Philistine

So I’ve officially steered my personal schedule into a tree. I realize, now, that my wife’s rigid personal bedtime (She looks at the clock at 10:45, every single night, and exclaims in genuine surprise, “Oh God! It’s nearly 11!” and goes to sleep. It’s a genuine production, and she does not think it’s awesome when I provide chorus for this little routine.) is the only thing standing between me and complete reversion to my polyphasic-sleep absurdity.

I think I fell asleep around 9pm, and it is now 1am, and I am wide awake. Both Philistine and his paycheck-seeking alter-ego have lifestyles that lend themselves to this wack[i]ness. I am, by nature, a “night writer.” Valerie Sayers, my favorite aunt and Obi-Wan of my writing life, called this shot long ago.

Night writing is “different.”

……………………………………….she would put it. Her Southern upbringing and consequent mastery of grace let her be mercifully ambiguous here. I have a feeling she was thinking,

…………………………………..Philistine, you’re coming off kind of like a sociopath here.

This was all during my stint as a stay-at-home priest’s assistant in a very Dead-Poetsy, bat-infested dormitory. I was a role-player on our three-man team: chances are, if something happened at 4am, I was awake to hear/see it. I’d occasionally be writing, but most often would be scouring the internet for the salient details of how to burn dvds in the dashboard of our old Jetta–or some other months-long, abortive undertaking–while half-listening to the freaky anime on Adult Swim. It was invaluable training.

This morning, I came off a two-week “duty cycle,” a period wherein I’m responsible for what happens at night (really 24/7) on our campus. Luckily, there are two other professionals in front of me in the response structure, but they’re instructed to call me for help or guidance using what I loosely define as the “blood, fire, newspaper,” criterion. If there’s a rape, somebody gets run over by a bus, knocks back a couple handfuls of pills, or whips a frisbee at a fire-sprinkler outlet and summons a “moisture episode” in the tens of thousands of gallons, I’m there.

All this combines to give me a goofball propensity for sleep-schedule idiosyncrasies.

I stayed up last night until 5am reading Coetzee’s (infinitely readable) Slow Man. I awoke (raw and sweaty from my lingering cold, with sore molars from my nightly attempts to shatter my teeth by clenching) this morning at 7am to a call from Kololo, Uganda. I sort of bit my wife’s head off for that, and made her feel like shit. Which made me feel awful–it became this big, cyclical mess–but she has a deft touch for defusing this kind of thing, and did.

I puttered around the office a bit today, but it’s officially “down-time,” and there’s not much that’s pressing. Campus is empty–that magical time between the students’ departure and the advent of conference season (not our problem) which brings droves of Baptists, cheerleaders, and cheerleading Baptists to campus.

It is quarter past Rapture out there.

I walked the dog down to a relatively enclosed quad between four of my buildings, and let him off the leash. He ran spastically over the grass–apparently in disbelief–always staying a few feet out of my reach, lest I should declare recess over. I felt good for him, and kinda bad that he doesn’t get to do it more often. There’s a dog park here, but he’s not really into dogs: he tries to herd them, and when they don’t move, he goes apeshit and bites them. We muzzle him like a nineteen-pound Hannibal Lecter, he foams at the mouth, it’s all ugly and not worth it. We have a lot of “inside playtime.”

I watched a tree service using a crane to surgically dismantle an enormous, dead tree on the center of campus. It was strangely fascinating–attach a cable up high, cut off the top segment, run it through the chipper. I walked by later, and there’s a clean, wide stump that smells like Home Depot and is flush with the grass. They even vacuum up the sawdust, apparently.

I also plunged elbow-deep into resurrecting a homebrew DVR project I put together about  a year ago. It’s basically a PC that works like a free Tivo. It didn’t go well, and I’m ordering a new motherboard. Be cool about it, though: don’t tell the wife.

Well, anyway, down to business:

I promised a review of Blue Mosaic Me, writer Jackson Bliss’s (at least 2.5 year old) literary blog. I’ve browsed a good deal of it, and there are some interesting things going on there. Now a disclaimer: I’m not presuming to be qualified to offer critique of another blogger, as I’ve just started this thing. My interest is in the set of experiments–perhaps planned, perhaps organic–that Bliss is documenting there.

Especially early on, he writes some personal stuff–news about his considerable travels, artsy friends, stuff like that. Fairly straightforward subjects, good writing, gives you a feel for Jackson’s voice. Probably interesting to his close friends and to his (and I’m certain they’re out there, or on their way) die-hard fans. Since Jackson is an old acquaintance that I recently pestered into becoming an accommodating literary brother-in-arms, I don’t really fall into either of these categories.

More intriguing–to me, anyway–is what the blog has become in recent months. Jackson tells me he’s earned (I mean this in the best way: that he’s had the pills to go out there and submit work) 424 rejection letters–mostly from journals, but also from publishing houses, it seems–in the last five years. This after I share a conversation I had with Chris Offutt last year, when he advised me to shoot for 100 rejection letters every year: the only number that I could control. Bliss is right on track.

He means business about this whole publishing thing. He seems to be (increasingly) systematic in his submission ethic, and he (almost always) maintains a helluva healthy professional remove from the process. It gets to him, at times, and he doesn’t hide that.

Blue Mosaic Me features a real-time updates in his dispatches–presumably from Buenos Aires, Marrakech, Casablanca–that feature the latest rejection letters from journals that have held on to his work for embarrassingly long periods.

A couple observations I’ll examine:

1. He includes the titles of the pieces he’s submitting–presumably, when an editor gets her head out of her ass and one does appear in print, those who follow his blog are keenly aware of the piece’s positively Dickensian childhood.

2. His blog, then, includes whatever algorithms would lead someone who typed “Identity Theory”+”Jackson Bliss”+lame into Google to find his justifiably scathing indictment of that magazine’s editorial laziness (or an episode of it). This includes those editors, themselves (whose names appear). In one case, at least, this prompted a long apology email only a day or two later.

So, Philistine, what do you think of all this? Well, I’ll tell you.

While #1 does shatter the veneer of universally-acknowledged authorial perfection, if you don’t realize that good stories are shot down by even bad magazines, you’re a fucking idiot. I think it’s great that his chronicle of rejections (and eventual acceptances) proves this. The risk here would be that, when seriously considering “Example Story,” an editor would Google “Jackson Bliss”+”Example Story” (perhaps to see if it’s been published or self-published–some writers put full texts on their blogs, after all) and find that other editors have consistently rejected the piece. I guess, though, that even in that case only the most short-sighted editor would defer to the opinions of other editors. I’ve been an editor. We all know we’re the smartest guy in the room, and the only hack out there with real taste. I imagine that Blue Mosaic’s audience likely comprises fans of Jackson’s writing and other writers. Both of these groups love a good comeback.

Observation #2 is more complex. No editor has ever imagined that editorial correspondences are confidential. Rejection letters, notes and critique wind up being the objets de dérision that really boost pagecount when the letters of the old masters are gathered, edited and bound. It ensures that the twelve guys who passed on The Naked and the Dead really feel like douchebags now.

Nonetheless, it flags Jackson’s name in an editor’s mind–and this might be dangerous. On one hand, a good editor would see the grand experiment of Blue Mosaic Me for what it is, and might respect it. On the other, this level and flavor of publicity (combined with Jackson’s bent for responding to his responses: something I’ve never thought to do) could earn him (perhaps unfairly) the reputation of a writer who insists upon stirring the turd. After that, it becomes a question of whether there really is “any such thing as bad publicity.” I don’t have a clue.

So, not really a review so much as me blabbering about a couple dynamics I see on the blog as entree into rambling about publication in general. I’m not sure an audience is what he’s after, but in case he is, you all should really check it out.

While I’ve been writing this, I’ve been half-watching Little Children, the 2006 film based on Tom Perrotta’s novel. Seems pretty subtle, pretty sharp, like it might have been underrated, or at least I somehow missed it completely. I’m going to sign off now and check it out, maybe pick up the book at the library later today.

I’ll let you know how it goes with that and with Coetzee.

Stay tuned.