Should a Writer Live in New York?

The conventional wisdom is that in the age of the Internet you can live anywhere. No longer do writers have to live in literary centers to be part of the world of publishing and agents and deals and other writers. It helps of course, but it really isn't necessary. Authors live all over the place and even the ones who live in New York have houses in other places. The successful ones that is.

Of course there is a nagging little caveat to all of this. Take Chad Harbachs novel The Art of Fielding. I read the Vanity Fair piece written by his buddy who started the literary magazine N1. He basically describes the process in which Harbachs novel was discovered by Michael Pietch. There is the usual rejected by many component and Harbach slaved away for ten years and people were beginning to worry. But then his friend from the lit magazine who had a book published, put the manuscript in front of the right agent and then the right publisher. Harbach was discovered.

And if you go down the literary heavyweight list of Jonathan Franzen type big novels it does seem a lot of these authors live in New York. Lets face it networking is part of life and being where publishing is centered (at least for now) is probably a good thing. People do business with people they know and if you are bouncing around New York you might bump into agents and publishers and authors who could help you. To say nothing of the wealth of material living in a large city like New York generates.

I...like a lot of writers, thought about moving to the Big Apple. Living in Chicago did seem at times like a second city, but I doubted my ability to find time to write in NY. Chicago just seemed friendlier. And sometimes I think I should have gone. You never know what can happen just by moving to a bigger pond. Probably this question has no answer except that you go where you can survive and write.

Still, living in New York as a writer.....city of dreams, right?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Times Editorial Suggests Huck go to College

An Editorial in the New York Times written  by a  novelist suggests that Huckleberry Finn with it's Nword pedagogy hit the road and go to college. Her rational is one that African American students could not decipher the onslaught of NWord idioms and that the racism of the nineteenth century to the IPhone hip hop generation just simply would not compute nor should it. African American students should wait until they get older and by the time they are in college they will be able to decipher literary intent from out and out racism or at least they would understand verisimilitude and all it's connotations. This is idiocy.

Surprising to hear a writer sign on to this kind of have it your way literature. I would like my Huck Finn sans Nword and hold the mayo and any other characters that smack of prejudice. I hope her novels are as ubiquitous in their appeal as cable television where there is a channel for every viewer. It would seem the essence of literature must again bow to the fatuous demands of Twain scholars and novelists who write politically correct essays for the Times. What is more PC than saying yes this is offensive, lets hold off until the laboratory of college where the adults can dissect this ante-bellum sickness.

This is exactly the type of thinking that got the scholar revved up enough to think that because we run around with smart phones and IPADs that we can just delete the offensive material from literature and serve it up in the same way we download a tune for ninety nine cents. The novelist brings up the fact that African Americans hearing the same NWord spoken in their music will not be offended as much by the silent printed word of Mr. Twain. That it is quite fine for their contemporaries to sing the Nword, rap it, because this has been sanctioned, but the repetitive hurtful rants of Huckleberry Finn is just really a burlesque show of racist minstrels and white people whooping it up. Rubbish.

To the novelist who wrote this editorial, I would simply say this. Literature stands. Period. If thy book offends thee pluck it out does not apply to art. You should know this. If a high school decides not to teach Huckleberry Finn then so be it, but that is a disservice to the student. Literature is not about our time. It is not about our twenty first sensibility. It is about saying what cannot be said otherwise. Literature defines things we cannot and brings it down to us through the ages. It is an intellectual exercise that informs the same way a painting or watching a great ballet performance or music does. There is something there we cannot lay our finger on, yet it speaks to us.

To say that African American High school Students cannot handle Huckleberry Finn or until college is demeaning to them. Worse, it cheats the students from the literary experience of reading the first modern American novel. Literature should not be held hostage to the winds of contemporary taste.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off in February

A Book By a Dog

Well I just read The Art of Racing in the Rain. There are two things I would point to after reading this book with a dog narrator: one, there is value to the kindle, and two, always read the first few pages. Alright. The whole Kindle revolution brings up the same advantages of the IPOD. You don't have to buy the whole CD. Or you don't have plunk down eighteen dollars to read a book by a dog. It is not that The Art of Racing in the Rain was bad, it is just that by choosing to have the dog narrate we are limited to what he can interpret. He is a dog after all.

And saying that you have to wonder what the author was after. Well, why not have the dog narrate the book? It is new. It is different. And the dog was very Zen. He thought of the afterlife and then spoke to us from the afterlife and then he came back as a...well, I won't tell you. Needless to say the authors work was cut out for him when he made this decision. I will tell it form the perspective of a dog...now how can I get that dog into all the scenes?

Well  he doesn't. When I wrote Tobacco Sticks I used a thirteen year old I had to get in all the scenes. In courtroom scenes I became creative and used other people, newspaper articles, literally having my narrator peeking in keyholes. The problem with any first person narration is that you are stuck in the person (or the dog in this case) head and everything has to filter through the canine brain before it reaches ours. Now this dog got a lot of his information from the television, from his master, from hearing, from a Zen knowledge of the Universe and racing (auto racing).

There were a few scenes where the dog just claimed knowledge and we went with it. Fine. A literary first person can do this. Prior knowledge. Well, prior dog knowledge. Of course the rubber meets the road when the dog has to interpret sex scenes. Our dog did this by well, comparing human sex to dog sex with some knowledge of anatomy and then again, we just went with it. There were courtroom scenes as well our canine friend was able to give us the nuts and bolts declaring more than once humans just think dogs don't have a clue, but they do.

By the books end our dog narrator moved on to the great dog pound in the sky. I must admit after finishing the book I didn't look at my golden retriever the same. I stared into his brown eyes and said to him: do you really know what is going on? To which he stared back and essentially said: Woof! Now like the dog narrator he might be hiding knowledge from the oblivious human. I will say that I kicked him out of the bedroom.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Citizen Kane in our Time

Black and white spooling along in the darkness and my son shrugs when I tell him this is one of the great movies of all time. Sure it is. But you watch it and you see why. Wells was onto something with his spoof of the great media mogul William Randolph Hearst. Especially in our media age of conglomeration where Fox fronts for Murdock's agenda and those that cross him cross at their peril. Presidents beware, Hearst is alive and well. But Orson Wells is the boy genius who put it altogether.

That's what comes across when you watch the movie. Wells. He was laughing his way through having a studio give him the money and the means to make his movie. Having one hell of a time as he took over the Enquirer and made a name for himself and played Hearst through his demise. And of course Wells was playing with fire and paid the price. He found himself black listed after the movie. His later projects never had the lustre nor the backing. The Magnificent Ambersons was finished by the studio.

But genius shines through. And Wells original vision is there at a time when movie making was pretty dull. Along comes this man who breaks just about every rule with angle shots, lighting, montages, the whole structure thrown on its head . But Orson Wells is the star of Citizen Kane even in his bald mask getting wheeled around his estate as a broken down old Kane. And in that moment he is Kane. He had made his opus and would pay the same high price as his character: isolation, broken health, loneliness. Art and life imitating each other over and over again. 

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Mozart was broke...another struggling artist

Mozart was deeply in debt at the time of his death and spent the last years of his life trying to make ends meet and pleading with aristocrats for money, so what else is new? Another struggling artist. Seems we can't get away from that starving artist thing when it comes to even our great artists. But he was an artist. He wasn't a celebrity dipping into the well of immortality at the end of his career with a book or a painting or a rock band to finish off megalomania fame to satisfy the craving that we will be remembered beyond our time. Mozart had no such worries, but he did worry about being broke.

Apparently scholars have connected the dots and found Mozart took a big loan and the payments were coming due and his music was in a slump. Sounds familiar to our 2010 ears. Slump. Loans. Payments due. Even musical geniuses get caught up in the boom and bust of capitalism. But artists seem perpetually in the economic dumps. We hear this frequently with big name stars and of course all the starving artists who never hit the radar scream and die in obscurity. It is just the nature of art that it does not produce a lot of money. From A Confederacy of Dunces to Van Gogh it just seems sometimes the public is not ready for what artists have to offer.

Of course Mozart was one of the few who was appreciated during his lifetime and celebrated. Of course he was brilliant and his music stands. But we strip away the gloss from Amadeus which does a good job of showing the squalor in which the last years of his life was lived and we see the artist lot in all it's glory. Maybe stability is just not in the cards. We know of all the musicians who produced great music right up to the moment they became successful. It seems struggle is wrapped up with being an artist, maybe it is the fuel that pushes on all great art. Certainly Mozart proved that magnificently.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

The Citizen Book Reviewer

How many people read the New York Times Book Review? Raise your hands. Hmmm...small crowd. How many people go and buy the books after reading a NYT Book Review? Extremely small crowd.  I do read the New York Times Book Review. Religiously. Every Sunday. But I must confess to a feeling akin to reading short stories in The Saturday Evening Post and that is I am reading something that belongs to a different time. The books reviewed are of a certain staple: fiction, international fiction with protagonists who overcome incredible odds in war torn regions. Biographies of long lost literary figures or Teddy Roosevelt. Steve Martin's art novel. Up and coming novelists on the back pages. Literary lions no one has heard of outside the literary lion circles. Historical fiction.

Not that this is bad content, but it is no secret that book sections in the major newspapers are vanishing. The Chicago Tribune's book section was marginalized to the Saturday edition. The Washington Post Book World was eliminated. The New York Times Book Review is one of the last holdouts. So, the question is where are people going to find out about books now? An answer might be they are going nowhere to find out about books. Or we might believe what Steven Jobs said who proclaimed no one reads anymore--a self serving observation from Mr. IPOD. But the fact is people are still reading and reading a lot.

I have been to land over the rainbow and it is a bit like OZ. Strange new munchkins called Citizen Reviewers are reading and writing the reviews in cyber land and this is what people are reading. It is not only the big Book Blog sites that are claiming the attention of the reader, it is the ordinary posts of the ordinary reader. If books are still sold in the fundamental way of word of mouth then it makes perfect sense that the middleman paid reviewer would become antiquated in age of the Internet. We now have the direct links for readers to click on to find out to what the most relevant class of reviewers think--other readers.

 The obvious site for this well of reviews is Amazon.com where readers post directly to the book they just read. A book with fifty some reviews will give the reader a more balanced view of a book then the opinion of one Ivory Tower reader. Consensus is the word of the day in cyberland. Other sites like Library Thing, Shelfari, Goodreaders all work off consensus reviews. A hundred people read a book and rate it and then you get an average. The fringe reviewer who doesn't like anything and the over the top reviewer who loves everything are marginalized by a healthy discerning middle. No one is getting paid and yes you will have the author friends and enemies weighing in, but in there also will be people with honest opinions.

The result is much more democratic and that makes sense in a democracy. Art by the people and for the people and reviewed by the people. It doesn't matter really if we like it or not because it is here. The argument for a paid reviewer is one that he or she is trained to review. Maybe. But don't you get a skewed viewpoint by a single rarefied person reading books they prefer? Getting through the literary gates of most heavy hitter review publications is reserved for those who catch an editors whim who is literally deluged with books. We can't expect a fair and judicial process from harried overworked reviewers or editors who have even less staff today.

So, by default, we end up with a polyglot of books being reviewed by a polyglot of readers. The New York Times Book Review will always be the benchmark for the literary world and I think that is a good thing. But the Citizen Reviewer will certainly be a second opinion...something everyone should have.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com'/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Addicted to Literary Crack

Before there was nothing. You lived in isolation writing your stories or your novels and all you had was a rejection letter coming back from a nameless editor from a nameless publishing company who might comment on your latest chapters and synopsis. And that was it. You literally wrote for years with the only feedback coming from friends, enemies, the compressed air of writing groups. Real feedback, real anointment came only from the Big Apple in the form of the acceptance letter that just never seemed to come. So you toiled on in the loneliest profession in the world. Then came the Internet.

Suddenly everyone became a writer but you had been doing it for years in your secret agony. Ensconced in your Garrot you had been honing your skills, wiring your synapses, developing your craft. The Newbies spewed while you thundered. People marveled you were able to spin off an essay crackling with wit and insight and you kept it yourself that it took you all of five minutes. Because your isolation had been broken. You suddenly were being recognized and people actually commented on your work. They complimented you, they criticized you, but it didn't matter. Your isolation had been obliterated and suddenly you were talking to the world.

So writers became bloggers. And for novelists who need to cool down between books or want to try out different forms it became an easy place to get that instant feedback writers crave. Suddenly that novel you have been burning to write gets put to the side for that quick essay on Obamas squeamishness and you are writing for that literary crack. It comes buzzing into your phone with one comment after another. Brilliant. Love your writing. Excellent piece. Just great. Your day becomes a little brighter as the comments pile up and you create a small firestorm. Thirty four hundred hits in one day for one article.

So you tell yourself its time to get back to that novel, but you have spent your best capitol on a one page blog and you are already considering topics for your next one. You hate to admit it, but you have become  addicted to literary crack.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Waiting in the Green Room at WGN Radio

You have glimmers of something passing. Sometimes you just know that what you are seeing might not be around too long. Maybe it was the space reserved for the microphone from the Scopes monkey trial. Maybe it was the foundation of the Chicago Tribune building inscribed on Lower Michigan with Culled in 1920. The slight wisp of snow in the cold darkness as a guard buzzes you into the WGN studio in the bowels of the old Tribune building and you follow a man up to the green room, passing the cases where old microphones reside and black and white pictures of celebrities long passed.

Then you sit down and wait and there is no one there in the green room, just you and rows and rows of pictures of people who look curiously human. The celebrity quality is gone and they are just men and women with gray hair, getting old. A thirty minute radio interview on WGN in Chicago is something you want to hang on too. The man doing the interview is the son of a legendary newspaper man from the Chicago Sun Times. You can hear the footfalls and you shake hands and he tells you to relax and do whatever the *&%$ you want. All Chicago old school. Then you are on in front of the WGN microphone telling your story for thirty minutes.

You try and imagine people all over Chicago waking up and hearing your voice, but your mind doesn't work that way. All you think is that it is just the two of you talking and it doesn't go near long enough. There are a million things you want to say, but you just can't get it all in and then you are walking back through the silent building and down through the guard room and suddenly outside in the cold. It's barely eight o'clock on a Sunday morning. Chicago is empty and just waking up. You drive through the streets, knowing you have used up one of the moments of your life that will never come back. You hit the city limits, then slip into the past.


http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will be out in January

The Writer's Dream

My life changed in one summer. I had just signed a two book deal with Bantam after years of struggling in total obscurity and actually been  paid good money after making nothing for years and now was on my way to the Big Apple to ink the deal and have dinner with my new editor and agent. A  year before my manuscripts had been sitting in the basement in a box where I put all those books and stories that never see the light of day, but events had flipped on their head as they tend to do in the careers of writers and acrobats and now I was headed for a victory tour of sorts.

The dinner was on the lower East side in a French restaurant with Conan O'Brien at the next table and you sort of leave the table and float down the street in the warm summer night because finally finally you have broken through to the other side. I didnt' know exactly what the other side would bring, but the biggest change is you have to adjust the way you think about yourself. Failure had been the shadow following me for years and I really wasn't used to that new ghost called success, but here she was. And so I sat and made small talk with the two people who could potentially launch my stalled literary career and then it was over and I was waking up the next morning.

I went for a run and then walked down through Manhattan still hung over and buzzing on adrenalin. I was due to meet my agent again that evening, but for now I was free and I drifted into an old bookstore and bought two very old editions of Fitzgerald Short Stories( Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers)  They were the original Scribner binding with the cut pages and the slightly smaller than trade size. Second editions that I picked up for a hundred bucks, but I was making money now. And then I started walking down Fifth Avenue and that's when it hit me.

It was summer in Manhattan and one of those hot blowy days where everyone has left. I walked with my two books and knew then something had ended. I had struggled for ten years to get published and now I had and whatever happened next would be consumed with business and sales and publisher agent shenanigans. And so I walked and walked and walked those empty streets with my two copies of Fitzgerald on that hot summer day in Manhattan. I walked that whole island.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Meeting Ernest Hemingway's Son--Bumby (Jack Hemingway)

One day I was working in the attic when Virginia Cassen the head of the Hemingway Foundation said to come on down. I had been in the attic for about five years and had gotten used to the tourists who went through the home and was more than glad to say a few words about writing in the attic. When I came down the stairs there was a man in a blue blazer and tie. He was bald with a thin mustache and was laughing at something when Virginia said, Bill, this is Jack Hemingway, Ernest's oldest son.


Now I had read all of the short stories of Hemingway's early years in Paris. Up in Michigan, Fathers and Sons, Cat in the Rain, My Old Man, The Doctors Wife and in some of the stories there was his son. At the end of A Moveable Feast Hemingway described seeing his son at the train station, "blond and chunky and with winter cheeks looking like a good Voralberg boy." He was either giving him a bottle while he wrote or meeting him with Hadley his first wife to go skiing in the Alps or going fishing. "Bumby" was his son during the happy years, the apprentice years of learning fiction in Paris and if Ernest ever had a time when his family was together it was during those first five years before he and Hadley divorced. In this way Jack Hemingway was a living literary character.

And now here was this man with a twinkle in his eye holding out his hand. He asked how I liked writing in the attic and we made small talk about the difficulties of writing good fiction. Jack was in for a dedication of the Hemingway house and so he didn't have much time for a young writer who had perched in the attic. After shaking his hand one more time and a kind "good luck with your writing "he left to get interviewed by a waiting camera crew. I returned to the attic.

Now it is ten years later and I haven't really thought about Jack much who died in 2000. His daughter Mariel Hemingway went on to fame and fortune, but Jack had a quieter life, working as a salesman, stockbroker, conservationist after serving in WWII. But you do have glimmers of people. His picture sits on my mantle, a moment in time. There was something about his rumbling laugh and the ready smile, some sort of heightened sensitivity to life that surely his father carried. It's hard to peg meeting someone connected to a legend and you sure don't want to over do it. The man who valued "one true sentence": would hate it if I summed up our brief meeting and said anything more than: I met Ernest Hemingway's son and he seemed like a great guy.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will be out in January

Politics and the Writer of Fiction

Fiction and politics rarely cross. Recently we had the President read Franzen's latest novel but of course that was it, nobody knows if he even finished the book. Then we have the novels from people who worked for candidates and write thinly disguised accounts of their days in the White House. Then we have people who write fiction but comment on current events in blogs, essays, pieces for magazines. That would be myself. It is a curious thing to write about current events then cross back into the land of fiction. Sort of like traveling to two different countries.

Writers do become political as time passes. It happens with singers and actors. It seems the canvas of "their art" just isn't enough and we even see some become President. Activist musicians are very familiar who use their fame to push causes they believe in. That old John Mellancamp lyric comes to mind, "you got to stand for something, or you're going to fall for anything." This doesn't seem like a big jump for people who fill stadiums routinely. But for the writer of fiction hidden behind a book, commenting on politics can be good and bad. Especially when times become turbulent and fiction suddenly feels irrelevant.

You really have a choice. Say nothing about the time you live in except through your fiction or comment directly and see where you end up. Certainly the Internet has empowered more writers to be part of the larger world directly. There weren't too many avenues for a writer to become political before. You had to just squirrel away and work on your books and make your views known through your characters or not. Some of us cannot help ourselves and feel commenting on our time a duty. Others, feel politics and related issues are not for the writer of fiction. Certainly one would like to live on one track, but that world vanished a long time ago.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

As Book Stores Close...

What is the writer to do as the book stores close? Not much. Keep on writing. One feels at times like you are writing through a war during this age of transition. Run out and buy a Kindle? They keep falling in price and now there is practically no excuse to not buy one. Before the price was prohibitive and they seemed a little weird and gimmicky and bulky. Not so anymore. Small, sleek, and cheap. $139 at the last check and they will surely come down more.

So then you have to think about reading from a screen. Reading a book is partly enjoyable because you are not reading from a screen. Something pleasing about holding the paper between your fingers and nothing flickering or whirring or dying from a weak battery. You can toss that book under your bed, smudge it with jelly or stain it with coffee. And it still works! But then there is that thing called the economies of scale in publishing running everyone down.

Brick and mortar book stores might become dinosaurial. All that paper sitting in a warehouse essentially. But then a blockbuster comes along and all that paper flies right out. A Kindle blockbuster would be much more muted. A ten million download bestseller! Wow! Did you see that server go! Something about it is just not as exciting as watching people line up to buy their favorite book from their favorite author.

But the times are a changing and publishing will bow to our version of the IPOD revolution. Hopefully it won't leave publishing as tattered as the music business. In the mean time, nothing to do but to keep on keeping on...imagine how those scribes felt when they saw that printing press.

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