JOSEPH HELLER CITES ENDLESS SLAUGHTER & INJUSTICE & DON’T EVEN ASK ABOUT MY AMAZON RANK

Ivan Goldman is both a novelist as well as an accomplished blogger for the past 10 years with Digging Deeper (www.ivangoldman.blogspot.com). He’s also a very inventive novelist and we’ve been privileged to publish three of his novels: The Barfighter (2009), Isaac: A Modern Fable (2012), and The Debtor Class (2016). His blogging often reflects political concerns he has about the state of the world and America in particular.

In this blog he manages to combine the two. With that I introduce you to Ivan G. Goldman.

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“Although it’s not what this column is about exactly, allow me to point out that the state of our nation is not so hot. The economy deals cards from a stacked deck, we’ve got more folks rotting behind bars than reside in Houston, the infrastructure crumbles, the ecology’s screwed, and we remain entangled in crazy wars. In Washington a hideous array of corrupt, deranged, ignorant manipulators seems to call the shots.    As Leonard Cohen lamented in a song,

There’s torture and there’s killing

And there’s all my bad reviews

“But enough about my problems. The point is, all this crap hitting the fan makes it an excellent time to look back at Picture This, a novel by Joseph Heller that came out in 1988. By virtue of being a Heller title, it received salutary attention at the time but then faded into the netherworld of barely remembered art. Its Amazon sales rank has fallen to 903,130, almost as embarrassing as my last novel, give or take a few hundred thousand. But who’s counting? Me, that’s who’s counting.

“Anyway, Picture This is a brilliant, meditative, enchanting work teeming with ideas that very much relate to the world right now. The story bounces around even more than Heller’s masterwork Catch 22, stopping at times and places that include Socrates’s jail cell in Athens, Rembrandt’s studio in Amsterdam, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. What ties it together are the stories, thoughts, and humor the novelist weaves out of one Rembrandt masterpiece: Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.

"When we think of ancient Greece we tend to see it as the birthplace of democracy, but Heller, taking a hard look at its principal city-state of Athens, can’t help noticing that its society was based on two pillars: war and slavery. The place was run by phonies who espoused generosity and other high ideals as they put the fix in to pile up more wealth for themselves and screwed everyone else. That included the exploited youngsters they periodically sent off to fight in grim, wacky wars. Sound familiar?

“Heller juxtaposes this abysmal stream of hypocrisy, greed, and violence against the saving power of art, and as he does it he reminds us of the value of humor in our everyday lives. While Big Media chase after Kardashians and such, Picture This, like this passage in Ecclesiastes, reminds us none of this is new:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

                                                                       

“It’s simultaneously depressing and comforting to know that if it’s not getting much better, maybe it’s not getting much worse either. Except neither Heller nor the author of Ecclesiastes had to dwell among a vast population of zombies staring into little hand-held gadgets. If that last sentence describes you, please take it personally.

“In any case, folks who keep fighting the good fight to save us from the worst of the worst within our maimed political structure deserve our respect. Meanwhile, it doesn’t hurt to follow Heller’s lead and enjoy the art that’s all around us.

“If that fails to appeal to you though, here’s what’s trending now on the Sites that Really Count: ‘Reddit Users Share Photos of Babies Who Look like Old People’.”

To which Ivan adds this: “His 5th novel The Debtor Class is a ‘gripping ... triumphant read,’ says Publishers Weekly. A future cult classic with ‘howlingly funny dialogue,’ says Booklist. But who cares?”

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COMING NEXT WEEK: A blog posting from Larry Duberstein, a highly regarded novelist who decided to try publishing, on his own, his 10^th novel. The title? Confessions of a (Self-Published) Fool.

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KURT VONNEGUT, BERRY FLEMING, AND THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS

Twenty-seven years ago Judy and I discovered Berry Fleming (or, more exactly, he discovered us). He was about to turn 88, and under his own imprint, Cotton Lane Press in Augusta, Georgia, was reprinting some of his earlier novels. Before I had ever read Berry, I should mention that the four writers who had the greatest influence on me were William Faulkner, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut, all of whom were members of  The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Faulkner was inducted in 1939, Mailer in 1967, Vonnegut in 1973, and Vidal in 1999.

Over the next two years we went on to republish 10 of Berry’s earlier books and two new ones. We also filmed him, producing a DVD of one of the giants of American Literature. At the time, driving a green Porsche convertible, he still zipped around to his office, writing daily on his typewriter with one finger in a hunt and peck manner.  But Berry wanted us to bring these books out in relatively rapid order, as who was to say how long this vital and creative guy would keep going. So we released four books at a time from 1988 midway through 1989, all of which are listed in our catalog. And we discovered that some of his lauded masterpieces, Colonel Effingham’s Raid, The Make Believers, Siesta, and Lucinderella gained the same accolades all over again . And the new ones, Captain Bennett’s Folly and Who Dwelt by a Churchyard, were also gaining followers from reviewers on NPR and from dozens of major newspapers and journals.

On June 18, 1973, Jimmy Carter signed a Resolution passed by the Georgia State Senate proclaiming that “His works have been hailed by critics with comparisons to those of Welty, O’Hara, and Faulkner. He is one of America’s greatest authors,” With this new resurgence, Professor William Doxy at UNC Chapel Hill in March 25, 1989, nominated Fleming for the Nobel Prize for Literature given by the Swedish Academy. This possibility never came about because Berry died less than 6 months later, thereby becoming ineligible.

Before his death I had the idea that Fleming deserved to be a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and that could come about only if he were nominated by an existing member of the Academy. At the time I was in contact with Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer and I wrote to them both about this. Mailer said “my backing wouldn’t help since Hortense Calisher is now the President of the Academy of Arts and Letters and she and I are not compatible, so it would do Berry Fleming’s cause no good if I were to propose him for anything.”

And then I received the following letter from Vonnegut, a neighbor of mine here in the Hamptons when not in the city. It’s quintessential Vonnegut, spoken from the heart of a man who attempted to resign from the Academy on two occasions, and who surely knows his way around it.

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                                      228 E   48   10017   Aug   8   89

Dear Marty –

     I congratulate you on your efforts to get deserved recognition for the novelist Berry Fleming, who is, I’m sure, as good as you say. So you and he are surely on my conscience. At the same time I feel helpless, since the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters is much like an Exxon Tanker with the skipper dead drunk in the lavatory off the engine room. It doesn’t act the way it’s supposed to.

     I myself no longer attend meetings because of its lack of maneuverability. Too many good writers  (and no doubt painters and composers and historians and architects and so on)  have gone to their graves believing that that they lacked that indefinable certain something which kept them from joining the cream of the cream. Irwin Shaw and James Jones and Richard Yates have failed to get in for a couple of maddening reasons at least:  first, poets campaign for each other like politicians, so that most of the writers honored are poets now, and second, painters and musicians and so on get to vote on writers, too, and have never heard of Yates and Fleming, and are often log-rollers, too. “If you’ll vote for an artist you never heard of in my field, I’ll vote for one I never heard of in yours,” and so on.

     When Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win a Nobel Prize, the Academy and Institute asked him if he wouldn’t please become a member. To his discredit, he accepted.

     I now say, and am not alone, that the Academy and Institute should not exist, since its main achievement is broken hearts.  Please give Berry Fleming my love.  

                                            
                                          Cheers –

                                          Kurt Vonnegut

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COMING NEXT WEEK: a blog from Ivan Goldman, author of The Debtor Class. Be sure to read this iconic, and ironic, writer’s political take on events.

Marty

A RETURN ENGAGEMENT

Sheila Deeth is a marvel: a creative and excellent writer, a wonderful critic and someone who posts more reviews on more sites than anyone else I know of. It’s all under Sheila’s Reviews (sheiladeeth.blogspot.com). 

Enough said, this is her blog.

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“On April second, Martin Shepard interviewed me for what was to become a weekly blog by people in the business of books. He introduced me to the world as a writer and book reviewer for which I am enormously grateful. A few weeks ago, he invited me to celebrate the six-month anniversary of that interview with a blogpost of my own. I agreed, of course, awed to be invited back to such celebrated company. And then... time ran away from me.

“There’s a formula for that somewhere, for relative space and time. Long ago, most likely in a galaxy far far away (otherwise known as Cambridge, England), I studied Einstein’s relativity, calculated structures and admired the evolution of stars, and dreamed black holes. I was a mathematician, in love with the order and sense of it all; the way patterns line up and answers rise from the mist of uncertainties; the unchanging nature of equations, measurable validity of approximations, and calculation that always simply has to be right or wrong.

“Today, as time slips swiftly away, I’m compiling, editing and formatting an anthology for our local writers’ group.  It might seem a far cry from studying math, but the connections continue to amaze me. Back in high school, the math teacher taught us first, not to calculate, not to measure, not to sum, but rather how to write our equals signs neatly one under another. “Why?” asked a daring young student, receiving a frown of mild amusement followed by, “So I can read your answers; so you can too.”

“Why does the punctuation go inside the quote? Why does it matter where we put our commas? Why shouldn’t sentences run on? But grammar rules, like one plus one makes two. And then there’s style—Why set a rule about the spacing of ellipses? Why insist on italics for internal dialog? Not everyone does.

“Plus there’s all the unseen stuff, like invisible approximations and those all-important epsilons tending to zero while time tends to infinity; widows and orphans who are (lonely) only words, white space that needs to filled with a picture or resized, and sections that start on the wrong side of a two-page spread....

“Why?” asks the daring old voice in my head, and the answer’s still the same, in math or in writing: “So people can read your answers; so you can too.”

“More time slips by. I think I’ve missed my deadline, but the Writers’ Mill Journal’s really nearly done. Perhaps I’ll get back to writing novels and reviewing new releases soon—hopefully ones where the grammar’s consistent, the white-space is clean, and the style doesn’t change from page to page. I have a growing pile from the Permanent Press calling out to me, and I know their equals signs will all line up!

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NEXT WEEK I’ll be posting another blog critiquing The American Academy of Arts and Letters , which will feature a personal letter from Kurt Vonnegut. It’s quintessential Vonnegut and not to be missed.

Be sure to leave comments below feel free to contact Sheila Deeth directly (sheiladeeth@gmail.com).

Marty

A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

On October 12, Publishers Weekly gave me the opportunity to respond to comments made by the Authors Guild recently. It appeared as a full page—the final page—a generous “Soapbox,’’ with a headline: Commenting on Mary Rasenberger’s Comments, and a subtitle “An independent publisher takes on the Authors Guild’s director.” 

Some of you may have read this article, but most will not have. Over and above challenging the Authors Guild claims, it also presents a point of view about the state of publishing today which I think you might find interesting. What follows is the text.

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After polling 1,674 Guild members, Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild, created a splash several weeks ago by claiming that most of their members’ earnings were less than $11,670 annually, which is the federal poverty level. She spread the blame around: bookstores shutting down, the rise of Amazon, publisher consolidations, and the low royalties authors receive from publishers. But do these alarm bells ring true?

It became clear that Rasenberger was talking about the five publishing conglomerates, while ignoring the more than 2,000 independent publishers listed in Literary Market Place. When she says that “authors need to be cut in more equitably on the profits their publishers see,” this is another assumption that all publishers are profitable—as opposed to the reality, in which some are going broke, others are losing money, and some are just breaking even.

Last year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I was talking to Robert Rosenfeld of the Poisoned Pen Press, which has been publishing high-quality mysteries for the past 17 years. We at The Permanent Press started publishing in 1978. I put a question to Robert that I’d been thinking about: “Do you ever get the feeling that you’re standing in the ocean when the tide starts coming in, but you can’t move your feet? Soon the water level comes up to just below your nose, and you wonder whether you’ll survive or not. Then, at the last moment, the waters recede and the crisis is over.” Rosenfeld, with a devilish smile, said, “Yes. But publishing is the least expensive hobby a man can have.” I’ve cherished that sentence ever since.

Despite Rasenberger’s claim that Amazon has hurt author earnings, in our experience, Amazon has never been a detriment to either author earnings or publishers’ earnings. When Amazon orders printed books, they rarely return anything, while wholesalers and bookstores typically return a high percentage. As for electronic sales (such as with Kindle), we split them 50/50 with our authors, as we do with all subsidiary rights—another good deal for writers, despite the Authors Guild’s warnings. 

Rasenberger claimed that “unless writers share more equitably the profits their publishers see, we’ll stop seeing the quality of work the industry was built on.” What quality is she talking about?  My impression is that the quality of writing has gone down and down and down over the decades. 

As the co-publisher of a small press interested in publishing literary fiction, I applaud this development. Why? Because the only reason we’ve been able to find, introduce, and publish so many award-winning novelists is because the conglomerate publishers increasingly reject them. Dumbing down artistic merit in favor of wider sales works if the goal is making money. But if one’s passion is to find and introduce artful writers, this strategy doesn’t work. Amy Schumer is not Mark Twain, though both are humorists, and James Patterson is not Elmore Leonard. I fault neither Patterson nor Schumer for their financial success any more than I would fault the winner of a million-dollar lottery. Patterson’s name on a book guarantees high sales, even if his “coauthors” do all the work, and some people find Schumer irresistible.

Which brings up a bigger question: what compels someone to enter the arts and keep at it, despite the fact that most put hours into their work that puts them below the federal poverty level? Living and working here in the Hamptons for most of my life, I’ve known many artists, from writers to painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, playwrights, and poets. All of them work because that’s what dedicated creative people do. After decades, some have achieved worldwide renown, such as Hans Van de Bovenkamp, whose stainless steel sculptures are installed in parks, museums, and collections throughout the world. But he never went into it for the pursuit of money. Another friend, Ruby Jackson, known by many for her assemblages, ceramics, paintings, and gallery exhibits says, with a laugh, “I am the best collector of my own work.” Jackson’s income is poverty level, but she shares with Van de Bovenkamp that same enthusiasm to create art.

“Authors are not getting the financial rewards they are due,” Rasenberger concludes. This is an argument used by workers everywhere. But what is due to anyone?

And don’t authors have the right to sign or refuse any contract offered by a publisher, large or small?

I rest my case.

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I welcome your comments.

I can also be reached by email: shepard@thepermanentpress.com.

NEXT WEEK expect another blog posting.

Marty

A MEMORABLE EXPERIENCE

John Valeri is a book reviewer who writes for the Hartford Books Examiner on Examiner.com. Given the wider distribution it receives, his column consistently ranks in the top ten percent of Hartford Examiners, National Books Examiners, and National Arts & Entertainment Examiners. His reviews have been excerpted and printed on more than forty titles written by popular authors, ranging from Wally Lamb to James Patterson. John regularly moderates author discussions at bookstores and conferences throughout the state and is a proud member of the Em-Dashes writers group.

He’s been carrying on a lifelong love affair with books since discovering the many charms of Nancy Drew as a child. “In Middle School, I graduated to the more adult stylings of Mary Higgins Clark—and I continue to have an affinity for murder & mayhem of all sorts (fictitious, of course).” This ardent bibliophilia led him to apply to Examiner.com in 2009, and he’s been writing about books ever since. “What better way to indulge my habit? I dabble in composing fiction, as well, though I can’t seem to find the discipline to complete the great American novel. Or even a decent one. This is probably due to the fact that I spend most of my free time immersed in that which has been written by others.” Consequently, he can attest to what Gloria Estefan once sang: the words get in the way.

What follows is his story.

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"Five years ago, Patricia Cornwell embarked on her first book tour in a decade. While the limited itinerary found her visiting big box retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Costco, Sam’s Club and the now defunct Borders, there were also a precious few stops at independent bookstores—one of which, though out of state, was within driving distance of my Connecticut home. Given my longtime affinity for the (then) reclusive Cornwell and my ardent support of indies—even when it means expending more money and more gas—I decided to hit the road, fully expecting a memorable experience.

“And I got one.

“Upon arrival at the venue, I deposited a bag of newly purchased toiletries in the collection box—Cornwell was soliciting donations in support of the “America for Vets” campaign—and proceeded into the store. The owner, noting that I was carrying a bag of books under my arm, immediately accosted me. First, he insinuated that it was due to non-buying readers like myself that independently owned bookstores couldn’t compete with the Amazons of the world. Then, he chastised me for intending to cause an inconvenience to other attendees by having more than one book to be signed.

“Apparently he’d forgotten that old adage about what happens when you make assumptions.

“First, I had every intention of patronizing his business—and had driven two hours, and 120 miles, to do so. (Ironic, then, that he patronized me.)

“Second, it was he who was ignorant of the knowledge that Cornwell and her publisher had prominently stated that the she would be more than happy to accommodate those of us who wished to have older titles signed, provided they waited until the end of the event.

“Though my initial instinct was to walk out, I decided to stay—and spent more than $100 in his store, however begrudgingly. (Hey, where else was I going to get a signed copy of Food to Die For: Secrets from Kay Scarpetta’s Kitchen?) I will freely admit, then, that I felt the ultimate redemption when Ms. Cornwell and her impressive entourage recognized my name as I passed through the signing line, resulting in warm handshakes, a photo op, and even a rare personalized inscription—all while the store owner watched on in stunned silence.

“Had he taken a moment to engage me in conversation rather than making assumptions, he might have realized my noble intentions and saved us both the embarrassment of an unnecessary and unpleasant encounter. (He might also have discerned that I was the press.) I’ve not publicly divulged this story before, but I do believe that there’s a lesson to be learned here.

“Independent bookstores are an endangered species. And while we have the responsibility of helping to protect them by shopping for a cause rather than shopping out of convenience, they have the responsibility of earning that privilege. The great majority of establishments exceed this expectation time and again. Sadly, it’s the few that don’t that we often remember best.”

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I hope you will post your responses to John’s blog. If you want to reach him directly you can email him at oyejohn52@aol.com. NEXT WEEK I will be at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and will likely take a week's break before continuing our Wednesday postings on October 28.