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Hoisted on My Own Petard

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During one of my blogtalk radio interviews to promote IMMORTAL, I spoke about publishing houses and writers and the need for the two to find a common ground. Today that interviewer contacted me, asking if she could use some quotes she had culled from the interview. Sure, I said. It won’t be the first or last time my own words have come back to bite me in the tushie.

Here’s the thing: Publishing is in a sad state right now. One house is foundering like the Titanic. Another house fired a publisher and is being restructured into a larger conglomerate. Editors have been fired. The ones who remain are afraid to buy anything.

But is firing people and re-organizing really going to help the bottom line? I mean, is it really going to entice people to buy more books?

The problem, as I see it, is two-fold: 1, marketing people decide which books editors get to buy, not editors, and 2, writers all want to publish beautifully written literary novels that no one but their mother and best friend will buy.

Books are not widgets. Books are the Keepers of Soul. For thousands of years, people have been going to war over their Holy Books. They’re still wreaking death, destruction, dismemberment and other varieties of intolerance because of their Holy Books. Books have this extra dimension, this extra quality, that MUST be taken into account. Even by marketing people, who can be soul-less creatures.

BUT. Writers also need to take the market into account. We writers can be all too self-indulgent, because we are in love with words, with prose, with story in its most abstruse forms. But most people don’t want to buy a book just because it has pretty words and the story takes an intellectually shimmering shape.

There’s got to be a middle ground. I say: let editors have more say and marketing people LESS say. One reason for this: editors love books, while marketers love money. When marketers chose which books get published, we get the current state of book selling. That is, I go to the bookstore and 99% of what I see is crap. Most of it is all the same. Badly written serial-killer-suspense books, formula mysteries, predictable action-adventure or supernatural yarns, and celebu-drek. Then there are those select ‘literary’ tomes that someone has chosen to anoint, and those ‘literary’ novels are self-congratulatory, precious, self-indulgent, and just plain boring. They also have unlikeable characters. WHY WOULD ANYONE BUY ANY OF IT???

I read everything, really everything. I will even pick up a Harlequin romance. I consider this my market research. I just finished a book that epitomizes what is wrong with publishing today. It is Brad Meltzer’s BOOK OF LIES.

I apologize to Mr. Meltzer for the bad review, and I can only say that plenty of bloggers have trashed my novel IMMORTAL.

However: BOOK OF LIES was confusing, hard to follow, and clearly created to capitalize on the DA VINCI CODE-secret-Biblical-artifact-craze, or what’s left of it. It is more than obvious that some marketing person yelped with glee: “Hey, Cain and Abel, biblical secret, we got a flavor of the DA VINCI CODE and we can even pull in the Superman fans: yes!”

Unfortunately, it’s just not that interesting a story. No one cares much about how Cain killed Abel and if the weapon survived. Yes, we did care about Jesus being married and whether or not the Church suppressed that information for reasons of secular power. Now, that story has been told: MOVE ON.

Meltzer’s prose isn’t horrible. He seems to be trying with his characters and with the relationships between them. It just never all comes together to make me as a reader care about anyone or anything. And the sentimental glop (spoiler alert!) of “Tell your stories to your children” that is supposed to be the big finale, well, if the story were riveting, it would be a let-down. But since this novel is just so functional, utilitarian, and forgettable, it comes across as annoying and silly. Drivel.

But the appeal to a marketing director is so blatantly obvious, how could this novel NOT be published?

So novels will continue to be boring, silly, and the same, because marketers are infected with the notion, “If it sold once, we can beat the dead horse into a gelatinous pulp and sell it a million times.”

So general readers are bored and disaffected and they don’t spend their money on books. And writers aren’t motivated to do more than 1, appeal to marketers or 2, indulge our worst, most narcissistic love of an abstruse craft.

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On Transparency

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Of late I’ve been thinking about karmic entanglement. Maybe it’s because 2008 is drawing to a close; maybe it’s because Ketu, the moon’s south node & the keeper of the book of the past, is transiting the ruler of my chart. The past, and my past actions, are much in my consciousness.

I think it comes down to mutual forgiveness. Meaning, forgive the other person, and forgive yourself. Send forgiveness to neutralize the acid of interaction that’s fraught with hurt, longing, anger, pain, or even with the alkalinity of love and kindness. Peaceful forgiveness, so that the interaction returns to a clear state without the varnish of meaning, without the binding of a bond, any bond. Transparency. Liberation.

As a believer in reincarnation, I have a sense of the occlusive stickiness of the wheel of birth and rebirth, and how action and reaction, cause and effect, desire and fulfillment play out, over and over again. I wish to stop riding this wheel like a caged rodent. I think a lot about how to get off the ride. It’s also scary. What will happen to my precious individuality when I merge with all that is?

But the first step is to release. May all conscious beings be released from their suffering.

I support gay marriage

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About 30% of the time I hate my husband. I mean hate, really loathe, as in, Chris-Rock-staring-at-a-box-of-rat-poison-and-the-only-thing-that-stops-me-is-an-old-episode-of-CSI hate. Other married people know what I’m talking about. And why should gay people be denied those exquisite feelings?

Seriously, why should the excruciating agony of marriage and divorce be reserved only for straight people?
Marriage is fundamentally different from living together or committing informally. It just is. I’m sorry to all those people who say, “Why do I need a piece of paper, etc” …. Well, the rites of marriage bring another dimension, another quality, to the state of being a couple–whether you like it or not. The act of getting married is one of those irrevocable passages, like having a child, that demarcates life. It’s never again the same. Two adults who wish to undertake that passage together should be allowed to, whether they are gay or straight or transgender or one of them is from the planet Xetron–as long as the Xetronian is an adult over the age of consent, and isn’t being forced into the marriage. 
In the end it comes down to two hearts who wish to formalize a journey together. Every such wish is an act of tremendous courage and optimism. Who is to say that God, whoever She is, would not admire that courage and optimism just because the two hearts are both temporarily encased in male bodies? Or temporarily wearing female bodies? If I were God, I would be applauding: “Yay! You go! Marriage is one of the most difficult tasks on earth, and you’re going for it! I’m proud of you!” I do not understand the sanctimoniousness of people who use God as an excuse for their own bigotry.
The great poet Rumi:  “You that hand me this cup, you are my soul and my loving. Whatever enthusiasm I’ve had, you are those, and any success is yours. Clap for yourself! These are your hands.”
It’s not about bodies or the costume of gender. It never was.
SABIN’S SCULPTURE
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SABIN’S SCULPTURE

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My husband is selling some plaster copies of his bronze sculptures on eBay. He came home last night dressed in his usual grungy, clay-spattered jeans and ragged tee-shirt with red iron-oxide patina stains. He trudged into the kitchen where I was cooking dinner for our little one, kissed me on the crown of my head, and tread back out. I followed him to see why his hands were so dark. Sitting on our dining room table was PERSISTENCE.
I gaped: this is a powerful, stunning piece of art. His muscles bulge under the compression of gravity, his mighty thews heave with will and determination, his veins strain and pop-out. It’s anatomically plu-perfect, hyper-real in accordance with modern taste, but classically designed and conceived in its male nudeness. It is sensory exaltation. It is an experience of revealed truth.
It’s easy for me to forget, in the dailyness of our life together, that my husband Sabin Howard is a singularly talented artist. Grumbling about his messiness, his clothes left out for me to put away, and his penchant for over-peppering every plate of food he cooks, I lose sight of his extraordinary ability. No one else can sculpt like him. No other working figurative sculptor sculpts at Sabin’s level. No one has sculpted as well as Sabin since, who, Carpeaux? And there is an argument to made that, historical place aside, Sabin is a better sculptor than Carpeaux, who tended to a saccharine quality. Don’t get me wrong, I love the sweetness in Carpeaux’s figures. But for sheer mastery, Sabin’s got him beat. Michelangelo, Bernini, Cellini, Howard: these are the great master sculptors.
Even if I do have to wash out the sink after Sabin shaves.

Jupiter in Capricorn

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I follow astrology for the same reason I use the multiplication table: because it works. I use both Western and Vedic astrology, because they are views through different windows into the same richly nuanced room.

In the Vedic system, Jupiter recently entered Capricorn, the sign of its fall. It joins Rahu, the north node, the head of the karmic snake. From what I’ve read–and, admittedly, I am an amateur Vedic astrologer–this makes for a special situation (yoga) in which false guru’s are exposed. And sure enough, here’s the news about Madoff, the billionaire ponzi scheme con artist. Many people considered him a financial guru. I also read something about a NYC lawyer who was engaged in a scam, bilking people out of their savings. And, regarding a different kind of crime, it seems timely that poor little Caylee Anthony’s bones were found, a duct-taped skull rolling out of a plastic bag on a swampy piece of land near her home, during Jupiter’s entrance into its least favorite sign.
So I wait with interest to see what else will occur, what other guru’s will fall, their wisdom exposed as fraud. I am curious to see how this will play out.
Capricorn is a sign of practical, grounded, building and construction. This style of action is sharply in contrast to the exuberant, bouyant nature of Jupiter, the great benefic. Jupiter expands; it has open hands that shower luck everywhere. Feels good. But there’s a place for the steady, careful concretization of effort that makes for realistic foundations in the world, too. 
But even in Capricorn, Jupiter is lucky. Take this crook Bernard Madoff: exposing him was lucky. It was lucky for the people who were saved from his scheme, who might have invested with him if he’d been allowed to keep on trucking. We get to know the truth, which is Jupiter’s greatest gift–even if it’s the truth we don’t want to know.

WHY I LIKE BARACK OBAMA

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Chris Rock said it best on Larry King Live: Obama is a class act.

That is, he demonstrates a graceful, intelligent poise and sense of respect for himself and others. It’s a fine quality. There’s an august thoughtfulness about him that’s very appealing, an air of cerebral gravity, passion for his causes, and caring. In the debate when Obama spoke of middle America, it was clear that middle America matters to him. He is concerned for those of us who make under $1,000,000 a year and he sees it as his duty to help us have better lives. 
I also like the fact that Obama represents the melting pot that is the United States. All kinds of blood runs in my veins: Native American, English, Irish, Welsh, Russian, Czech, Polish, Romanian Ashkenazi, Scottish…. My ancestors interbred with great ingenuity and I am happy to vote for another American whose ancestors did the same thing. I support the mixing of races; it strengthens all of us. Not just genetically, but also in terms of brotherly love. Nothing broadens the mind faster than having relatives–kids, in-laws, a spouse–from a different race, religion or creed. Tolerance comes quick when blood commingles. Tolerance is what will gather us all into a community that encourages individual differences while also strengthening our common bond as people living together on one Earth. Tolerance is what will save us all.
And Obama did something that showed forethought and commitment to the country’s best interests: he chose a running mate with a wealth of experience. There’s no gimmick to Obama’s vice-presidential candidate. Biden is an intelligent, seasoned servant of the people, and the fact that he has a profound, long-term understanding of foreign relations adds breadth and depth to Obama’s candidacy. It leads me to believe that these are the kind of people Obama will choose as advisors and cabinet leaders: experienced, thoughtful, well-credentialed people. People who will guide Obama’s concern for the common man and woman with wisdom and forethought. People who will be able to heal our economic situation, restore confidence in the US at home and abroad, and put in place measures that will support and strengthen Americans for generations.