full fathom five

The Loss of a Great Voice

I'm very surprised at the fact that since the death of David Foster Wallace, author of the postmodern novel Infinite Jest and numerous unforgettable essays, I've felt the loss of his voice, his sardonic-yet-compassionate take on the world, every day.  Since September 13th, when I first heard the news on National Public Radio while we were off sailing, I've braced myself against a new silence, the weakening of a shared sense of absurdity - surely D. F. W. knows how ridiculous this is, my addiction to Roger Federer's footwork - when I smack up against a new subculture.  So he was with me, albeit unconsciously, when I insisted to my husband that we interrupt our cruise to veer off to Rockland Harbor so I could spend two nights in a loud, mildewed-smelling basement poolroom of a waterfront sports-bar to watch key matches of the U.S. Open tennis tournament.

    Only Wallace's passing has alerted me to the fact that I internalized something of his world-view, how it feels to stand on the threshhold of a new subculture, with its contradictions and absurdities winking at you, but also feeling a new sense of one's own frailties.  And now with this new sense of missing him, I want to recommend three of his essays that lodged him so unobtrusively but firmly in my mind. Two are in his 1998 book: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.  The title essay is about a Carribean cruise on a Club-Med-like commercial cruise-ship that - like almost all his writing, surprised Wallace in what this subculture of excess showed him about himself.  He wrote the piece for Harper's Magazine, I think, and he boarded the vessel with the assumptions of his audience: that the experience would be cheesy, gluttonous, and absurd, which he showcased by men in lurid leisure suits and women in lamay evening gowns oohing and aahing over the butter sculpture centerpiece that towers over the dining-room.  After cataloguing such scenes in a colloquial voice that sounds like your funniest friend, he shows himself in his cabin getting ready for the last night's banquet, gaping at the tuxedo t-shirt he brought in place of the required black-tie, having second thoughts about his sardonic choice.  He says that if you think it's easy being the only one who breaks a rule - no matter how silly - in a self-contained world that you can't get out of, think again.  And as he chastises himself for being literally paralyzed, confined to his room by this sudden need to fit in, he underscores the fact that life is continually surprising, continually challenging to our idea of self.

    The other two essays are about the tennis players Michael Joyce and Roger Federer.  The first one is in the book of essays above, about the subculture of the sattelite tennis tour, the minor-league of professional tennis.  The second appeared in the New York Times a year or so ago.  Google "Roger Federer as Religious Experience."  It's about the preternatural grace of Federer, and the experience of seeing him live as opposed to TV.  In both these essays, Wallace deconstructs physical movement and the geometry of the court to make us newly appreciate what these athletes do while at the same time retaining the mysteries of the game.  Such as the way Federer seems to float a foot above the court.  The fact that he never gets injured, while most other players have to wear ankle, knee, or thigh supports, attests to what otherwise would seem just a fantasy or trick of the eye. 

    These pieces, and I'm sure all the rest of Wallace's work (I haven't read much more than this because I find the trademark footnotes of his fiction interruptive), show us a voice that is very funny in a sardonic and ironic way, and yet is never mean or mocking.  We are so lucky that he's left this rare balance, a feat akin to Federer's footwork, behind.                 

book-promoting

Book-promoting is the hardest thing about writing today, besides the shrinking audience of readers that we've all heard about.   Promoting a book is hard because it's the exact opposite from writing in many ways.  Writing is individual, so the writer can fully control the process, but book-promoting involves at least two people: writer and librarian, events coordinator, or bookstore manager.  And because these people are doing the writer a favor in giving her a venue and free publicity to try to sell her book to an audience, the writer is no longer in control of these transactions.  The events coordinator is. 

    And whereas writing is all about pleasing oneself, promoting one's book is completely about pleasing other people.  The first is all inner-directed; the second, outer-directed. 

   Writing has an inherent momentum and continuity; book-promotion is a stop-and-start hodgepodge of interruptions and dead-ends.  Events coordinators don't call back, so you have to start over with a new venue.  A few of these starts and stops, and you wonder what you've done with your day, whereas the writer has created meaning with the hours she's put in. 

    And finally, one never knows whether her promotional efforts have been rewarded.  When you get an invitation to give a book-talk, you rarely know why they called you.  It could have been because of the letter you wrote them three months ago, or it could have been from word of mouth, or the lucky sighting of a review or posting of a book-talk notice that you haven't even seen yet.  So very often, you don't have a sense that you're making any progress. 

    Therefore, the tipping-point I've recently experienced after a solid year of promoting my book (starting long before it was published), is not necessarily of my own making.  But I'm welcoming it with relief and gratitude nonetheless.  It's the point where I no longer have to reach out to events coordinators and publicity people; thankfully, they've started to call me.  So I can take a welcome rest from the chasing or "following through" mode.  In fact, I'm through making cold-calls to potential book-talk venues; I'm going to move on to new writing this Fall, and only promote my book selectively, in response to people who have called me.

   Because it's the opposite of writing and thus feels unnatural, the promotion I can trace back to my own efforts is something I'm inordinately proud of.  It's the hardest, most frustrating work I've ever done, so small victories really stand out. 

    But after the talk is finally scheduled, comes the enjoyable part of promotion, and most other writers I've talked with agree.  We love to talk about our book, love to connect with readers.  So book-talks are wonderful once I've gotten all the scheduling done, helped publicize the event, ordered and packed up books to take to it, and set up and tested the audio-visual equipment before the talk.  This last is always a nerve-wracking process, involving a precise sequence of steps which, if I get them wrong, I've got to call my husband to talk me through by phone as audience files in and takes their seats.  It's always just down to the wire when I start talking.  One time, the electricity failed completely, and I had to go to hand-outs, which I'd made up for just such a possibility. 

    Fiction-writers have an easier time, because fiction is better-suited to reading aloud than non-fiction.  Non-fiction writers are advised by book-marketers to talk about their books, while fiction-writers can simply read from their books and take questions at the end.  No need for slides, as in my case. 

    Because the last thing I want to do in this summer of book-promotion is relive its many frustrations by writing about them, I haven't blogged much.  When I'm not promoting, I'm in the garden digging my worries into the soil, or walking out the kinks in my back from hunching over the e-mail all day.  So it's been a long time between posts this summer. 

    I'm hoping things will change come Fall, with the advent of new writing and no longer chasing promotional venues.  My husband and I are taking a sail down-east to Penobscot Bay in a few days (from Sept. 3-14), and I trust the late summer winds to blow all the promotional obsession out of my mind, and I'll come back empty and ready for new work.  I hope the same new Fall spirit for all of you. 

             

Precious first readers

As a new author, I was on tenterhooks about how my book would be received.  What was most important was that the book keep readers turning pages. 

One of the first readers DID turn pages, and it's a wonderful feeling.

And e-mail from another reader:   

Hi Mary Lee,

Yes....I was up till midnight (and I very seldom stay up that late!) because I HAD to finish your book!  I read it in one day. I simply couldn't put it down.

Another one called me to say that she was in the middle of the new biography of John Quincy Adams, so opened my book just to look at the design before putting it on her to-read stack.  She said she made the mistake of reading the first few lines, and got stuck reading it for the next day and a half.  She's gone back to finish the John Adams, but says she wants to read FFF again. 

And now Cowtown Patty has written a wonderful Memorial Day post citing the book and even plans to research and write to life a cousin of hers who died young as a result of having been in a Japanese prison camp in WWII.  My dad would have been so happy to know that his story inspires this kind of investigation.  There were so many unheralded victims of WWII, and the POW's were particularly invisible because after the war our government didn't want them to tell their harrowing stories for fear of offending our new allies.  So the ex-POWs were told to stay mum, and carried their scars around inside of them for decades.  Patty's cousin apparently died without anyone in the family knowing his story.  Patty will do the world a favor to dig for this man's story and bring what might be an amazing legacy to light.  We just don't know until we try.  At the very least, she'll be - in the most literal and personal sense - making history.               

Forthcoming Book

At last, I can announce what's been going on behind the scenes here for about a year and a half: the acceptance and publication of my memoir uncovering the fate and character of my submarine-commander father, lost in WWII before I was born.   I couldn't let myself talk about it till now, for fear of over-exposure.  Even now, I've had to hold myself back from republishing the whole book in the excerpts at the sidebar!  To breathe a word about it opens the floodgates. 

The official publication date is April 29, but you can order it now from Amazon at a substantial pre-publication discount.  Meanwhile, I'm scheduling book talks, compiling mailing lists, and doing all the other marketing tasks that writers are now expected to do to promote their books.  This requires a full 180-degree Janus-like turn from a writer's to marketer's stance.  EEEEK!  or IIIIIIck!   The Maine Writers and Publisher's Alliance has written in their newsletter over and over again words I've always ignored until this past year: "Your real work doesn't begin till after you've written and placed your book with a publisher."  That's when you start marketing.   And I'm here to say, now that I've gone through it, starting a year before your book will be published is not soon enough.  It's one of those inchoate jobs that expands to fill any time you have.

     But I'm not complaining.  I know that this is just temporary, the arrangements to what I really have been wanting to do ever since I started this project way back in 1999: to shout it from the rooftops!  In a few weeks, I'll be able to do just that.  And as of today, blog about it here.