The Publishing Contrarian

I’m not sure who was going to take the first swing at whom at Wolffer Estate during “Candlelight Friday,” last week, but David Buda, the tasting room manager, who watched my friends and me finish off our Cabernet Franc, quietly defused the situation by offering the three of us a little taste of Wolffer’s new 2009 Rosé table wine. We had been leaning in toward each other across the table, our voices raised. One of us had been wagging an annoying finger in the faces of the other two.

One friend, a local artist (no names, please!) and author of several books that actually sell; the other friend, Maralyn Rittenour, the former director of the EH Historical Society and a woman who spent two years at Christie’s in New York City; and I, who had a roommate who slept with at least ten well-known LA artists, were arguing: Does all art in The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art deserve to be there? Do local museums and galleries around the country, such as The Parrish Art Museum in Southampton and Guild Hall of East Hampton, offer really great art — when billed as such — or are they just touting good art or, heaven forefend, actually displaying “bad art” promoted by fawning, opportunistic, inbred art buyers, critics and curators to attract wide-eyed, thumb sucking, parvenu clients and donors.

Whew. Quite a verbal slugfest.

Still smarting from the hissing and spitting the night before, on Saturday evening I headed for The Parrish Art Museum’s exhibit of “Fairfield Porter: Raw – The Creative Process of an American Master” to see “great art.” The plan was to hear a “spirited exchange” between philosopher, writer and independent curator Klaus Ottman and American painter and sculptor Eric Fischl, to have a little wine and cheese, hobnob, and to get to view not only Porter’s paintings, but his sketches, and drawings as well. After The Parrish, I’d slip over to Joe Strand’s solo exhibit and reception at 4 North Main Street Gallery, also in Southampton.

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Jane Austen co-starring in a documentary with Cornel R. West and Fran Lebowitz? What in the world was The Morgan Library thinking?

Ok, let’s admit it. Jane Austen has not been allowed to rest in peace. Quite the contrary! That poor woman has had “Janeites” pouring over her personal letters, peeking into her dresser drawers, and analyzing every word she ever wrote until her death in 1817. When it comes to knowing everything knowable about Jane Austen, as Mick Jagger said about his excesses: “Too much is never enough.”

I Felt So Guilty Reading Jane Austen’s Personal Mail

But somehow I got over that. What a treasure trove on display at the Morgan Library exhibit “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy.” And what a crazy quilt of sentences filling every inch of the page. First left to right and top to bottom. Then the paper turned upside down and sentences written in between the first sentences. Then the paper turned sideways and more sentences written cross-wise across all the other sentences. Yet, this “cross-hatching” technique is completely readable. Amazing! When I think of the paper we waste today. Jane (may I call her that? Everyone else seems to) puts us to shame.

Yell: FIRE! Pull the Alarm and Run Screaming from the Theatre. It’s Cornel R. West and Fran Lebowitz Opining About Jane!

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How dare Vanity Fair print such a cruel and heartless article about Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the publisher and chairman of The New York Times? How can a man possibly summon the energy and enthusiasm to get out of bed, get dressed and face the problems the Times is facing with a nasty journalist like Mark Bowden gleefully and gratuitously tearing chunks off him?

Note how Sulzberger is characterized in attributed and unattributed descriptions in Bowden’s article called “The Inheritance” in the May issue of Vanity Fair:

His buck teeth give the impression of puerility. He listens impatiently and impulsively interrupts. He makes stabs at humor. He is long winded, affected, fussily articulate, eager to impress, insubstantial and slightly glib. He exaggerates. He has hit-and-miss witticism. He’s arrogant, not especially intellectual and a Star Trek Fan. His mind wanders. He’s a prince-in-waiting. He has the personality of a 24-year old geek. He’s provincial, sarcastic, uses poor judgment and lacks conviction. He’s condemned to stand apart from others. His career has progressed in prodigious and unearned ways. He’s timid. His efforts are half-hearted. He’s a light-weight. He’s out of his depth, fails to impress and elicits pity. He doesn’t always wear shoes in the office. He promotes people based on how “fun” they are. As a reporter, he was competent if unspectacular. He hides behind barbs. No weight seems to adhere to him. He has no radiance (power). He’s not deeply respected. He’s a lightweight cheerleader. He has a high-pitched and zany laugh. He’s overmatched. He looks dismayingly small. He’s shrinking. He’s childish. He’s goofy. He’s steered his inheritance into the ditch. He’s squandered billions. He’s the wrong person at the helm. He’s an unappealing and stereotypical figure. He’s weak and pampered. He’s a diluted strain of the hardy founding stock. He’s a man who sees himself as both journalist and business manager, but who, in fact, is fully neither.

Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Backstabs AND frontstabs.

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I’ve got a thing for the actor Brian Dennehy. No, not like the thing I have for Alec Baldwin. This is different. Alex Baldwin makes me laugh, too, but Dennehy brings out the Irish in me, just like the sound of The Chieftains and a penny whistle do. So when I heard he was starring in Eugene ONeill’s Desire Under the Elms at the St. James Theatre on Broadway, off I went.

Unfortunately, I did not have a good time. Not at all. My problems started when the audience was packed in like sardines into too narrow seats and too tight rows. I felt straight-jacketed. I couldn’t move an inch. I fell into an even uglier mood about twenty-minutes into the play when a woman seated a few seats to the right of me in the row in front of me actually pulled out her cell phone, opened it up, and began to whisper-chat — until the man sitting directly behind her rapped her on the shoulder and told her to HANG UP. (More about that later because it got ugly as the audience stood up at the end of the play.) So maybe this play just got off to a bad start with me . . . or maybe not.

Lose the Maine Accent, PLEASE!

Desire Under the Elms takes place somewhere in New England. I vote Maine because I couldn’t understand half of what the actors were saying due to their heavy Down Easter accent. Charming in the Pine Tree State, no doubt, but not good on the New York stage. Could the director, Robert Falls, please fix that?

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I’m on a theater binge: God of Carnage last week and Reasons to be Pretty and Mary Stuart this week. Two out of three were terrific, but Reasons to be Pretty was such a slam against blue-collar workers that this white-collar girl, sitting in the midst of an audience of white-collar workers, was embarrassed. The play was billed as an examination of America’s obsession with physical beauty and a funny/dark coming-of-age tale.  You could have fooled me.

Wow, I’d love to see that play. Too bad I didn’t.

That’s why I was so disappointed in Neil Labute’s play in spite of its original theme about how Steph (a hairdresser) would handle being blindsided by the knowledge that her boyfriend (a frozen foods employee) really doesn’t find her particularly good looking.

It’s Not OK for White Collar Playwrights to Dis Blue-Collar Workers

Some of the best, most dependable guys I know are blue-collar, hands-on workers. Who ya gonna count on when your car is buried in a snow bank at two in the morning and you need somebody to haul your sorry you-know-what out of there? Who ya gonna count on when the toilet tank breaks and water is pouring through the ceiling? Who ya gonna count on when you need someone who can MITER? (Oh, yes, I know, YOU can miter!) Well, you get the idea.

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Thank goodness I was given a Kindle for Christmas two years ago. I say that because the three-day O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (TOC2009) in NYC this week was all about digital publishing and I could smugly raise my hand when a keynote speaker polled the audience about eReaders. Even though the back of the Amazon Kindle keeps falling off, the battery dies too quickly and I have to carry around a bent paperclip to have handy for the reset button, there were a lot of Kindle devotees in the audience, matched, by the way, by the number of attendees who owned a Sony Digital Book. Doesn’t this tell you something?

It’s All About Me! Yet Again!

This year I was doubly interested in the topic of digital publishing because of the enormous amount of time, energy, and money I spent developing a commercial online publishing presence in 2008 for Back2Press Books and publishing my first print and soon-to-be eBook, The Cure for Jet Lag. As excruciatingly boring, painful or vague as most of the titles of the individual seminars were:

• Copyright in Today’s Digital Age
• XML in Practice: Formats, Tools, and Techniques
• What’s Your Mobile Strategy?
• Optimizing Distribution + Maximizing Control + Channel Transformation = The Perfect Trifecta for Publishers
• CEO Roundtable: The Changing Role of Publishers
• Making an Impact with Travel Content
• Smart Women Read e-Books
• Extending the Publishing Ecosystem, Sharing Greater Wealth
• Authoring Challenges in a Multiplatform World

I was breathless with excitement to cram in as many seminars as I could.

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I’m sending a lump of coal to my financial adviser. Are you sending one to yours?

I’d like to know how stocks purchased over a year ago, like Citibank (C) or Radian Group Inc (RDN) or Irwin Financial Corp (IFC), could have been allowed to plunge to under $10 a share (now $7.22, $2.38 and $1.59, respectively) and still be in my portfolio when I had a smart, seasoned financial adviser watching — someone to whom I paid a percentage of my account not only to be there for the good times, but to protect and insulate me from the bad times. Have you asked yourself and your stockbroker that question, too?

NO, I said. I do not wish to continue to reinvest. I want out.

But this was months ago, and by the time I unceremoniously yanked my account and relocated it to Ameritrade, it was really too late.  Yet, even as the bottom continued to fall out of the market, “hang on, this too shall pass” emails kept arriving from my now former financial adviser.  Three months later, I’m am waking up in the middle of the night screaming in terror.

For several years I’d been gingerly investing in the stock market. I didn’t really understand it, but I had some money in one of the Oakmark mutual funds and was doing pretty well. Then I read The Brainwashing of the American Investor—The Book that Wall Street Does Not Want You to Read! by Steven R. Selengut. This is a print-on-demand, self-published book a mutual friend of mine and the author asked me to take a look at about five years ago.  There was information contained in the book that was forthright and made sense to me. Of course, the goal of any book of this genre is to tell people how to invest, then hope those people with real money will realize they don’t have the time to handle their own accounts, and will end up investing with the author.

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We all know I’m stalking Alec Baldwin, but what we don’t all know (or didn’t know) is that I’ve been stalking novelist Peter Matthiessen, too, in The Hamptons.  My eyes lit up when I first saw him about six years ago at the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, NY at one of those pay-$25-and-meet-the-author get togethers.  It was a really crowded event with the authors sitting behind long tables with tidy stacks of books and the public lined up three deep to get autographed copies of books written by the best selling authors.

When someone pointed out Peter Matthiessen among the authors, I was beside myself, desperate to tell him how much I liked his trilogy, how I couldn’t put down Killing Mr. Watson (1990) and how I had been breathless to get hold of Lost Man’s River (1997) and Bone by Bone (1999) to find out what had happened to Watson’s children. But I couldn’t get close to Matthiessen because he was completely swamped by people jockeying for position in front of his table. A lot of chitchat was going on, but no one was mentioning his fabulous trilogy. I began to elbow people out of the way until I was standing directly in front of him. When I got my opportunity I smiled and said, “I see a freshly painted, stark white house in the middle of the Florida Everglades.” Matthiessen stood up (he’s very tall), smiled charmingly and said, “Killing Mr. Watson.”

His original manuscript of 1500 pages was divided into the three volumes that have now been recombined and condensed into Shadow Country.  Is Shadow Country a better read than the original separate volumes? You’ll have to be the judge because I’m happy with the three separate volumes.

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