Book Clubs Get Fiery

Just did a ladies book club for Rocket Man and I expected it to be the normal give and take of any book club with questions about the writing process and themes. I don't know if it was the wine or what but these ladies came at me with both barrels. Why did I write a book about someone losing their home?  A lot of people keep their homes and don't shortsale them away they pointed out. True. True. It's fiction. But your character just keeps doing all the wrong things! He is so immature!

Now you may think fiction gives you a sort of bye on the I made it all up front. It doesn't. These ladies saw the main character ( a man hanging on the edge of a cliff financially, morally, losing his home, marriage_ as myself and they asked me if I was getting a divorce, if I really hated my father, if I was losing my house. I told them that I see things going on write about it and that I saw the American Dream in trouble and that was my theme. Huh!

Which brings the whole thing of suspension of disbelief. Rocket Man is about what is happening right now to people in their homes and so there is a natural inclination to say that is me! But in fact it is fiction but I think reality television has blurred the world in terms of what we think is true. The ladies at the book club never for a second believed I had made up this story of woe. "It is just too much like what is going on," one lady told me, pointing out that real fiction takes places in different times and different places. The novel of social commentary really didn't compute with her.

Anyway, it was a great time. But man, those book clubs can get rough!

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

I Think It's Going to Be A Long Long Time...

I don't know if anyone cares about housing anymore but it is the problem. Middle class people have no value in their biggest asset and they can't do anything about it. They can't refinance or buy a house or sell a house and they can't get an equity loan. In Rocket Man I put forth the idea our best days our behind us because we were sold a bill of goods. We really didn't want all of this, we just wanted the middle class childhood that slipped through our fingers like the contentment that eludes us now.

And you really have to wonder when it will come back. Nobody even talks about housing anymore. It just is. But the reason there is no demand is there is no backbone to the middle class anymore. There is no nest egg. It all vanished in the crash. And now you have people who don't want to spend a nickel and worse they are losing their home or walking from their home or thinking of walking. And no one in either party even talks about the problem anymore.

As Dale Hammer says in Rocket Man. "This is what I always imagined my childhood should be, a car parked by a modest home on a snow covered street with everyone safe and warm in middle class slumber. I realize now that is what eluded us in our drive to have it all....our contentment, our happiness."  And the way things are going I think it's going to be a long long time until we see that again.

Rocket Man Paperback or Download

 

Not Enough Pie to Go Around

You have to wonder if there is simply just not enough pie to go around. All our worldwide convolutions seem to have a common threat and it is that the promises made in the last century cannot be kept in this century. There is simply not enough resources, money, land, water to deliver on the promises made. Social Darwinism is rearing it's ugly head and without a war the general message seems to be that some of us will make it and a lot of us wont. Such is the world we  now live in.

It would seem the optimism that started with the Wright Brothers in Kitty Hawk and dampened by the sinking of the Titanic then buoyed with our triumph over evil in two World Wars then reinforced with the American Centuries Gottermerung of Capitalism, has ended not with a bang but a whimper. We promised the world during those high flying years and the world cannot understand why we wont deliver. From the Arabs to those protectected by our vast Social Safety Nets, we cannot pay on the checks our higher nature is writing.

We have always believed that everyone could have a shot at the American Dream. But of course we never talked about all the people who didn't get it. They mostly died or starved or just went silently into the American night. But now we are really faced with the reality that most people will not find this mythical Leave it To Beaver land of milk, two cars, and a home. We simply don't have the cash and it seems nobody else does either.

Nothing new under the sun. We staved off the laws of survival of the fittest for maybe fifty or sixty years while we ruled the world, but the sun has set and we now no longer have the dineros to help those who cannot help themselves. Like those poor souls who drowned in the icy Atlantic with lifeboats nearby, it is truly every man, woman, and child for himself. At least with the Titanic, woman and children were spared. First class that is.

Rocket Man Kindle Downlaod

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

"Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." - James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning

The funniest serious novel since Richard Russo’s Straight Man, rich with the epic levity of John Irving and salted with the perversion of Updike." - Chicago Sun Time




Writer in Residence for the Ernest Hemingway Foundation William Hazelgrove's third novel is "a charming tale of fatherhood, family, and the American Dream." (Midwest Book Review).

The New Guy is going to have to Punch Back

When I moved from Baltimore to Chicago I was the new guy. I had a weird accent and I dressed weird and I had bad hair. And I had no friends. We had moved to a suburb of low tolerance for weird. We had moved into a town of Midwestern guys who wore checkered shirts and blue jeans and boots. I dressed like a refugee from the seventies and grew my hair to Afro length. A clash of cultures. My parents were Kennedy liberals and we had moved into a red enclave of button down Yankees. But I was a kid, what did I care?

So I walked into the lunchroom past a group of football players when one of them calls out. "Now there goes a real faggot." I stopped, dropped my lunch, and saw the blond haired blue eyed Captain of the football team. I didn't know he was the Captain, but I also knew from Baltimore days that you had one chance to set your line. So I threw my lunch on the ground and walked up and pinned "Randy" against the wall, not knowing I had just grabbed the most popular guy in the senior class. "Who are you calling a faggot?" I screamed.

Randy turned red and struggled against my grip. Hey...Hey! He finally got free with his face burning and told me to get my lunch, but his homeboys were in shock. Somebody had pinned the Captain against the wall. This is what the President has to do now when he gets back.  He has to pin anybody who tries to bully, extort, or blackmail him again against the wall. He has to set a line for these guys. A funny thing is once you take down the leader, then all the other guys slink away. But he has to do it now.

A week later I saw Randy in an empty hallway. I had not seen him since the lunchroom. We walked past each other and then he nodded to me. I nodded back.

Rocket Man Has Been Released

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Kindle Download of Rocket Man

The funniest serious novel since Richard Russo’s Straight Man, rich with the epic levity of John Irving and salted with the perversion of Updike." - Chicago Sun Time

"Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." - James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning

Publishing in the Age of the Great Yawn

The Internet is empowerment. This is what we always hear. It gives everyone a chance to be seen, heard from, opinion, publish, record, you name it and you an do it. We can go and launch podcasts, release press releases, twitter into our neighbors face. In Walt Whitman's words: "I will not be denied!" So this is a great thing...yes? Well it is here so it doesn't matter if it is a great name or not. But if you have sent out a resume, published a book, distributed your song, shot out your press release, blogged until your fingers fall off, then chances are you have experienced the great democracy of the Internets colossal yawn. Or to put it in a more direct way: nothing comes back.

This is a strange sided effect of our collective empowerment. Let's take publishing. Once upon a time there was a thing called a publishing industry and if you wanted to publish a book then you had to deal with this beast. Chances are some of you have caught the supreme back hand of that industry in a few form letters. You had a choice, make your work better or give up any idea of publishing. Even then of course there was no guarantee, but if you did manage to get through and your book published then you were let into an exclusive club. Your book may not become a bestseller but you were a published author and this brought a certain result you could count on--a book in a store, maybe one, books in libraries, maybe a few, and respect of your peers.

Let's take pubishing now. You want to publish a book, you do it. In fact you can do it in a week. Boom. Game over. You are a published author. Might get some reviews, sell a few, maybe your book will get bought by New York. The problem is not that you have sidestepped the old publishing industry its just that everyone in the new industry is publishing a book. So what does that mean? Think of a highway with a thousand hot dog stands. You all have a product but only so many people can eat hot dogs. It is at this point you experience the supreme indifference of the Internet. The great cyber void just doesn't give a damn.

Self publishing is honorable. Authors from Hemingway to Faulkner have done it, but rarely was the result so instantaneous or cheap. This kept a lot of people who did not have the passion for the word from attempting this very expensive and arduous endeavor. Indifference on this scale is something few of us have had to contemplate. We usually always had someone to register our work, our individuality. But with everyone wired into the same circle there is just not enough individuality to go around. So people don't respond. You send out a hundred resumes, a hundred books, a hundred CD's and nothing comes back. That's because we are talking numbers in the hundreds of thousands floating around out there. You are one of the many. And what is worse you can be dismissed with a keystroke.

While others had to deal with the supreme indifference of a country scattered and barely wired, we have to deal with cacophony of voices calling from every corner for our notice. And we miss their calls, because we are busy calling out too. Like ships in the night, we end up missing our own salvation.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man due out in the fall.
www.billhazelgrove.com

Writing "literary" fiction and trying to sell

No one starts out trying to write "literary" fiction. I just started out writing and my early novels were lumped into "literary". Literary quickly becomes a code word for books that don't sell. But why you are writing has nothing to do with selling books. Then you get published by a large publisher (Bantam in my case) and get a little money and selling books becomes very important. You always want to sell your books because it is getting out there your view or art for want of a better word. When I was struggling to get published in Chicago in very much the survival mode I just thought about getting published. Period. You just wanted to be heard.

Then you do get published and it turns very quickly into "do anything to sell." This is not why I started writing in the first place, but you are quickly lumped in with every person cashing in on celebrity and star power with a book. Obviously you are clearly outgunned in an arena you never had any business in in the first place. But you continue to publish and do all the things to push your book. In the age of the Internet it is particularly brutal. Writing on the Internet is one way authors promote their books. I decided to write to sound out different ideas and I happen to like the form. But there is a pressure all authors must deal with.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's were not out of print at the time of his death. This is usually why people cannot buy a book, but it was actually worse. Scribner had books they could put in bookstores, there was simply no demand. And if you read the reviews at the time, quite a few people slammed The Great Gatsby. Again literary fiction, even great literary fiction has to struggle to make it's way. As a writer of fiction in the year 2010, I am happy to be read at all. If only by the few. But if I stumbled into a bestseller, a very big if, I would still have to sit down in front of the computer and wrestle with the same old demons. I think that's what being a writer is all about.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man due out in the fall.
http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Man-William-Elliott-Hazelgrove/dp/0982139241/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

President Obama should go to Foreclosure Court

You do get the feeling the President just doesn't get it. There is a Herbert Hoover quality to his pronouncements that the economy should be doing better with the stimulus packages his administration has passed and that many jobs have been created and people really are doing better. The President should go sit in foreclosure court. That might just jump start his awareness.

In foreclosure court you sit in the back and wait while the attorneys for the banks march up to the judge. The attorneys sit on the other side of the low wainscoted divider in high backed leather chairs. They are there for the banks. The people getting foreclosed sit in wooden benches next to each other like criminals waiting trial. There is no talking in court. Many of the defendants need a interpreter who gets up and speaks loudly in Spanish so everyone in the court will hear. On this particular day the judge makes the announcement that there will be no more interpreters after today because of cutbacks.

So then you wait and watch. One by one people go up before the judge and plead for time. That is the best you can do. The banks lawyers have foreclosure orders in hand and they want to foreclose...now! The judge gives some people twenty eight days, but others he grants the order of foreclosure. The people shuffled out glumly knowing they have to leave their home or the sheriff will evict them.

The President doesn't seem to understand this reality. The people in the courtroom are from all walks of life. Some people come as husband and wife, many times only one spouse shows up to get the bad news. Foreclosure court never ends. The court fills up as fast as the judge gavels the cases along. The lawyers troop in and out. The banks have at least five attorneys present. It is always the bank versus the individual. It is an assembly line in reverse. This is not production, but destruction. Destruction of an American Dream gone horribly wrong.

So I think President Obama should stop in just for a little while. You sit there for an hour and you get it. Sometimes there is a tearful woman and everyone feels really bad for a moment. Everyone remembers these are peoples homes and not just judgements of default on loans. The lawyers pause, the cops look away. The judge waits for the woman to compose herself, then everything gets rolling again. The sad assembly line of our bleeding nation.

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in September. The story of a man trying to hold onto his home. http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Repackaging of Culture

I watched the movie ET with my son the other day. My thought was, well this will be interesting as I saw the movie twenty years ago. It really wasn't. I think the term classic has come to mean anything that is at least ten years old. When we watch Casa Blanca or Citizen Kane or even Gone With The Wind, there is an epic quality about the story that transcends time. But today we have conveniently done away with any sense of the epic and given over to, can we make money on this again? Certainly the most hilarious version of this repackaging is our rock bands. We now have fifty, sixty year old men jumping around the stage in spandex and singing anthems that are what, twenty, thirty, forty years old. They are termed classic rock bands. The term classic used to mean something would last, would stand the test of time when other ideas, fads, groups had been long forgotten but our current culture defines classic as simply "can we get these old guys back on stage and can we make some money?" One would hope that the rockers might rebel and say, now wait a minute, I'm not sure about this, but of course they like everyone else need the cash. I recall seeing an old interview with the woman who wrote the novel, Peyton Place. The interviewer asked her, do you think your novel will be read fifty years from now? The woman replied, "Oh God no." She knew the difference between literature and entertainment. Ask that same question of someone in the rock band Stix or Kiss or Fleetwood Mac. The reply would surely be, of course they will be listening to us. Again, one merely has to age and then be brought back to be given the definition of a classic. Well, back to ET. So I watched the movie. There were the usual Spielberg tricks. Glowing lights and seventies families in flux with the overwhelmed Mom and precocious children. There was ET. There were the mysterious bad guys. All this was pervaded with a Capra quality that while somewhat refreshing when it came out was simply warmed over milk twenty years later. But here was the thing. The story was simply not that good. The movie was a B movie at best. That is what came to the front twenty years later. It was a classic I suppose, but only in that it was classically mediocre.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com

A Full Belly

Did you see the Academy awards last night? I mean, even Oscar seems off in these strange times. Forget that a lot of people took a pass or so they say. I personally didn't see anyone missing, but there was a palpable feeling of the King and Queen not being present. Don't ask me who the King and Queen are, but maybe it was the third Jack Black interview or the Morton Downey nomination for appearing in black face. Hemingway had an old phrase, "Praise to the Face is open Disgrace." Did you see the new way of presenting the awards? They have the last five guys or gals who won come out and present the award. The part that made you want to sink down into your chair or couch was when the actors and actresses went on a love fest of adoration for the nominee. We had to watch Meryl Streep smile for a good five minutes while praise was lavished. Or Kate Winslet who smiled graciously when the actress forgot her lines and began to sound like Sara Palin on a bad night. Who came up with that one? Well, movies are down. No one goes anymore and what better way to sing the praises then dig up the stars and have them gush to another stars face. It was a tad embarrassing for all involved. I don't know. Maybe it was the Hyundai commercials that promised you that if you lost your job they would take the car back no questions asked. I have to say I haven't' heard GM offer me that on my gas guzzler. Or the other commercials that spoke of these uncertain times. Or maybe it was the high hat routine that smacked of Ginger and Fred during the Depression. Suddenly glitz and movie stars seemed irrelevant. Even Sean Penn's call to arms against proposition thirteen seemed strangely marginalized by the times. The novelist EM. Forester once said, "art is for a man with a full belly." Maybe that's what it is now. Maybe there are just too many people who are in distress to worry about movie stars right now.

The Great Quiet of Hemingway's Attic

These days, there is Marcelline's old steamer trunk, a wine bottle from Spain, a cello, two wrought-iron gas stanchions from the late 19th century and National Geographics from 1912, 1915, and 1918 complete with scribbling on the pages from Ernest's father, or perhaps from Ernest himself. There are two small lithographs from 1945 advertising bullfights in Spanish, parts of a Victorian bed and a crib, as well as boxes and boxes of bronze heads that look curiously like the great writer, marked "Hemingway Busts." There are doors propped up that are from the days when a young Ernest Hemingway burst through a screen door on a hot summer day in Oak Park. There's also the normal bric-a-brac of any attic at any time: a wrapped Christmas tree, ornaments, and sheets spread over nondescript boxes. But that is all that remains of the man and his era. The big adventure of the 20th century is drawing to a close and all those larger-than-life writers are making their exit along with it. I came up here to find the ghost of a man who did not grow up on television, a man for whom commerce was a necessary stream, not the flood we find ourselves in now.
I write on Marcelline's stremer trunk. She must have opened it many times while crossing the wide dark seas in the last adventure of our time. Marcelline would open her trunk and sit down to write in a room of wood paneling while the ocean liner crashed throught the stormy night. She may have felt the roll of the seas, and her one lamp was small in the baseless night as a yellow beacon of humanity against the black sea. There was no jet screaming overhead, no disembodied voice instructing her from afar. She was simply writing letters to her brother in Africa, Spain, Paris, and Key West. And while she sat with only the sounds of her pen scratching on paper and the distant howl of the ocean, she possessed what frustratingly eludes us now--the great quiet of the moment.
The trunk no longer makes voyages across seas to an old world. That world has come to rest here among the dusty rafters and the pattering of squirrels across the roof. My mind is not as hers. Mine is cluttered, over instructed, overfed. Flickering ghostly images crowd out the single moment, and at times there seem a hundred different voices competing for my attention.
I realize now, that for all our progress, our technology, we still can't buy passage on that liner crossing the stormy seas of our dying tranquility.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

http://pantonnepress.com/chapter1.pdf

The Bankers and the Peanut Man

Did you see the bankers and the peanut man in front of the Senate? What is wrong here. First you have the bankers trying to explain that bonuses and retention awards come out of their profits and not the bailout money. Um...hello...without the bailout money there is NO BANK. So...where is that money coming from again. It's coming from our profits. Let's see, the big seven banks are insolvent, so, wait a minute, oh I know, you must mean the profits on the TARP money. Yes. Oh. You mean the TARP money you used to buy other banks. Yes. I see. Well, that's very clear. And when asked why they couldn't' lend any of the money the banks all explained very slowly how they have to keep a certain amount of money in the bank even though it's not their money it's TARP money given to lend but they can't do that. But they can buy a two hundred thousand dollar ad in The New York Times explaining why they have to still give their employees trips and bonuses. Fine. Makes perfect sense. Then the peanut man (you know the guy who killed everyone with peanut butter) got up there. He took the fifth. He decided he didn't' want to say a word after he knowingly shipped all that tainted peanut butter. The congressman asked him if he wanted to eat some of his own peanut butter. He took the fifth.

My question is, what kind of a society would produce men like this? So here is the lesson. Go start a bank and lose all your investors money and then go to the government to get more to pay yourself. (Total compensation for the bank presidents this year was over 100 million) Then go ship a bunch of salmonella tainted peanut butter and don't say a word. Oh, and go have sixteen babies and become a celebrity. So...I ask again, what kind of society produces people like this? Oh yeah, note to self, no more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

http://www.youtube.com/user/bhazelgrove

Revolutionary Road--A Review

I just finished Revolutionary Road. What a great book on the suburban culture of America. Frank and April are the quintessential suburbanites who have it all but have nothing. We pick up on them as they return from a play and get into a horrible fight. The frustration is amazing in how vicious it comes and the way Richard Yates funnels the stress of suburban living. This novel takes place in the fifties but it certainly could be today. April and Frank decide they want to go to Europe and escape the smothering sameness of their suburban existence. As they plan their getaway Frank has numerous affairs and is promoted at his company. The brakes are put on their plan when April becomes pregnant. Desperately unhappy she has an affair and they fight over the abortion that April wants to have. An ancillary character that visits them from a mental institution belies the question of who is really insane. The ending is right on, but what Yates does masterfully with this novel is he captures the soul deadening quality of suburban living in the 1950's. The frustration and desire of Frank and April of course are our own and while our resolution may not be as violent, Yates gives us a final image of a man turning down his hearing aid so he cannot hear his wife. He needs to say no more.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

The Coal

The problem with the stimulus bill is there is nothing in there for coal. Steam engines need coal. Big sleek ships and trains and even cars once upon a time ran on steam. You didn't really care about the men in the bowels of the ship shoveling all that coal into the boilers because you couldn't see them. You were far above eating your dinner or enjoying a cigar in the bar or lounging topside while the men sweated down below. So when the ship pulled into dock they loaded it up with food, champagne, caviar, fruit, cigars, wine, all the necessities for life and then tons and tons of coal. Because the ship's captain and everyone else knew that without coal the rest of the food, booze and cigars didn't matter much. Seems like there is one thing missing on the good ship's Obama's manifest for the stimulus plan--COAL. Middle class people are the coal of the economy lest you forget this go into Home Depot or Menards of Best Buy. There are no people. The employees outnumber the customers two to one. There are mountains of inventory and one cannot help wonder who is carrying the cost of all that inventory. So the steam engine has stopped. We know from our oligarchy who has taken all the coal. They are still in Washington and on Wall Street laughing their asses off that the American public bought into Tarp. See the one page article in the New York Times by Wells Fargo explaining why employee junkets are still necessary for the great work their employees do. The masters of the ship are tweaked someone would mess with their cigars and fine champagne. But even as the gilded glide far above us top deck, they too our a little worried that maybe the reluctance to order in coal might bring the good ship Lollipop to a halt. So how do we get our coal bins replenished? Bite the bullet and bypass the banks and make a national bank and start lending. Or...shock..shock...give money directly to the people. Not six hundred dollars, thousands. Prime the pump directly. It is interesting that the great populist nation is quite willing to take thousands of dollars in tax money, but recoils at the thought of giving it back. If income tax was never intended to be a permanent institution, let's make good now and give back some of the money. Nebulous promises of jobs will not replace the directness of giving credit to the middle class. Infrastructure jobs will put people back to work, but how many, how soon, remains to be seen. Our bins have been empty a while now and a bold President needs to take bold steps. Throw out the play book. Don't even look for precedent. Do the bold thing and put coal into the boiler now. The hard fact is you cannot operate a ship without coal, providing only for first class passengers. You really need some fuel.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

The Road Not Taken--First Page of Rocket Man

Hair of the dog.
The vodka is fighting the tomato juice, but it does the trick, and I mitigate the vagaries of selling popcorn at the Kane County Fair with ten screaming Cub Scouts, Bloody Mary firmly in hand, shades firmly affixed. The margaritas from the night before are a headache I’d rather be doing without, but osmosis and a little old-fashioned self medicating has gotten me to the point where I can drive Cub Scouts and be the charming father of two, husband of one. But I have to make a decision. We are constantly presented with rules that we can either choose to follow or break. Does one go through the unmanned toll? Does one pay for the case of water in the bottom of the shopping cart that no one sees? They are small, middle class rules, but rules all the same. My choice is simple. Do I take the time to hang a big looping U-turn and return to the highway for the Dairy Queen I missed … or do I cut into the McDonald’s parking lot and plow across an excavated field of old pipes and earth movers, past the surveyor posts flapping like markers of the road not taken?
These are the choices of our lives now. The big choices are mostly behind us by middle age, and we are reduced to schoolboys trying to whisper when the teacher’s back is turned.

What the hell.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0129-hemingway-attic-novelisjan29,0,6014669.story

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Politics of Obscurity

John Kennedy Toole. How many people have heard of him? Maybe some. Maybe.
He wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. The novel went on to win a Pulitizer. Highly reviewed. A classic. The author. He committed suicide ten years before the book ever saw print. 32. He was just thirty two when in 1968 he decided to cash it in. Written a huge manuscript dog eared and typed and smudged. Sitting down in New Orleans with his mother. Doing nothing. Waiting to be discovered. Eating rejection letters. Waiting to be discovered. Not many people know what thats like. You spend your best moments. Your heart and soul. Give your best years to this mound of paper filling your desk and then you begin funnelling it out to the world at large and it comes back. No one gives a damn.
So you can imagine old John. I personally never knew him but I do know him.Any writer does. You have one horror as a writer. Comes to you at night in your sleep. That you will die in obscurity. That what you have to say will find no voice among your fellow man. You write because you are driven. You write because you have no other way to make sense of your existence.You publish so you will leave footprints. That no one will see your passage is the knife at your throat as the sands flow. Time. It starts to run you down right after you finish your book. How long will it take to get it in print. Will it ever get in print. Will it stay in print.Will the manuscript ever escape the box, the basement, the attic. Immortality. A flag that you have passed.
And so you press on. Send it out. Send it out some more.And then it comes back just as fast. No one wants it. No one gives a damn that the talent you've been given. God palmed to you. Means nothing in the world. Take John. Just written his opus.His raison d etre. Reason for being. And there it sat. He must have known. You always know in some part of you when you have written your gift to the world. Usually it's the first novel. Sometimes the second. But you know. This was the one that I came together for. I know it's good. No one else gives a damn. So you send it out some more. Then again. Then again. Again. No one cares. Worse. No one wants it.
John must have papered his room with rejection letters.He must have decided there was no way to pass that wall. The wall of indifference.The world did not want his testament. He sat in his mothers house with his thousand page manuscript. Typed. Carboned. Smudged. In New Orleans. 1968. Hot. Twilight. Sitting. Obsurirty floating in with the night and then it overwhelmes. Drowns you like some miasma. I'm never going to beat this thing. It will win. Not me. I will be crushed underfoot by indifference. No one cares. The writer unrealized. Just thirty two. And so he ends it. Snuffs out his life. The wall of indifference falling on him.
Ten years later his mother takes his manuscript to an edtior.A genius discovered. Dead genius. Obscure. A pulizter. A classic. John Kennedy Toole. You think he didn't know. Didn't know that in death his novel might have a chance. Or was it just some black horror coming over him. Swirling him up. The horror of the artist damned to obsucurity. To the night.
Maybe he got the last laugh. Maybe.

What's Good For the Goose

Alright, so the banks get a get out of jail free card. And the automakers. And the airlines. And Amtrack. And the retailers (in the works). And whoever else in Corporate America who can find a friend in Washington. So how about the middle class? Radical. You cannot give money to the people...they might riot, tear the clothes off, not spend it...right. Sure, fine, ok, so you don't want to give money to the people. So lets not give money to the people...let's give them amnesty instead. Here's the deal. All the people slipping into foreclosure (up 81percent last month over a million a month) and declaring bankruptcy and not able to pay their bills, medical bills, credit card bills...they will all be knocked out of our economy. Why? Because their credit will be in tatters. FICO scores rule the day and if you declare bankruptcy or are late on a couple of credit card payments, can't pay your mortgage, your phone, electric, gas, then...(unlike the banks and the automakers and everyone else in greed land) you get a ding on on your credit. So, what happens? You get no credit. That's right. Out of the game. Millions and millions of people will not be able to buy a hut in the swamplands of Florida much less a house. They won't be able to buy a washing machine, fridge, car (durable goods you've heard of them) and so guess what, the very people you want to get back in there and start buying won't be able too. We could take the attitude of that is their fault. Fine. Then tell the banks and automakers and retailers and anyone else getting bailout dollars it's their fault too. What's good for the goose... is good for the gander.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com

Titanic and the Economics of Class

Titanic hit an iceberg and sank. When they rescued the fifteen hundred people from the icy Atlantic they found a disproportionate amount of first class people. There were some from second class, further down in the ship, but very few from steerage down in the bowels. It seems the Captain and his crew had concentrated on saving the wealthy over the the middle class and lower class passengers. When a crisis occurs there is a run for the boats and those of privilege usually get in. Recently, there was an interesting quote from a banker in the New York Times. He said they were going to use the bail out money to shore up their accounts and invest in "banks of interest". In other words, the bankers are going to buy other banks with the bail out money and make sure they have enough reserves to weather the storm. They are going to make sure they are in the boats and well away from the ship. The real tragedy of Titanic was the fact that over a thousand people drowned in the frigid waters in range of people sitting in half filled boats. Yet, no one returned to help them. They were afraid, they later said, of being swamped. At the Bankers Association Meeting other bankers reiterated the mantra that they were going to concentrate on opportunities but that they had no real plans to lend the bailout money to consumers. So the American middle class, strangling on a lack of credit and asking for this needed money, will not get it. The boats will not return. When the inquiry into the sinking convened in New York, there were many who cried class warfare. The immigrants in steerage mostly died while the upper crust of the world managed to get into the few lifeboats. The officials of White Star said there was no choosing between classes of passengers, but there were simply not enough boats. The banks are still hemorrhaging. Bank of America just asked for another twenty billion and experts say that still won't be enough. Seems all that speculating in derivatives and mortgage backs was kept off the books. So they will continue to suck up all the bail out money and the middle class will get none of it. The gilded top will sail through for a while but will falter because the coal of any steam engine is the lifeblood and the middle class is the coal of our economy. Even the bankers must know their ship is taking water faster than they can bail now. Like Captain Smith, who asked his ship's architect about Titanics fate with four of her watertight compartments gashed open, the bankers know the words floating up from the depths of our economic distress...she will founder.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Dr. Zhivago

Twenty four below and Dr. Zhivago abandons the city for the ice palace in the country. He and Lara know their time time is limited before the Bolsheviks come for them. I throw another log on the fire and stare out into the moonlit snow. Twenty four below and another million people will lose their homes this month. Zhivago and Lara enter Varekeno and find part of the old summer home where they can stay. Zhivago sees a table where he can write his poetry. He runs his finger through the dust and nods. "Yes this will do." The moon pearls the snow outside my window and the fire flickers as wars rage and banks fail. Lara and Zhivago sleep under animal skins and then he rises and lights his candle. Dr. Zhivago carefully takes out his pen and paper and slowly begins to write. He looks out the window across the Siberian landscape, seeing nothing but snow and ice under a blue moon. Wolves howl and he stares out into the darkness. We see the small candle from outside through the frosted window. The Russian Revolution has decimated the country and people live in fear for their lives. The houses around me are all dark. You don't' see people in this kind of cold, in these times, just homes belching steam. The middle class slumbers on under their increasing strain. Lara rises and touches Zhivago's shoulder as the wolves howl again. She cries out, "Oh...this is a terrible terrible time to be alive Uri..." Soon the Bolsheviks will come and they will be parted forever. Twenty four below and I slip down in front of the keyboard. The wind passes through the window as an icy hand. The wolves howl.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Hemingway's Lost Short Story

You may or my not have heard about Hemingway's lost short story. The son of a friend apparently had been holding onto the story for all these years. Seems Hemingway in 1925 wrote this satire on bull fighting and sent it to this friend. Now it has come back into the limelight and the Hemingway estate does not want it published. It will be sold at Christies for about eighteen thousand. Eighteen thousand dollars for a short story at a time when you couldn't' give away a short story. The form is basically dead. The heyday of the short story was in Hemingway's time when "slicks" like the Saturday Evening Post paid as much as four thousand dollars a story. In todays dollars, probably like twenty thousand, maybe more. Hemingway of course made his mark with the short story. In Our Time was a collection of stories that brought him to the attention of Max Perkins at Scribners. You know the rest of the story. So here we are in 2009 where a short story is discovered and people are willing to pay almost twenty thousand dollars for something the Hemingway estate deems unworthy of Ernest. As a writer I can only envy those days when the written word was held in such high esteem that a short story was like a movie today. Those writers were the celebs of their time, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos. Apparently the story spoofs bull fighting, something Hemingway held in high esteem, but others do not want to see the light of day. It is interesting that the Hemingway short story will get about what it would have in 1925 dollars. I guess some writers really are timeless.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com

Revolutionary Road

Back about four months ago a reviewer said, "Rocket Man reminds me of Revolutionary Road." I thought, well, interesting title. That was it. Another review came in a few weeks later, same comparison. I still did nothing. Then came another. And another. Then I heard about the movie and I finally went to a bookstore. Richard Yates struggled in 1961 to get readers. His book came out and basically dropped from site. Now why is that? Here is a book that pegs suburban living in the 1950's, nails down the monotony, the feeling that we should be doing something more than just going to work and coming home to a house in a suburb among other people doing exactly the same thing. Maybe the reason Richard Yates novel found a hard audience is because people do not like a mirror put in front of them. Now the novel and the movie are deemed brilliant. Seen through the safety of almost fifty years we can safely relate to this suburban couple. I have had people react violently to Rocket Man. Some had defended the suburbs. The Daily Herald just came out and termed the article "Author's new Novel Takes on Suburbs" http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=262957&src=5The assumption that an author is attacking an institution is implicit in the headline. There have been fears from other people that Rocket Man would be alienating, neighbors would stop talking to us, we would be politely shown the door back to the city. In Revolutionary Road, the couple see themselves apart, some would say in the year 2009 they see themselves as the "cultural elite." People who have reviewed the novel have been dismayed with this view and see their eventual comeuppance as just deserts. We are told from day one to not rock the boat and we don't appreciate our art pointing out our foibles, posing the question that there must be a better way. Yates named his novel, Revolutionary Road, thinking that the placidity of the fifties had to give way to something. It did, the sixties. But here we are in 2009 with another novel questioning the way we live in the year 2009...I wonder what the teens will be like?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=262957&src=5

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0615213073/ref=pr_all_summary_cm_cr_acr_txt?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1