Looking for my alter ego...I'm sure I left it someplace around here...
I'm still insanely jealous of that clever pun by one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters posted on a sign outside his ranch, so I've been drafting a few signs of my own:
Pest control truck parked outside church:
Last Halloween we joined several other families so our children could go Trick-or-Treating together. The hosts first served a kid-friendly dinner to the eager, costumed kids. The plan was to allow the adults to eat a more leisurely meal in two shifts, taking turns shepherding the kids through the neighborhood. The women decided to take the children for the first shift, leaving the men behind to eat, talk, smoke cigars (not), sip Scotch (just kidding), and watch football.
I have no recollection of which teams played that night. What I do recall is how stimulating I found the conversation among the men. For once the discussion was not repeatedly interrupted by children and I was able to enjoy the conversation of intelligent, well educated men from a variety of professions (surgeon, venture capitalist, entrepreneur, etc.). I found myself stimulated by the conversation and the intelligence with which various points of view were expressed and different complex topics explained.
It reminded me not only of the best moments of college (well, you know what I mean), but also of a goal I've occasionally articulated about raising children. Essentially, it's my dream to raise my sons in an intellectually stimulating environment where they are surrounded by successful adults from many disciplines. I have this image of them sitting at the dinner table across from astronauts, politicians, pro ballplayers, architects, CEO's, teachers, ministers, musicians, travelers, writers, journalists, directors, doctors, investors, entrepreneurs, volunteers, and even attorneys. (I know: I need a much bigger table.)
And you know what? It occurs to me that I am capable of providing them that environment since we know someone from nearly all of those occupations. So why not bring the talk show into the dining room and play the Bill Moyers role to a range of interesting and enjoyable dinner guests? It'll be like dinner at Barbara Walters' or Walter Cronkite's house...except for the chicken nuggets and paper napkins.
Even when the boys become teenagers and want nothing more than to escape the house and race off with their friends, how preferable is it to envision the scene they are racing from being one so enriching, rather than one of perpetual domestic drudgery and embittered family disputes? Besides, as the conversation the other night reminded me, I myself am starved for intellectual discourse and debate with adults who have something intelligent to say and the ability to express it well.
For several days following that Halloween dinner, I contemplated the part of the discussion when several men spoke of which journals, magazines, and periodicals they read regularly. One dad lamented that he no longer had time to read anything but the most technical journals in his field and missed reading Science, Discover, and Natural History. Thinking about that, it occurred to me that I also don't have time to scan Scientific American, Wired, Popular Science and others every month. I know from experience that such subscriptions will just result in a pile of unread magazines and wasted money.
But that's when I had my epiphany: Why not let someone else do the work of reading dozens of periodicals and culling only the best articles for my edification? I'd still miss a lot of fascinating and important articles, but I'd be reading far more technical and educational material than I am now. So I sauntered over to the bookstore, and although I wanted to buy every essay anthology on display, I limited myself to two from The Best American Series®.
I purchased The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 and The Best American Essays 2004. They make terrific bedside reading. It was there that I found both Peggy Orenstein's article on baby names and Susan Orlean's terrific essay on the 2003 World Taxidermy Championships. I also read interesting articles on neuroethics, high school pranks, multiverses, and The Matrix.
I'm one step closer to my goal of creating a stimulating and intellectual (and arguably eccentric) environment for me and my family.
Now I just need to invite a few poets, astronauts, and governors to dinner.
Ever have that experience where a familiar word one day suddenly sounds foreign? Not only strange and alien, but actually ludicrous and implausible?
For me that word is "much."
"Much?"
Just listen to it: How much? Not much. So much. That's too much. Does that hurt much? Pretty much. Thank you very much. I ate too much. Do you ski much? Not as much. How much is that? Not too much. Oh no, that's way too much. How much did you expect? You can never have too much.
Much!!! It's too much! Do you hear it? I thought as much. Doesn't it sound absurd? What the hell is "much" anyway? Does every language have a much equivalent? Could we live without much? Could we go a whole day without saying it?
Try expressing sincere gratitude. "Thanks a lot," sounds sarcastic. You almost have to say "Thank you very much." What else could you say?
How do you get rid of much? You're pouring coffee and you want to know when to stop. Or someone is cutting you a slice of cake and they are slicing it too thick. How much? That's too much. Not so much. It's endless!!
How much is much anyway? When does something go from being enough to becoming much?
What the hell does much even mean? (No, I am not going to give you Webster's definition; any time you read a column that begins, "Webster's defines the word 'citizen' as..." trust me, you are reading a lazy, cliched writer who hasn't given much thought to being creative. Argh! That drives me nuts, too!)
At bedtime the other night, Kevin asked me, "Daddy who first invented words?" While I was mulling over this latest imponderable, he added, "And what was the first word they invented?" We talked about this second question, and came up with several ideas. I especially liked his suggestion of "Look." So now my imponderable as everybody, myself included, is muching away all day long is, "Who the hell coined the word, much? And what are the alternatives?" Cause I'm all muched out.
Don't even get me started on "such."
Postscript: I know you'll ask, so I'll answer you: "much" occurred 54 times during the first one hundred entries of this blog. Is that too much?
(Yes, I know, it also appeared 40 more times in this 400 word post alone.)
We bought our tree this weekend and I brought the boxes of ornaments in from the garage. The boys were eager to decorate the tree right away, but Kathy and I had dinner plans so we only had time to string the lights. When we returned around 10 o'clock the boys were asleep and the living room was beautifully decorated.
Valley Girl was sitting in front of the TV folding laundry. She told us the boys had done all the decorating completely on their own. What about the top ornaments? we wondered.
"They got the stool."
Who set up the manger?
"They did."
What about Dickens' village?
"They did that, too. Did you see the snowbank they made?"
You didn't have to help at all?
"No, they did it all by themselves."
The next day they brought in Frosty from the garage. "Mom says it's our job to set him up with you," they informed me. Frosty was a gift from grandma and Uncle Harold last year. We weren't too eager for an eight-foot inflatable snowman on our front lawn, but the boys were in a mood to decorate, so up he went.
They still have gingerbread houses to make and they want me to string lights outside the house which would be another first. It seems like they are determined not to let Dad play the role of grumpy ole Scrooge.
Kathy reminded me I have another responsibility due. It's time for the annual Christmas poem which has become a tradition in our Christmas card. I am not a poet. Hell, I'm not even a writer, but every year we somehow manage to collaborate on a Christmas poem expressing our gratitude for friends and family and celebrating the things we are thankful for.
Some of the poems have been admitted clunkers, but the intention is always heartfelt, and the picture of the boys is always adorable no matter how candid and unprofessional. My best poem, I always thought, was the one Kathy would never be willing to choose. It expresses what happens when software engineers by training make a feeble attempt at creativity:
When programmers write poetry, the words don't always rhyme
The tenses may change; it may not sound sublime.
/* It may have lines that are commented out */
OR IN ALL UPPERCASE WHEN TRYING TO SHOUT
But the message is still heartfelt; the intention sincere
Such as wishing you Joy at Christmas each year.
And when programming poets take marketing wives
Expect artistic conflict the rest of their lives.
And if the pair should happen to breed
Pity the poor offspring the lives they will lead.
For with programming dads and marketing moms
Its "impact" from her and from him its all ROM's.
And if family talents together combine
On a simple verse, a Christmas rhyme,
You may get a message of Peace on Earth,
It might sound convoluted, but for what it's worth
When programmers write poetry, it may croak like a toad,
But it's still less of a disaster than if poets wrote code.
Kevin woke up, but Justin did not.
It was one a.m. when I heard "a sound like someone trying not to make a sound." I found Kevin washing his hands in the bathroom and after confirming that he was fine, I walked him back to his room, gave him a hug, and tucked him in. Before leaving, I also checked on Andrew and Justin—they sleep in the same room, side by side like the three bears—and covered them again as well.
Ten minutes later I went back to check on Kevin and found him asleep. Andrew, however, had flipped off his covers and was sleeping the way I so often discover him, with his head toward the foot of the bed. I considered covering him in that position, then decided to flip him back with his head on his pillow. As I lifted his heavy, still form, I whispered, "Andrew, you're sleeping upside down again."
I never expected a reply, but he gave me a reassuring smile and said, "It's okay, Dad. I sleep both ways."
He's right, of course, he does kick off his covers and flop around in bed. He likes to sleep with his body pushed up against the wood frame and often with one limb draped over it. He tends to run warm and quickly kicks off his covers. He's the last to fall asleep and the first to wake up. We don't even set an alarm clock on school days; we let Andrew wake us up when it's time.
When the boys were infants, the NICU nurses taught us to wrap them up like little burritos while they slept. We learned to calm them by holding their arms pressed against their chests so they couldn't flail about and get over-stimulated.
Yet even as babies they slept differently, but it wasn't until they were out of cribs that I discovered Andrew's magic formula for putting himself to sleep: he thrashes. I instinctively tried covering him, but it seemed to frustrate him. So I watched him fall asleep several nights in a row while I cuddled beside him. And sure enough, he thrashed. He'd flop from position to position, then eventually end up face down with one leg kicking. I watched as he repeatedly kicked his foot, gradually slowing down, and eventually his foot paused in the air, then settled down one last time and he was asleep. It's not a technique that works well with covers tightly wrapped around you, but I could see it worked for Andrew. In fact, in later weeks if he claimed he couldn't fall asleep, I'd just tell him to lie on his belly and kick his foot. Sure enough, he'd be asleep in five minutes.
I know the boys' sleeping styles pretty well—I should after ten thousand bed checks—but I still marvel at the differences. Kevin sleeps on his back, often with his hands beside his head on the pillow, looking for all the world as if he's in Hollywood lying on a beach chair by the pool as the starlets parade by wondering if he's someone famous. He looks as if he's having great dreams about playing sports and scoring points. He prefers to sleep inside a sleeping bag on top of his covers. I still don't know whether that's because it keeps his thin frame warmer or whether he's just trying to make less work for himself every morning when making his bed.
Justin could give a class on sleeping. He's a cuddle bug and he wraps the blankets up tightly over his shoulder and sleeps on his side. He has a ritual of arranging his pillows and favorite stuffed animals by his head. His two greatest comfort items are his lambies. He puts one on top of his pillow, lays his head upon it, and then drapes the other on top of his face, and he is instantly out. I've watched him make himself into a lambie sandwich at night and teased him about it. "You never have to count sheep, Justin," I've observed. "You just have to count lambies: one, two, and then poof, you're asleep."
But Andrew will always be the squirming, flopping, wiggly boy I'll find in a heap at the bottom of the bed, occasionally sleeping beside his bed, sometimes collapsed amidst an absurd pile of stuffed animals, and other times with his feet in his pillow case. Maybe one day he will outgrow it. But for now, he continues to sleep both ways...and every other way imaginable under the moon.
I found it intriguing when, of all the topics I've written about, I received an anonymous comment about my (re)discovery of Ish Kabibble. I at first assumed that it must be a practical joke by a close friend, but the usual supsects have not owned up to it.
The reader mentioned watching "a movie with Ish Kabibble, Kay Kaiser, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff." For a moment I thought the giveaway was the inclusion of the name Kay Kaiser, whom I momentarily mistook for Keyser Soze, who indeed was one of The Usual Suspects. That would certainly have pointed the finger at my brother, one of the unusual suspects and a fan of that movie. But Kay Kaiser, who the reader correctly identified, was the band leader of the orchestra that included the mop-topped cornet player, Ish Kabibble.
Serious movie trivia buffs would more likely have been suspicious, not of Kay Kaiser and Ish Kabibble, but of the group appearance by the three veteran stars of classic Hollywood horror movies, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre. It turns out that those three only appeared in one picture together, a forgettable 1940 horror comedy called You'll Find Out.
How's that for a clue?
It's unlikely, of course, that I'll discover that the identity of the reader is anyone I know. But having been led so directly to such an intriguing movie, I figured the least I can do is watch it. Easier said than done, as it turns out. Neither Blockbuster nor Netflix has it in their 25,000+ movie rental lists. (But if I can wait until 4:30 a.m. on December 17, I can catch it on the Turner Classic Movie channel—which is my duty as a blogger, don't you think?)
Hmmm. How did that reader just happen to have watched that movie and to have conveniently found my posting on Ish Kabibble?
As soon as I learn anything, you'll find out.
What began as a small experiment in blogging has lasted far longer than I ever expected. Yesterday's entry was my 100th post to this weblog (excluding the original, "Shirley, You Jest," test case) and it concludes nearly six months of writing.
You might now expect me to editorialize upon what I've learned, or look back and reflect upon what I've written, or speculate upon what, if anything, comes next. Not so. This ain't your momma's weblog, baby. Instead, I chose to commemorate this inexplicable pastime with a similarly irrelevant and inconclusive analysis.
I wondered what one might discover by running a word count utility against the first 100 entries. I'm sure you've all been wondering the same. Fear not, I have the data.
Those 100 entries exceed 53,000 words, the equivalent of a short novel. English grammar being what it is, much of that word count consists of only a few common words. In fact, the top five words alone account for 15% of the total word count:
I paid a second visit to 826 Valencia today. This time I wasn't there to purchase any piratey things, although I did purchase Issue 12 of McSweeney's Quarterly.
My specific purpose in returning to 826 Valencia was to leave behind the anonymous calling card I once mentioned. While browsing among the spy glasses and pirate dice, I spotted what I was looking for: a pile of unopened mail. I waited until the cashier's attention was diverted and then as inconspicuously as possible (which was not very), I dropped atop the stack of mail a standard business envelope with a single folded sheet of paper inside. On that page, in the form of one long, unindented paragraph, were the following nineteen unrelated sentences:
It all started with one simple question. Enoch drew his rifle and held it. It was the first time he beat his father at anything. Some stories are better left untold. Scat. Call me Ish Kabibble. Finding a parking place that morning should have been the least of her worries. I never did understand “reality TV” and that right there was half my problem. You look at any picture of Charles Manson and what do you see? Not again. Think of it as the next Great American Novel, the best whaling novel since "Moby Dick"—except much shorter, only one hundred and forty pages, and set in West Texas, and there isn't any whale. The first time Jason spotted her she was walking her dog backwards through the snow. If you really wanna know what happened, I’ll tell you the whole freakin’ story, even the part about getting kicked out of "Exit-Here Academy" and what happened after JayDee tried swallowing half a bottle of pills, but if you start giving me any of that Holden Freakin’ Caulfield crap, then I’m outta here and you’ll never know why they both had to die. Harrison first showed it to her in the front seat of her father’s black Lincoln Continental. Could I possibly be any more charming? Arguing with her in a crowded bar, that was my first mistake; following her home in my green VW was my second; but killing her, that was no mistake. What my sister lacks in talent, she more than makes up for in enthusiasm. I never should have gone through that door. You come to me at night while I am sleeping.Whether that sheet of paper ends up in the hands of Dave Eggers, a student prodigy, tutor, or clerk, or merely gets tossed unread into a waste basket, I have no way of knowing. My role in the fate of that sheet of paper began with an idea and included weeks of thoughtful revisions, right down to the precision of the sixty-three words of sentence 13. But my role in the fate of that sheet of paper also ended with its delivery (and its authorship is our little secret).
I wrote previously of how Kathy and I assigned each name to our boys after their birth, but I omitted the details of how we selected the names in the first place. It didn't happen the way I would have expected it.
Naming one's child is a serious matter. Every couple gives it a great deal of thought. Baby naming books are consistently strong sellers. A name is the first gift you give your child and in most instances it lasts a lifetime. Who wouldn't agonize over it?
Names are evocative. They remind us of close friends, former classmates, colleagues, movie characters, even people we despise. Many couples decide not to reveal the baby names they are considering, even to close friends and family, because they have learned that any name may provoke a strong reaction, and not always a polite or favorable one.
I once assumed I would choose names fraught with personal meaning, perhaps the name of a great author, or a public figure, or a character from a favorite novel brimming with personal significance. But where does that leave you? With Herman? Theodore? Atticus? One's spouse will surely have an opinion on such choices. And likely as not, she reads different authors and admires different celebrities and actors. Was I willing to risk Fritzwilliam? Pierce? Bra-aad??
(I have a friend who did exactly that, though, naming her son Atticus, and I asked him once after he'd graduated from college how he felt about it. He was pleased with it, I'm happy to say. I now wonder what he'll name his children.)
When I was a perennial bachelor, I suggested absurd options as potential names of future offspring; I claimed facetiously that it was a litmus test for compatible spousal material. "I'd like to name my daughter, Mirth," I might say (and poorly, with my accent). "Or maybe, Blight Louise—it will build character." While others were still shuddering, I'd propose for boy/girl twins the names Vermin and Virus. It was all a big joke designed to get a shocked response and played by a man who never seriously expected to be naming a child. (Although I do still expect Mirth to show up in one of my stories; I may not be as unrestrained as Jonathan Lethem, but the name still charms me.)
The joke on me, of course, is that I did eventually marry, and then had triplets, not twins. My friends were quick to offer suggestions. We repeatedly heard the names, Moe, Larry & Curly, or Huey, Dewey & Louie. One literate friend proposed Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. Baseball companions suggested Matty, Felipe & Jesus, or Tinkers, Evers & Chance. (I liked "Chance.") The triplet naming game was irresistible.
Upon hearing the news that Kathy was pregnant with triplets and that her suggestions for names were welcome, Kathy's five-year-old goddaughter, Molly, went off to think and came back shortly with a 3x5 index card with the names Emily, Kate, and Julia printed carefully in red ink. "That's terrific, Molly," Kathy said, "but what if they are boys?" Molly looked momentarily shocked and betrayed, but returned again later with three more names printed on the card: Justin, Tom, and Scott. We actually liked all three of those and Justin Thomas now owes partial thanks to Molly for his name. I cannot recall as precisely when Andrew and Kevin became candidate names for the other two.
The boys were three years old before I first heard one high school friend of Kathy's explaining to another how cool she thought it was that Kathy had named one of her sons after a high school boyfriend. Can you imagine? It would take real chutzpah to name a child after one's ex. I sometimes wonder how many others still believe this fiction. (Knowing as I do that I had been the one to suggest the name and having heard Kathy's own response to the rumor, I'm not concerned. "But what if you're wrong?" you ask, rudely. Big deal. I admire the man.)
The anticlimactic truth is that we did what many couples do. We sat up at night feeling the babies jockeying for position in the womb and discussed potential names. We made lists of possibilities. We consulted baby naming books. But in the end, we navigated purely by instinct and chose names that just sounded agreeable to both of us.
The middle names were almost easier. We wanted to attach a degree of family legacy to them so we chose unused names that would honor our two oldest brothers, Thomas and Michael; and with some irony, Patrick signified both Kathy's Irish heritage and my Portuguese father who was born on St. Patrick's Day (and may or may not have once had the middle name, Patrick). I paired the middle names with candidates for the first until I was satisfied, and showed them to Kathy. Happily, she concurred.
End of story.
Except...
One can now wonder, How well did we really do? Did we give the boys names that would honor them, that were not absurdly trendy or commonplace? Did we burden them with names better suited for a character in a Jonathan Lethem novel? How will their names sound thirty, fifty, seventy years from now?
The best article I've read on the topic of baby names is called, "Where Have All the Lisas Gone?" by Peggy Orenstein, appearing in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 essay collection.
In trying to select a name that is not going to become the next trendy name, she sets out to determine what really influences the popularity of various baby names. Along the way she discovers the official Popular Baby Names web site hosted by the Social Security Administration. It's a site that "ranks the 1,000 most common boys' and girls' names since 1900. You can also look up a specific name and track its status over time," an activity that Orenstein warns and I echo, "is an Internet addict's sinkhole." Sure enough, I downloaded the data, organized it into a spreadsheet, and began charting and graphing the progress of my siblings' and children's names.
Andrew seems pretty safe: his name has remained in the top 100 boys' names for an entire century, hovering in the top 10 for the last 14 years. He may resent growing up and working alongside so many other Andrews, but he is unlikely to one day find himself burdened with a middle-aged name, like girls named Barbara, Nancy, Karen, Susan, and yes, Peggy. "Those sound like the names of middle-aged women because—guess what?—they are," writes Orenstein.
The name Kevin, on the other hand, surprised me. It didn't even make an appearance in the top 1,000 male names until it placed 830 in the 1920's. How is that possible? In the 1900's Rudolph ranked 129th. There was also Hyman (265), Barney (269), Solomon and Moses in the top 300, Aloysius for goddsakes (no offense) at 381, Hoyt (595) and Casper (608), but the name Kevin couldn't even break into the top 1,000? Fortunately, it took off like a bullet once it made the chart, and has remained in the top 30 or so for nearly 50 years. Kevin, also, should age without fear of becoming the Chauncey of his generation.
Then there is Justin. My poor little guy has not one, not two, but three "Justin H's" as classmates. No wonder the name already shows evidence of having peaked at 9. Worse yet, it only really began to rise in popularity in the 70's. Thanks a lot, Molly (102). If he weren't such a funning pool ("Hey, I'm Justin Time!"), I'd fear he might one day begrudge us his trendy name, as one day he still might.
Luckily for me, my naming days are over—blessedly before I found the SSA's Popular Baby Name web sinkhole. But for those of you still naming babies, whether you're considering Roses (358), Moses (503) or Beauses (423); Dylans (19) or Villains (as if); Destiny (37) or Chance (246), you'll get thoroughly dazed and confused on this site.
Good luck.
Right from the outset I expected rejections from publishers when I submitted my manuscript for the picture book, The Search for Plupreme. Two more familiar SASE's arrived yesterday.
From Cartwheel Books, I received the following form letter:
Dear Author,Even less personal was this 4" x 6" Authorgram from Boyds Mills Press:
A sincere thanks for allowing us to consider your manuscript. We are sorry to write that we do not see a place for it on the Cartwheel list, but as each publishing list has its own needs, we encourage you to submit your manuscript elsewhere.
We apologize for the impersonal nature of this reply, but we are hoping that this form letter will enable us to respond to authors in a timely fashion.
We wish you the best of luck in placing your manuscript.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Cartwheel Books
Many thanks for your submission.These rejection notices, while expected, are hardly instructive. I originally hoped that recording them here might be helpful for others with similar aspirations. Instead, they have become redundant and illustrative of what I said all along, that it is an against-all-odds proposition to break into the children's literature market as an unknown. (Notice I don't entertain for a moment the notion that my manuscript is flawed or undeserving. I hope I get credit for that much, at least.)
Unfortunately, this one didn't work for us.
We are returning your manuscript because
_X_ It's not suited to our present needs.
___ Its language or concept is too mature for
our audience.
___ We seldom buy rhyming picture books.
___ It needs more character/plot development.
___ We have a very limited nonfiction line.
Sincerely,
The Editors
What do the following names have in common?
We were fortunate enough to find the means to take the boys on their first trip to Disneyland last week. We decided to make the seven hour drive and chose to combine the adventure with a visit to their cousins in southern California.
The big surprise was the reaction by Val and three other former nannies, now all approximately 23-24 years old. They couldn't imagine missing out on the boys' first trip to Disneyland, so they pooled their resources and five girls planned a road trip of their own to coincide with ours and to join us at the park for one day to experience it with the boys. Of course, their evening plans were far wilder than ours and details of their 3 a.m. exploits would undoubtedly make far more interesting reading.
Nevertheless, we had a terrific time and it was fun to witness both the boys' delighted reactions to Disneyland and the girls' eagerness to make sure no thrill was overlooked. I observed also that the boys had no problem pairing off with a partner for each ride. I'm not sure what to make of that, but I'm sure it's preparing them for some socialization experience I'd rather not contemplate.
There's no easy way to summarize such an eventful trip, but I can share a few lessons learned along the way, giving a sense of the adventure in the process:
Justin's ongoing amusement with all things punderful has extended to the visual. We were driving past the car wash today when he announced from the back seat, "Warning: Pigeon Alert." It has been a running gag with the boys that the pigeons sit atop the street lights outside the car wash waiting deliberately to use pristine vehicles for target practice. But today, as Justin pointed out, they were not only on the light posts, they had gathered on one roof, that of a medical center. Several dozen pigeons perched between two tumbling figures bookending the words, "Active Life."
When I read that phrase to Justin, he burst into a fit of contagious giggles, his scrunched-up eyes filling with tears. "Are you kidding me?" he asked in apparent disbelief at the oxymoronic unlikelihood of the scene. "Why would pigeons that just like to sit around and sleep and poop sit on a building that says, 'Active Life?' "
He continued to giggle in delight, eager to share this absurdity with his mother, while I pondered the amazing little guy who daily blesses me with his sense of humor.
I believe Susan Orlean and I would get along fabulously. We would while away the hours talking about an endless array of topics: New England eccentricities, monomaniacal collectors, underwear models, blogging compulsives, you name it. In fact, Susan, if you're reading this, I encourage you to give me a call the next time you're in town on a book tour.
(It's a damned shame I missed her on Oct. 7; she was promoting her new book, My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere, at Kepler's, my favorite local bookstore.)
Who else but Susan Orlean could get me to read an entire book on white orchids (The Orchid Thief)? Really, it not only isn't the type of book I'd ordinarily read, it isn't even the type of book I'd generally pick up. But I found it sitting on an acquaintance's coffee table a couple of years ago, scanned it, and became intrigued. So I went out, bought it, and found it fascinating and engrossing.
In the person of John Laroche, Susan found the embodiment of obsession, a man whose passions become all-consuming, until they one day disappear as suddenly as they began. As a ten-year-old boy, Laroche obsessively collected turtles, determined to collect one of every species. "Then, out of the blue, he fell out of love with turtles and fell madly in love with Ice Age fossils. He collected them, sold them, declared that he lived for them, then abandoned them for something else." So it went with lapidary (hey, I missed that one), old mirrors, orchids, and tropical fish:
At its peak, he had more than sixty fish tanks in his house and went skin-diving regularly to collect fish. Then the end came. He didn't gradually lose interest: he renounced fish and vowed he would never again collect them and, for that matter, he would never set foot in the ocean again. That was seventeen years ago. He has lived his whole life only a couple of feet west of the Atlantic, but he has not dipped a toe in it since then.Those of you who haven't read the book may have seen Charlie Kaufman's movie adaptation starring Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper, called—what else?—Adaptation. But don't let the movie deter you from reading the book. Charlie went off on a drug-addled tangent of one sort or another. The movie resembles the book not at all (but Susan loved it, so you can see she has a terrific sense of humor, one more reason we'd get along).
—"The Orchid Thief," Susan Orlean (1998)
As soon as the 2003 World Taxidermy Championships opened, the heads came rolling in the door.Susan Orlean is consistently funny, observant, and unconventional. And whatever catches her interest, she observes with clarity and discusses with wry intelligence and infectious enthusiasm.
—"Lifelike," The New Yorker (2003)
If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me... We wouldn't have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home... We would hang out a lot with Colin's dad. For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.Surprising as it may seem for Susan to envision her marriage to her ten-year-old subject, she takes an even greater leap of imagination in an article about a championship show dog:
—"The American Man, Age Ten," Esquire (1992)
If I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff Truesdale.By the time you finish the essay, you may or may not be in love with Biff too.
—"Show Dog," The New Yorker (1995)
How much rejection can one man take?
Actually, when I set out to document my pursuit of a publisher for The Search for Plupreme, I expected it was a Sisyphean task without the benefit of an agent. But I thought it might still be instructive to record and post the rejections as they accumulated, sharing the sense of anonymity one feels and offering any lessons worth sharing along the way. (Yes, and privately maintaining a sliver of hope that I might one day get to post a note of encouragement, if not an actual acceptance letter.)
Yesterday, I learned that Kathy had intercepted one of the rejection letters that had arrived the same day I'd learned I had been turned down for a job by a company I was enthusiastic about. A charitable gesture, to be sure, but unnecessary as it turns out, as this particular rejection was from a publisher that declines to read unsolicited manuscripts. (Hey, at only 750 words, I'd figured it was worth a try.)
So here is the response from Candlewick:
Dear Author:Sounds like it was written by attorneys, doesn't it?
Thank you for submitting your work to Candlewick Press. Sadly, we must return the material unread, per our stated submissions policy of accepting only agented or solicited material. Please note that we have increased our attendance at writer's conferences and SCBWI meetings to mitigate the effects of this policy and to maintain a strong level of involvement with the writing community.
We thank you for your interest in Candlewick Press, and offer our best wishes for finding the right home for your work.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Candlewick Press
Dear John,"Cute???"
Many thanks for sending me the manuscript for "The Search for Plupreme." Please pardon my delay in responding.
Your story is cute. However, I am not inclined to pursue this project at this time. I am returning your manuscript herewith.
With best wishes,
Andrea D. Pinkney