would be a good time to call. I had gotten no response by this morning, so I phoned. Oh, never mind, he found an editor already. Huh?

Now as it turns out, my plate is fairly full at the moment. While it might have been fun to edit a medical thriller, I don’t exactly need the work right now. But if you’ll pardon my ranting a bit, what kind of decision-making process do these doctors go through in their professional lives? The first guy wanted a price from me without showing me the manuscript. I wonder if he diagnoses his patients without examining them. The second guy sent out some unknown number of emails to a list of editors and picked the first one who was rude enough to call him Sunday night, without considering any alternatives. Is that how he evaluates treatment options for his surgery patients—first salesman in the operating room wins?

Weird. Gives me a whole new perspective on guys in white coats.

Jazz in Ecuador, Butch's BBQ, and books

This post is about selling it.

My excuse for being in Asheville was that my niece and her family, who live in Ecuador, were visiting my sister. My niece gave a benefit jazz recital to a sold-out crowd at my sister’s house on the same night that Tony Bennett was performing at a somewhat larger venue in Asheville. She’s coming along as a performer and the crowd was receptive to her familiar American Song Book repertoire. The pickup band who accompanied her are familiar with the music, too. In Quito, however, there are challenges. My niece sings in English, for the most part, and introduces each song with a lengthy explanation in Spanish. Still, this is unfamiliar foreign music to her audiences there. She has to put in long hours of rehearsal with the few musicians she has found who have any notion of American jazz at all. And even though some of them are students in an extension program of Berklee School of Music, the notion that some jazz can include vocals is totally unfamiliar to them. They have heard of but not heard Luis, er, Louis Armstrong and Eja, er, Ella Fitzgerald. That’s it.

Now put yourself in the position of an Ecuadoran listening to my niece. This is foreign music with lyrics in a foreign language (difficult to comprehend even if you speak the foreign language fluently) that tell the stories of a foreign culture. It is an experience similar to attending a concert in the US of a touring group from, say, South Africa. The music is lively and catchy and entertaining, but its foreignness is at the core of your experience. You do not relate to it the same way you relate to the familiar music of your own culture. Once the group has gone back to South Africa and the tour publicity has ceased, what do you retain from the experience? There is no empathic relationship built up between that touring group and you. My niece has that problem selling herself to the public in Ecuador, and for the same reason.

Pulled pork

On the way to Asheville, and again on the way back, my wife and I stopped along the road for lunch. Both times we chose a local barbecue place in North Carolina. (On both trips we also carefully avoided eating anywhere in Pennsylvania; experience is a great teacher.)

On the southbound trip, stopping for gas, we spotted a place at the top of the hill. One store promised “scenic souvenirs,” which we somehow managed to avoid, but the barbecue place next door looked clean and reasonable. It had the expected kitschy gewgaws on the wall, along with a number of posters of Andy Griffith and Don Knotts for some reason we did not inquire about. The menu was unexceptional; the service was prompt and friendly, if somewhat impersonal; the food was far better than we had any right to expect. And yet the place was sufficiently unmemorable that I cannot tell you its name or its location along I-77. I’d be hard pressed to find it again unless I happened to need gas at the same point on the next trip down.

On the trip home, though, our experience was different. We knew we wanted to eat somewhere west of Statesville, where I-40 and I-77 cross, because that area is saturated with franchise restaurants. Even if there is some local gem hidden there, we would not have been able to find it. On the tourism informational panel listing restaurants at Exit 103, we saw a promising-looking sign for Butch’s BBQ. Okay, let’s try it. From the outside, the building was nothing special. With different signage it could have been a Dairy Queen or a KFC or a dry cleaner. But in the parking lot we noticed three or four catering trucks. Clearly, the place had a local reputation sufficient to keep those trucks busy on weekends. That was a good sign.

Inside, the place was clean and neat, not laden with quaint decorations. We ordered at the counter, where a middle-aged man in a Butch’s BBQ tee shirt took our order, talking us through the choices of sides. He volunteered, “Now if you try something and don’t like it, just bring it back and we’ll give you something else. You can taste anything you like right now.”

He seemed a little too enthusiastic to be someone who took the job after getting laid off from a software company. So my wife asked, “Are you Butch, by any chance?”

“Yes, I am,” he said. And he continued with his spiel as he rang us up.

A couple of minutes later, after we’d picked up our order and were beginning to eat, Butch was working the room. After a minute or so he was at our table, talking about the food. I had ordered a smoked chicken salad sandwich. Before I got to my second bite, Butch informed me that it was made with chicken breasts he smokes himself. He gave us the recipes for both his white slaw and his red slaw (same as the white slaw but with cayenne pepper added). He offered that the hush puppies on my wife’s barbecue plate were all-you-can-eat. “Just come back and ask for more. We’ll give ‘em to you.” Yes, he makes all five barbecue sauces himself and bottles them. “Taste that bun. It’s homemade. I refresh the sourdough starter every three days, the old-fashioned way. Well, actually, my wife does.”

He gave us a card and continued around the room, pausing to take a call on his cell phone (when we noticed that the back of his shirt listed three locations), chatting up other customers, and then returning to the counter to wait on some more new customers.

Butch and his wife, we learned, started the business thirty-two years ago. And yet here he was, as enthusiastic to talk about food, smile at customers, and act as a role model for his employees as any newly promoted store manager trying to prove his worth to the boss.

I should mention that the food really wasn’t as good as that first place we’d stopped on Saturday. But it’s Butch’s we remember, because the retail transaction is about more than the actual goods exchanged. That’s true when you shop, too, isn’t it?

It’s true for the book-buying public, too.

Whether you self-publish or get a deal with Random House, selling books doesn’t end with creating a marketing plan. The actual selling—making the empathic connection with the purchaser—is your responsibility as an author. Whether you like selling or not, whether you are a natural salesperson or not, no matter how introverted you may be in real life, you have to stand up and smile and shake hands with people and pretend you enjoy signing autographs and expressing your heartfelt best wishes for cousin Jimmy’s wedding and say howyadoin’ like you really mean it. Moreover, no matter if it is all an act, you have to be convincing at it. Shirley has to go home from your reading and tell her friends the story of how you and she really connected, if only for a moment. She has to tell that story for years. So don’t give her a perfunctory brush-off when she dawdles at the signing table to ask about your dog, okay? Because she’ll tell the story of your rude brush-off for years, too.

You can’t sell books sitting on your ass, even if you have to write them that way. That’s what Butch understands. You have to understand it, too.

Consider the crime writer

Consider the cop, too.

This last sunny Sunday afternoon, my wife and I were strolling, window shopping, actually, in the yuppified part of downtown Asheville, North Carolina. A street musician sat with his back to the sole of a giant black flatiron, a public sculpture across the way from an old flatiron building. The street scene included a number of pedestrians and, within a couple of blocks, numerous charming boutiques and cafés.

As we were walking away from the corner where the guitarist sat, I heard a bottle break, then some shouting, then some thuds. I turned to see a man on the ground being kicked in the side. Within a few seconds, several participants in the melee had scattered, some around the corner, some past where we stood. The victim of the beating, with the assistance of a friend, hobbled past us, holding a shirt to the back of his head, which was bleeding from where an assailant had broken the bottle over it.

When we reached the corner where the musician still sat, we and other tourists conferred and concluded that we could not piece the event together well enough to make a credible police report. Hence, we were all non-witnesses to an unreported crime. To be sure, I tried to ask the participants I encountered what had happened, particularly when some of them returned from around the corner to see where the beatee had gone. But the more I learned, the less I knew. Had any of us called 911 and waited for a cop to take our statements, we would have contributed nothing to the pursuit of justice.

There was one person I think I might be able to pick out of a lineup, although I don’t know the person’s role in the events. Yet I would swear this was a slight young man of the sort one might call pretty and my wife insists it was a rather unfeminine young woman. Some lineup that would be!

I’ve watched my share of police dramas and read my share of crime descriptions in novels and stories. And I’ve also read reports of experiments designed to assess the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. I’ve thought about how I might do as an eyewitness to a crime, and I’ve had the sort of practice that most of us get with the occasional traffic accident. I fancy myself a fairly observant person, too. But in the real event, with non-actors attacking a flesh-and-blood person on the street, I batted zero. We all batted zero. So my hat is off to the real cops and prosecutors who piece together the events of crimes, to the witnesses who stay collected enough to remember what they see, and the writers who can imagine violent crimes and write about them in a way that evokes reality. Fictional crime is certainly better organized than real crime.

Getting a self-published book reviewed where it counts

Join this discussion on Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle board of directors. The question on the table is how to bring independently published books to the attention of major book critics. I’ve thrown in my tuppence-worth. It would be good to see other points of view, and Critical Mass seems like the right venue to raise the issue.