Once I gave a reading with Mark Richard. He was on tour for his novel Fishboy. He’d taken to driving all across the south, in a convertible, in support of his book. As I’m remembering it, he was intent upon every good, independent bookstore in the South. I asked him about all the travel, you know, because I hadn’t really done any touring yet, and he said, in his beautiful southern accent, You gotta pimp the book. Well, if that’s true, then I should be given a gun. And a Cadillac with Naugahyde interior and fuzzy dice.
I sure get bored of other people’s stories of the horrors of the tour. However, it’s some of what I did yesterday, so I’ll just say it and get it over with. I had to get up early and tape an important national radio show, a show I had done once before, a show that strikes fear in my heart for the acuity of its host. This show is difficult on a good day, but my book is partly about my problems with alcoholism and depression, and when I was in the psychiatric hospital in 1987 I was a self-destruction machine. Thinking about those days makes me really sad. And in order for me to talk about The Black Veil and why I wrote the book, in order to talk about my book without seeming like some slick media slut, I have to relive those days, and reliving those days makes me really sad, even if I don’t regret the past. Pimping the book means remembering the self-destruction machine in me, and though this machine is arrested, it is not eliminated. So, I get down on the gurney for the open-heart surgery and the amphitheater is crowded, and the trick is that I have to be completely awake for the procedure, and I can hear the ill-informed reviewers from the conservative tax-write-off news organs up there whispering. They sort of make me want to dance with the self-destruction demons all over again.
It was like being mown down by a city bus. The host of the program had me talking about the hospital, about my sister’s death, all these things that I feel sad about, things that I don’t want to talk about, because talking is much different from writing, and I was feeling like any unkind syllable could knock me over. And just as I was bouncing back it was time to go this really huge cocktail party being thrown by the AOL/Time-Warner publishing group, which publishes me, even if I don’t approve of any company that has both slash and an n-dash in its corporate name. Cocktail parties are abominations, as far as I’m concerned. The longer I stay at cocktail parties, the more I feel myself becoming the Designated Observer of other people’s craven behavior. Back when I drank too much, it was almost guaranteed that I would make a pass at someone’s wife or deliberately insult a few people, and when I woke up in the morning I was always trying to reconstruct the damage. I didn’t do any of those things last night, although I did overturn a glass. (I watched it descend toward the floor in stop-motion.) During this particular mishap, the shattering-glass mishap, the woman from CNN standing near me kept looking at her nails. She was incredibly bored.
Among the luminaries at the cocktail party were James Patterson, Walter Mosley (who’s smart and intense: In our conversation, he cited Jack Kirby of Marvel Comics as an influence on his work), and Rosie O’Donnell, whose autobiography was issued by the publishing empire with the excess punctuation marks. I tried to get some photographs of both Walter and Rosie, but these pictures didn’t come out too well. I guess I don’t have the paparazzo gene, and anyhow I like out-of-focus photographs better. So, here’s a photograph of the back of Rosie’s head. I think the guy in the foreground might be one of her bodyguards, but I’m not sure. I like the spider web of lights in the photograph better than I like Rosie.
Best exchange I heard at the party:
Bookstore Owner Lady: Seems like most of the publicists are women, doesn’t it?
Publicist: It is a profession dominated by women, yes.
Bookstore Owner Lady: So, what are the men?
Publicist: The men are VPs.
So, is this my job? The job of Party Witness? The job of transcriber of voices? Is my job the job of pimping the book? Is my job having my picture taken? Is my job talking on the radio about the drug-induced hallucinations of my 20s? Is my job talking about the psychiatric hospital? Is my job going to the airport on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday? Is my job trying to remember which store I was in last year or the year before that? Is my job remembering all the names? Is my job the dead spots in the next month when all I can do is fiddle around with these pictures of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden until they look like the hallucinations of my teens and 20s? Is my job putting words into books for publishers with excess punctuation in their name? Does my job have to do with commodities? With making things that can be properly shelved in hitherto existing categories in transnational chain stores? Or is my job simply writing the novel that I haven’t been able to work on all week, because I was flying home from Idaho, because I was dealing with a friend’s drug problem, because I was counseling my fiancée on her job situation (as best I could), because I was doing interviews, because I was going to a book party, because I was going to a really great reading by Barry Hannah? And when do I get to sleep? When do I get to eat? I’ve already lost something close to 20 pounds this year, worrying about all of this. So, is my job to publish a diet book?
I think literature is above and beyond all of this stuff; I think literature is late at night and it’s all the love chatter that goes on between intimates, between writer and reader, and it has nothing to do with books or with pimping the book.It’s about people. Plato didn’t have to pimp the book, and neither did Rabelais, and if Sterne did so, he did so while laughing about it. Literature is all about the sentences, and that’s what I’ve been doing here all week, instead of writing my novel, just trying to get a couple more sentences down that do not offend, and when I have been walking around from appointment to appointment, I’ve been trying to come up with sentences, I’ve been listening to the music of them in my head, thinking about line lengths, that perfect end of a paragraph, that ending that’s like an echo, like I heard Barry Hannah say the other night, where the writer is emptied into the canyons of what is,the canyon of sorrows and affections and memories, and now it’s sunset.