The Publishing Contrarian

They poured down RT 27 East in cars, tumbled off the Hampton Jitney and Hampton Luxury Liner buses and disgorged from MTA Long Island Rail Road double-decker trains that ripped past crawling commuter traffic exiting New York City on the Long Island Expressway. Directors, actors, screenwriters, film critics, film lovers, all gaining momentum and numbers as the weekend approached. By Saturday they were everywhere, overrunning the luxury-store-studded sidewalks, cramming into the local Starbuck’s, and queuing up for the lip smackin’ good, international smorgasbord of films.

Luckily, I was able to be in East Hampton for opening night, Wednesday, October 15th, when the Hamptons International Film Festival actually began. My ticket in hand and press pass dangling from around my neck, I stood gamely in the suddenly bone chilling cold in the ticket holders’ line at 7 PM waiting to see the festival’s opening “Spotlight” film and grousing with other ticket holders about the low-slung, nearly-impossible-to-get-out-of Porsche sporting a handicapped sign and parked right in front of the movie theater.

Gentlemen, Start Your Movies!

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Oh, no. Not again. Another aging author uses writing a book as an excuse to enter the world of the sex-trade and pornography. Gay Talese did at age 49 in 1981 when he wrote the nonfiction book Honor Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and proceeded to spend nine, count ‘em, years researching massage parlors, strip clubs, and sex shows, sometimes with his clothes on. I remember reading the book and wondering what his wife was thinking at the time.

John Irving did it at age 56 in 1998 when he had to research Amsterdam’s Red Light District, with its tattoo parlors, window parlors, brothels and sex shops, all of course in support of the main character in Widow for a Year, Ruth Cole, who is doing research on prostitutes in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. She finds herself hiding in a closet and witnessing the murder of a prostitute by the prostitute’s client.

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Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming is the kind of play for which you would do well to prepare yourself. This is no fluff ball diversion for the brain-dead like David Mamet’s November, nor a multi-generational tragicomedy with a pill-popping Mama stumbling down the staircase like playwright Tracy Letts’ August: Osage Country. You shouldn’t just ride in from out of town on the Long Island Railroad or Metro North thinking you are going have an evening of light entertainment on Broadway that will make for charming, intelligent, cocktail party-speak in the “burbs.” No, not with this play. Know what you are getting yourself into: The Homecoming is a lethal, haunting drama about familial one-upmanship, seduction, lust and betrayal.

“Let me outta here!”

That’s what Rose, played by long-legged Eve Best, should be screaming at the top of her lungs in this revival of Pinter’s 1965 play at The Cort Theater. Rose is the wife of one of three grown brothers played by James Frain, Raul Esparza, and Gareth Saxe. As the play begins, she’s just being introduced for the first time, after eight years of marriage, to her in-laws—a creepy bunch that would make the hairs on the back of the neck of any woman stand up. The father, played by Ian McShane, should have put at least two of his miserable whelps in a burlap bag, dropped them into the nearest river, and then, if there were any justice in this life at all, fallen in after them.

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I have seen the future and it is the end of “Used & New” purchases on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.

I feel it. I sense it. I know it.

All it took was for me to activate my new Kindle and download Jeannette Wall’s The Glass Castle for $7.99 and have it delivered digitally in 60 seconds, count ‘em, from Amazon for me to hear the death knell for all those subterranean, bottom feeder, entrepreneurial booksellers online who have been making money by reselling advanced reader copies, tag sale finds, and entire inventories passed to them out the back door of warehouses. And I say this as a book purchaser who always prefers to pluck books from the “Used & New” option online.

So if you visualize me now, après Christmas and my Capricorn birthday, see me in your mind’s eye as sitting in front of the computer, cute new wool socks on (thank you!); wearing a new red beret and red leather gloves (thank you!); resting a coffee cup on a stack of “wish list” new books that includes Thomas McGuane’s Gallatin Canyon, Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, William Trevor’s Cheating at Canasta (thank you, thank you, thank you), about to switch on my birthday Kindle and place another order (THANK YOU!).

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What a comedy! Nathan Lane as the President of the United States cum extortionist. Laugh a minute.

Not.

November, written by David Mamet, author, essayist, screenwriter, film director and, for the past few years, cartoonist, opened last night in previews at the Ethel Barrymoore Theatre in New York City. There I was, hunkered down in a $98.00 aisle seat (for a “f”ing preview, as Mamet might put it) in the second-to-last row, orchestra, next to someone whom I didn’t know and who, thank goodness, displayed exceptional taste by joining me in never laughing. “Maybe all these hyenas are ringers and/or friends of the playwright,” mused I, under my breath.

I think I “get” that the play was very tongue-in-cheek. After all, Playbill, which listed all the major players in November and their credentials, described Mamet as being “better known as a cartoonist.” Frankly, I found it painful and embarrassing as, yes, an American, to watch my president, Charles H.B Smith, being portrayed as such an ignoramus and so…venal.

Yet, people laughed. Hahahahahaha. Guffaw. Guffaw. Guffaw. Slap that knee!

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I’m all for illicit affairs in the office. To my mind, the more, the better. Sub rosa relationships just make going to work so much more fun. Not only do people take more pains with their appearance, but you can count on them to have upgraded their underwear. (Oh, my God, I can’t let him see me in the floral cotton panties up to my armpits! Oh, my God, I can’t let her see me in these sagged out, skid-marked skivvies.)

What gives me pause about the revelation that the notorious Judith Regan and macho-man Bernard Kerik had a smoochfest in an apartment overlooking Ground Zero for three months in the winter of 2001 is NOT that he was her oft- and currently-married lovebird (hey, that’s the third wife’s problem, n’est-ce pas?), but when his autobiography, The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice, was published, she had him under contract AND at the same time between the 200-thread-count sheets.

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I know that every book and every screenplay exists because of an heroic and obsessive act of creativity. However, after spending four days last week turnstiling into and out of and back into the United Artists 6-Plex in East Hampton for the 15^th Hamptons International Film Festival, I was scratching my head, wondering if a few of the filmmakers hadn’t wasted their time and everyone else’s.

Who in the world pulled Starting Out in the Evening from the bookshelf and deemed it worthy of a film? Did anyone take the time to get past the hype in Customer Reviews on Amazon and read some of the less than laudatory comments about Starting Out? “Not much happens.” “Brian Morton does not really tie up anything with his endings.” “…some of the individuals in the book seem put together in a piecemeal way.” “This book sat on my bookshelf for nearly five years….” (And perhaps, I might add, should have stayed there!)

And what depths of originality did the screenwriters plumb to come up with Rails & Ties, Four Minutes and AmericanEast?

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I’m back. The streams are low. The fish are lying on their sides at the bottom of the river with their tongues hanging out. No self-respecting trout is biting. Whoops, ’striking.’ I’ve hung up my waders until the fall.

So what did I come home to from Pine Creek in Pennsylvania? Mediabistro rocketing nonstop to Jupiter(Media), as well as scads of query letters and book review requests piled up. And a trendy new eReader to drive me mad with 90-pages of instructions.

MediaBistro Goes Corporate

Mediabistro.com gets sold to publicly held JupiterMedia Corporation, a Darien, Connecticut-based, internet media company that sells photos and art. Laurel Touby falls into the clutches of Alan M. Meckler, Chairman and CEO. Twenty-three-million dollars! (Cash? Stock? A combo? It’s enough to keep Laurel eating out every night at trendy Spice Market Restaurant in New York City. No more doggie bags for her!) And guess what? Laurel gets to stay on as a Senior Vice President at JupiterMedia. (Er, okay, Laurel, but maybe you should convert some of those dollars into gems and sew them into the bodice of your frock. That way you’ll have a protective vest on when the first volley hits you after the honeymoon period ends. I can’t think of many entrepreneurs who survive more than two years once their company is acquired. Can you?)

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“Gone Fly Fishing”

I’m happy that newspapers are cutting back on book reviews. Most of them are unnecessary and just take up space. Long ago, I stopped believing the majority of them.

No, I don’t mean every reviewer ought to be cashiered. I know a handful of book reviewers who are objective, insightful and truthful, and who can get you to run, breathlessly, to the book store and leap eagerly into bed with a book on Saturday night. (“Hands off! Can’t you see I’m reading?”) For the most part, however, I find reviewers just steal copy from the book jacket and promotional materials, glance at the first few pages of the book (maybe), turn in their column, collect a few measly shekels and move on to the next book, whoops, few bucks.

If I am tempted to buy a book based on a reviewer whom I don’t know, 99% of the time I get a second and third opinion before actually making the purchase.

Reviewers Who Delight in Maiming or Killing

When I was working at the book publishing arm of Barnes & Noble, Inc., I plucked an advance reader’s copy (ARC) from among the stacks of free ARCs tossed on a long table for us to take if we wanted them. The book was The Know It All—One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, by A. J. Jacobs. It’s the true story of a middle-aged man who feels he has become a dolt and forgotten everything he ever learned. So he takes it upon himself to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z.   Of course, as he pushes through one volume after another, his brain overflows with esoterica, which he dispenses ad nauseum at every opportunity in EVERY conversation. You can only imagine with what his wife, friends and colleagues have to contend. As Jacobs becomes the repository of the history of the world, no, the universe, he and his wife are struggling with a serious family issue that, because you grow to like him and his wife so much, makes this book much more than just a yuck a minute. (My review, thank you.)

A more honest woman would have given back the money she billed for that workday. I drove my fellow cubicle dwellers crazy with my insane laughter. I actually sent the editor an email telling him how much I enjoyed this book, and got a nice email in return.

Then a review came out in The New York Times Book Review. What a cruel, unfunny, outright nasty review. The kicker, of course, was that The New York Times, in its infinite wisdom, had selected Joe Queenan, a “contemporary humorist and critic,” with an ostensibly funny (and perhaps competing) book coming out later in the year.

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