An industry on the skids

I work in an industry -- traditional book publishing -- on the skids. Or at least that's what I'm led to believe by the pundits, few of whom accomplished anything of note when they worked in it. The former six-figure mooks are the worst of all. They opine publicly on their electronic soapbox like rejects from the self-help circuit. Some of them are gleeful, some are rueful, some are resigned, and some mask whatever emotions they're holding inside behind a facade of objectivity. There is no such thing as objectivity in publishing discussions these days. Who knows? Maybe objectivity itself is a myth.

One thing's sure: those who have been laid off or have been otherwise sent packing can't even pretend to be objective. Too many of them have had to settle for smaller salaries and fewer responsibilities, if they've clawed their way back into the workforce at all. Labor no longer frees them, they have moved beyond their middle years, work is a grind, and they are bored. The mask they wear is the interested face, behind which fatigue grimaces and panic simmers. They’ve got kids who cost money. They’ve got mortgages and health problems. And the world doesn’t give a shite about them.

They have contracted a communicable disease. Former colleagues avoid them. Who wants to catch a depression? Those old-time values, fixed ideas, and never-ending conversations about all that's been lost. No bloody pills for that. They are losers, angry and dismayed at having had the keys to the playground taken away from them. That's what work had been -- a playground filled with pliant playmates and a bi-weekly deposit into their checking accounts. A vacation from pondering all the bad shite that can happen to a person.

Now they write, looking to explain their predicament to themselves. It’s got to be systemic. Nothing personal. They ruminate, compose manifestos, make lists, effect analyses. Their sentences hurt my eyes. So many words, carelessly tossed about. The legacy publishers are dying, the windblown earth is being repopulated by self-publishing wizards, Amazon is the immortal big dog, seventy cents on a buck is the least an author should get for her work, even if it only costs a buck, one must grow vertical communities, direct to consumer marketing is the only marketing that works, libraries are mausoleums, the web is a portal to discovery, and so on.

My effin eyes are tearing up even now. Who says anybody should be making a living wage in this game? It’s all hot air and wagering. Take an effin bus to Foxwoods.

I work on the island of Manhattan, a kind of laboratory in which big money experiments with sheer verticality and tourists maunder about like cows awaiting milking. It is across the river from Brooklyn where people intent on being creative muster their talent during the day and drink at night. Few make a living at it. This thirteen-year old century has been cruel to too many -- we look in the mirror and old fat people stare back at us, weary of the grind, one foot in the grave, the other on the banana peel. We got a lesson that we find difficult to acknowledge -- ideas are tied to money. When you run out of one, the other doesn’t do you any good. Most days I don’t even have the energy to be bitter. Instead, I read about the impending apocalypse and hunker down with my Scotch, calling it medication. I don’t give a shite who believes me any more.

I figure it must be true, that this business is going down the tubes, led by Jeff’s epigones out in Seattle. The way it was conducted once upon a time, by courtly gentlemen in navy blazers who drank martinis at lunch -- thank goodness that shite is over. Those were the days of half-days when you could read a book cover to cover. Now the health club and prescription pills blunt the pain of stress. Twelve hour days are the order of business. Weekends? Forget about them -- there’s no such thing as free time. And, as my friend Cosmo says, “We live in an age of uniform individuality. Better learn to love it. If you want a safety net, get outta town.”

Contrails over Sussex County

How the mind works, it's just this side of a miracle that it works at all. I was sitting in the kitchen minding my own business -- as though I knew what the hell my own business consisted of, the way the world these days comes closing in on me, a damn freight train, fuck knows what my own business is, as opposed to yours or anybody else's -- eating and trying to figure out these big leaps in sense that my gray matter has been making. As though the brain tissue was orbiting its own sun, minding its own business instead of mine. Lotta loose shite rotating around that stem.

I was sitting there eating french fries and it came to me how a girl -- no, a woman, though only in spirit all these years since her death -- I knew worked in a McDonalds down in Greenville, Mississippi and was awarded "Employee of the Month" because she made batches of french fries so fast and so well. She loved working there she said. "I had such good time." By the time I met her, she was in the city, Mississippi far behind. We had fun saying that line of Lowell's: "gored by the climacteric of his want…" Christ she could laugh at such words and she kept a whole slew of the buggers up her sleeve -- archaic words, neologisms, small words, funny words, cuss words -- slang was her specialty. It was a real gift. This was just as email was taking over the workplace, so she and I had to be careful what words we used for official business. Her life was full of love and heartfelt comedy but all I can focus on this morning are those french fries. Hot and crispy and salty.

Fucking Nietzsche, arguing that the ones among us who count are the supermen. Let him rot in hell. What would he say about Byron who worked in a Pepperidge Farm outlet store selling old bread, went to church and tithed, and volunteered at St. Mary's Hospital in Passaic? That was his whole life. When we prayed together at St. John's -- he'd recite these long intercessions for his brother who was a drunk -- he would raise his voice in song, and Faulkner's Byron Bunch came to me, the man nobody sees, the man nobody can imagine worth anything, the man whose love is true. A fur piece my arse, Nietzsche was a mess. My picture of him is the one I got from Gustaw Herling -- lost in his mind, embracing a horse in Turin, sad and stammering, his brain boiling, ecce homo laid low by the sheer size of his thoughts. I'd set Byron's humility against Nietzsche's willful pride any day of the week.

A close friend of mine glommed onto Nietzsche's characterization of people of mixed parentage as mutts. "I'm a mutt, destabilized at my very core." I thought to myself, okay that's what we all are, we Americans. Mutts. Street dogs. He's half Sicilian, half Hungarian. Then there was another young woman I used to know, she was mostly of German background, as I am on my mother's side. I told her one day that I would rather be known as a dumb Polack than an evil Nazi. "I know what you mean," she said. I don't remember what other blood she had in her but I knew she wasn't pure. These days even the royal families aren't pure.

Nietzsche remains a problem if you're inclined to think Christ's elevation of the poor in spirit was an honorable pitch. Christ's godhead is something I can't deal with, but the beatitudes still hold out enormous hope for those of us whose lives are filled with living but who won't make a mark on History written with a capital "H." Lying on my back on Rehoboth Beach watching the sky fill with gulls, then looking over at E. as she squinted into the sun, thinking to myself, maybe this is the best one can do, to be this happy even if for only a few moments. Nietzsche is also a problem if you like music but find Wagner's Liebestod a bit over the top. If you prefer Debussy's late Préludes, recognizing that Romanticism is dead and gone -- perhaps not forever, you never know what your successors will find blissful -- then Wagner is a ball-and-chain made of heavy metal. Something to drag you down because, in the end, you can't help but go teary-eyed at the fat soprano's death. Joe, who used an umbrella in the snow, played the Birgit Nilsson recording from time to time. It was Joan Sutherland he couldn't stand.

None of this is my business. I have been loved far more wonderfully than I'd had any right to expect. Contrails over Connecticut turn into clouds but here in northwestern New Jersey they disappear as quickly as they're made. Or maybe we just don't see them.

Bethel

Up at Bethel Woods, standing on the patio listening to a Beatles recording playing in the gift shop -- "Tomorrow Never Knows" of all things, among the candle-holders, placemats, and t-shirts -- while waiting for the concert to begin, Korean-American violinist Jennifer Koh and her Israeli husband, pianist Benjamin Hochman, about to perform singly and together, Janáček, Chopin, Bartók, and Brahms. I look out over the sloping fields and windbreaks. Nothing is the same, not Yasgur's Farm, not the sixties, not the uncertain green woods, and certainly not us, me and a bunch of panting overweight gray-haired retirees. Out in front of the museum on the walk over from the North Parking Lot, four ceramic bells hung from beautiful wooden frames -- miniature torii -- called Shohola Bells by the potter David Greenbaum -- chime fitfully in the April breeze. The sound gives me chills.

We're at the end of mud season, excited to see the year's first green shoots peeping through the leaves: daffodils, crocuses, tulips. Green onions shimmered above the black dirt of Pine Island on the way up like a mirage: maybe the world will be green again. My wintry body straightens itself and begins its slow climb back up the way of belief, its dumb-stricken belief in resurrection, born of the recharged soil tinged with green. I see horses frisking on the far hills, cows standing mute, goats and llamas lying down and letting the sun stream into their bodies. Giving off primitive vibrations, even lower in pitch than the bells, the tableaux along the northern ridge make such godforsaken music. If I stand here long enough, it will become apparent nothing makes sense. It's only meaninglessness that reveals itself in music.

The sky appears vaster here than in the big city a hundred miles to the southeast. But it's just an illusion. The sky is the same. The people are much the same, not unlike the animals. Flocks of geese and herds of deer now inhabit the abandoned camps, distressed buildings, and crumbling barns that sit forlornly behind broken fences and peeling, faded signs, the names written in Hebrew. Many of the concert-goers are elderly Jews. They wink and wave at each other in greeting, keeping their other hand on their canes. The world was a different world when they were young -- these hills bustled with Jews taking a break from the city -- dancing, singing, swimming, palefaces squinting into the sun. Sex, sex was everywhere then. Today they are patient during the first half of the concert as they wait for orderly Brahms to organize their memories. Janáček’s folk melodies, Chopin’s sensual lyricism, Bartók’s microtones and called-for virtuosity, hell, such music is all too sexual, just like their young lives were fifty, sixty years ago, just like this April breeze that lifts the skirt of beauty and fuels their red-blooded dreams, the reveries of the dancers they once were. They stand here on the patio, transfixed, inhaling the fresh air. Max Yasgur was a Jew, may his memory live on.

There is no way to account for the effects of music. I too am an animal, like the retarded boy in the next-to-last row who rolls his head from side to side as he tries to pull his hand away from his mother. She holds on to him lightly out of love. He giggles at Bartók and cries at Brahms, reminding me of my uncle Gene who wept inconsolably at Chopin's Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2. He was retarded too but that word has fallen out of favor, and so I don't know how to think of him straight or describe him properly. He wasn't challenged or disabled or merely slow. He's in a cemetery now out on the Island having returned to the dust from which he came, like all of us must. The Jews up here look prosperous, they look like fine professional people who made a good living, are now physically comfortable despite their afflictions, and want to hear a little Brahms before dinner. Their children and grandchildren are marrying out of the faith in record numbers -- America is the land of mutts after all -- and Asian musicians are playing the music of Eastern Europe as though it ran in their veins. Cripes, it's enough to make your eyes well up with tears, that the people of the world are coming together in places like this former farm on a wind-swept ridge in Sullivan County, amid the crows and sheep, the good intentions and hazy memories.

Back in the seventies I was caught speeding by a New York State trooper somewhere on Route 17 between Wurtsboro and Monticello. It was January, I was driving my step-brother back to school, it was early on a Sunday morning, and there was not a single other car out on the road. My step-brother and girlfriend were sleeping. The car was a bronze-colored Chevy Impala. I was doing eighty-eight miles per hour. The sun glinted off the snowbanks at the edge of the road. The cop came out of nowhere, as cops always seem to do, and caught me dead to rights. It was the most expensive ticket I've ever gotten, payable to the court in Liberty. The others in the car went back to sleep. Brockport was still hours away.

After getting the cop's lecture and ticket, I remember putting in a cassette tape of Brahm's Second Symphony and letting the sound wash over me, as we started up again, riding over these same hills while the world slept. The sky was clear but it turned overcast by midday and started to snow in the afternoon. Once you get out of the city, New York State seems endless. You can see for miles even if there isn't much to see. And now here he was, Brahms again, scared of Beethoven's shadow, his music architecturally sound, finely fitted, but already fading into a distant past. I wished I had some Joe Cocker or Country Joe McDonald with me. Something sloppy, brutish, sophomoric. Something the cows would understand. Sure, there's poverty and ruination nestled in these hills, a sadness in knowing that casinos won't turn the tide, nor will cultural tourism, the peddling of some plastic Woodstock bric-a-brac. But you wouldn't know it, sitting in this big room, listening to Jennifer Koh and her husband give their all to the Brahms sonata. In the company of these respectful, almost courtly, elderly Jews, their eyes alight, their ears open, it works: the room comes alive. Amazingly, we're still alive.

Friday white sale

Hello there. My network is free today. Welcome. I live and work in New York City, the try-state area. So there. And I can get back into Brooklyn on a day pass if I want to. Mingle with the effin hipsters and eat some pierogis. I reach into my pockets -- my god they're deep! -- and play strangle the snake. Feeling for loot. I hear somebody say into their phone, "The ferries are running on a weekday schedule." Good to know. Maybe take the BQE to the LIE, then head out to Lake Success.

I look across the river. The clouds, well, they look like clouds -- when M. says she can see Christ's face up there I get suspicious. He isn't up there -- he's down below the surface of the river, in the muck. Fish food. Toxic shite, that fella, especially today. Making me sick to my stomach, it is, watching the Commemoration Industry ramp up to its Anniversary Gala. Tall buildings, cranes, gravestones. A cross with a body nailed to it. The Freedom Tower. I forget what they're commemorating. I forget whom they're commemorating with. Hardhats, social workers, gay couples, illegal aliens. Who knows? Maybe those who love guns and go to church. Maybe the cops. My stomach heaves and my bowels hiss. All this commemorating is hard to take. Even Bach sounds treacly today.

Anarchy -- shite, monarchy -- no, levity -- or maybe some kind of gravity, the herky-jerky clutching at one's nuts, trying not to wee wee publicly, what is it that rules the little aboriginal privileged individuals living in this secular, nay molecular, millennium? The one we inhabit. The one that can be quantified. Reduced to scale. Surely it ain't the Bible. The law? Or have they overcome the need to observe the law and given themselves over to love instead? Love works like a balm in the brain when it isn't driving you insane. Believe what you want to believe.

Doctor Feelgood tried to remove them from my reptilian eyes, those scales. But it didn't do any good. He turned the crank. I could hear its gears. But nothing happened. The machine stood still. M. said, "If you'd only listened to me. Jesus is always with us. He's just waiting for you to invite him in." I could've kicked her then. But I didn't. I just looked away and watched the city's veins open up. The light was changing and the wind was coming on. I imagined Florence in the last decades of the 17th-century, the plague waxing, the tyrannical rule of Cosimo III the reactionary, the population decimated, the Dominicans putting screws to sinners. The Arno filling with blood. They lived in a world of blood and shit, only one way out of it. Unlike us.

Garish, garnish. Vanish, varnish. Ain't no apparition crawling down the cross. Not if you see it. Sipping fine wines and conversing with intelligent beings masquerading as sex-bombs, wearing TV costumes, real housewives kinds of clothes. Nothing real about them. Better off listening to James Brown sing "Hot Pants." Looking for a white sale.

I don't want to quibble over privileged information. If you see Christ in the clouds, that's okay by me. I don't. Maybe one of us is wrong but until we find out, let's just watch the river lift the city a little bit, lift the spirits of its inhabitants, they're so tired of the devil's stratagems. They just want a nice long weekend. They've heard so many lies, too many lies, the lie is dangerous, the lie is a ludicrous attempt at seduction. This is America -- they don't want to be seduced, do they? For real. Show me your evidence, evidence of what? The dyer's hand?

The hand darkened with ink, hard to make out. Somehow it's implicated in original sin. The city is getting dark. Goddamn daylight, the way it disappears when you need it. Listen, poot, poetry is perjury, that's why I much prefer prose. I trust the way it works even it's telling another lie. The ferries are running on a weekday schedule my ass. Our loved ones will keep us from reaching the summit of Mount Olive. Everyone lies in this pseudo auto biography.

Reentry

This year, I came back from Austin to New York, from SXSW to the workaday world, thinking, "The parade's already begun to pass me by. I'll have to run to catch up." I mean, I can work in a paperless world, a world of virtual connectivity, and look, I've got an iPhone and an iPad, and using them doesn't upset me too much, although I don't particularly like to, it feels a bit like being unmoored on a seething sea and trying to cope with the drift, but when did I ever navigate in tranquility? I remember seeing pictures in the Boy Scout Manual of a young lad treading water and absorbing the lesson of survival: don't panic, learn to float, breathe normally. And what if you feel your body coming apart? It's just an illusion. Hah.

But that was forty some odd years ago. This year, I wasn't so sure that it was just an illusion. My kidneys were sore and my nose bled every morning. Everybody wanted some meaning out of life.

In the Austin Convention Center, SXSW monitors worked at the escalators, allowing only so many people to ride up and down at the same time. The place was jam-packed with attendees and clearly there was some fear that the narrow structure's weight-bearing load might be exceeded if limits weren't imposed. I thought back to 1981 and the famous skywalk collapse in Kansas City that killed more than 100 people. I had just stayed at the Westin Crown Center there, in the Paris of the Prairie, two weeks earlier while attending the ABA Winter Institute, not a thousand feet from the site of that disaster. People like a herd standing above the dancing crowd, drinks in hand…then the silence before the chaos. Reagan was President.

Part of the Austin scene was simply craving company, but one had to be careful -- there was a lot of company to be had. The kids were full of life and full of questions. How was one to make a livelihood in the present environment? Not everyone had money to burn, although there was a lot of money being thrown around. Who knows where it was being funneled to. I was spending company cash, not my own. And I was not alone. It was a junket. Listening to panels all day, drinking on into the night, coming away thinking how complex marketing has become because the channels and levers have changed. And yet. The customers have stayed the same -- their wishes, lies, and dreams haven't changed. Their behavior in the bars and in the buses, their lining up in queues outside theaters and nightclubs, their picture-taking and tweeting -- it was beautiful to behold, their normalcy was reassuring. It made me feel young and foolish again. Everybody wants some meaning out of life, yes.

Like me and my jejune pals in the old days, they wanted stories with heroes and villains. Effin comic books. They wanted a narrative thread to string their pearly days upon. Screw salvation -- salvation was gonna have to wait till another day, maybe when they were hunchbacks afraid of dying. If there even was such a thing as salvation. The last thing they wanted was to have some gray-haired geek like me tell 'em, "I told you so."

The things they were after, I knew them well -- sex, food, companionship, an exultation of the irrational (call it drunkenness or forgetfulness), but, above all, some kind of meaning -- something you could carry with you all the days of your life. And not just biology. It was impossible to walk through life as though it were a maze without a center. Novelty would come and go, though this year there was little to remark, no new Twitter, no new Facebook. Lots of people were trying on Google Glass but it wasn't gonna change the game. It was more of the same, a speeding up without giving new meaning to anything.

I looked around me in the Austin airport. The game wasn't changing. We were still entering the theater of the absurd when it came to security, we were still sheep, inwardly seething at our obeisance. The game wasn't gonna change all that much just because we changed the equipment. Why? Because the participants stayed the same, trying to account for their brief lives in a nervous world devoid of inherent meaning. These people waiting for the plane didn't look like they were up to the task. Then again, neither did I, on my way back to the workaday world.