Month: July 2003

I stepped into the elevator at the college library one afternoon, around 10 or 11 years ago. Another student walked in behind me. As the doors closed, he said, “You’re the literature guy, right?”

“That’s me. Literature’s my middle name,” I responded. I held out my hand and said, “The Guy: pleased to meet you.”

He shook my hand, nonplussed. Then he asked, “I was just wondering: have you read much by Camus?”

I said, “Not really. It’s been my belief that most of French existentialism prior to World War II just presaged the fact that the French would fold faster than Superman on laundry day when the Germans rolled in. And all of it after the war was an attempt at justifying that fact.” [Note: I realize that this is an unfair characterization, and if you’d like to call me out on it like a bitch, click here.]

“Oh,” he said. “So you don”t read Camus’ books?”

“No. When you get down to it, I’m a Stranger to Camus,” I replied.

Dead silence.

“Really, I avoid Camus like the Plague.”

Uncomfortably dead silence.

“Well, maybe I’ll get around to reading him in the Fall.”

The elevator doors opened. I expected to hear crickets or see tumbleweeds rolling by. I had bombed before, but this was worse than Dresden.

Anyway, this was a little preface to mention that, while killing time in Rutherford, NJ yesterday evening, I bought a copy of The Plague and sat in a little cafe, where I read the first 40 pages or so (and drank a double espresso).

I have no idea if the book is responsible for this, or if it’s more because of the four G&Ts I socked down in the city at my buddy’s birthday party (on an empty stomach), but I had some of the most vivid and disturbing dreams I’ve had in months.

But the book’s actually not that bad so far.

Too tired to write about San Diego last night, and too pissed off this evening. After budgeting The Immensity of the Here and Now, setting print runs and prices, planning marketing, etc., I discovered that my printer forgot to factor in the costs of the book’s dust-jacket. I guess my sales rep thought that hardcover novels come out without dust-jackets all the time. He probably thought this even when he was faxing over the specs and dimensions for the dust-jacket a few weeks ago. Good thing his estimator thought of it now, since I’ve already sent a check for half the production money and the book is in prepress (with no time to shift it to another printer if I plan on having the book by September). GodDAMN am I pissed off right now…

So now the book is going to cost me $750 more than I had planned, which means I have to make a much more significant leap of faith regarding potential sales of the hardcover edition. My initial plan of printing 1000 hardcover and 2000 paperback is useless, since I’d have to sell nearly 100% of the hardcover run to cover its portion of the costs. So now I have to decide among 1500HC/1500PB, or 2000HC/1000PB or just 3000HC (which is actually cheaper than going with the other two options, but carries a greater risk of unsold copies), with accusatory spreadsheets looking me in the eye.

Do I believe the book can sell? It’s the best book I’ve published, in some respects (I’ll have a soft spot for our first book, Adrift in a Vanishing City). I’m receiving good blurbs from critics and writers, and there are reviews coming in a bunch of venues.

But I don’t have a sales network to help sell the book into stores. I’m going to have to rely on mailings to bookstores (as well as personal visits in any areas that I happen to be around). Fortunately, I do have national wholesalers that will stock it, but they don’t actively sell the book. And if it’s not sitting on a table or shelf, with that wonderfully eerie cover on display, it’s not going to sell.

And after getting this news, and laying out the aforementioned spreadsheets with the revised numbers, what was my (entirely wrong) reaction? Why, pouring myself a gin & tonic, putting on one of my favorite records, and sitting on the back porch to watch the golden light over the mountains as the sun called it quits for the day.

Didn’t relax me as much as I’d hoped. So it’s time to sit back, blog, and watch Tuesday Night Fights on ESPN2. Not my usual practice, but hey.

Tomorrow, I’ll figure out how many copies of this book to print. I’ll keep you informed.

It’s been a week since I got back, but I’ve been way too busy to write about my mini-vacation to San Diego (7/16-7/20). The publicity work for the new book has sorta taken over my life. Now, all the review copies are sent out, and we’re starting to get some advance blurbs (including one that came in just an hour ago from Booklist). Next week, I’ll be making a ton of flyers to send out to independent bookstores all over the country. This weekend, to “relax,” I painted the walls of the “Voyant Nerve Center,” a room that was previously the bedroom of the daughter of the last tenant; the walls were pink. It’s taken me two months to find the time, but at last the walls are painted (poorly, but painted) a dark green. Pix to follow.

So I went on vacation. Now, one thing to know about me is that only once in my life have I taken a flight that didn’t involve work or my family. So I was looking forward to this jaunt to see my buddy Ian out in San Diego, recently returned from the war. He was aboard the USS Valley Forge (which I did get to tour, but did not get to take any pictures of, since I would’ve been beaten into a pulp for doing such a thing), a cruiser upon which he helped coordinate the Aegis weapons system.

I wanted the opportunity to catch up with my friend, but I also wanted to hedge my bets. If some “situation” came up, I figured Ian might have to put in extra time on the ship, so I timed the trip to coincide with the San Diego Comic-Con, geekfest extraordinaire. Another good friend of mine, Tom Spurgeon, was coming into San Diego for the Con, so I figured I could spend some time with him, too.

Over-planning complete, I dumped about 3 gigs of music into the iPod and headed to San Diego. I was stuck in a window seat for the flight, next to some middle-aged white people who wore name tags that read, “Give God Glory.” Sitting right behind them was cartoonist John McCrea (on the left in this picture, with the dyed devil-horns). We chatted a little after landing. I remembered reading some of his UK comics back when I was in college, which made him feel a little old.

At the airport, Ian and I met up, and headed out for a late dinner (subjective time was around midnight; 9pm locally) at the Turf Club. Here, you order cuts and the staff brings it to you raw. There’s a big grill in the middle of dining area, and you put your steaks on it and cook it as you like. Which was fun, especially after 6 hours on a plane, and a couple of G&Ts in you.

The next day, Ian worked from 6am-3pm, while I geeked out over at the Con with Tom, his brother Whit. I saw plenty of people dressed (you don’t know how disappointed I am that this link doesn’t have any pictures) as Klingons, Stormtroopers, Jedi Knights, Elves (replete with pointy ears), Wolverine, and a couple of guys dressed up like Neo from that bullshit new Matrix movie. There was also a hot girl who had no top, but painted a pair of suspenders on herself. I have no pictures of that, unfortunately.

I’m tired, and will write more tomorrow. I think the paint fumes are getting to me, a little.

I’m heading out to San Diego tomorrow, to see my good friend Ian, as well as some Contract Pharma advertisers. Given the amount of traveling I do for the job, I decided it’d be in my best interest to get an MP3 player. Esp. since, during my recent flight to San Antonio, I essentially used my laptop for that function. At more than 7 lbs., it seemed a little inefficient.

I had to choose between the iPod and the Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox Zen. Now that I’ve had it for a week, I have to admit, that Steve Jobs sure can make an elegant piece of hardware. The iPod may be the greatest invention in man’s history.

Revised cover (still some revisions to go) for the book is in. It includes a great blurb from Irving Malin, who called it in to Mr. West after reading the book in a 48-hour span (at least, that’s about as long as he’d have had, given the date that I sent him a review copy).

David Madden, who wrote the introduction to our edition of The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests, offered up the following (edited) blurb, too:

“[I]t takes a writer like Paul West to explore the deep psychic lacerations occasioned by [9.11] . . . Anyone who thinks he or she knows anything about that harrowing moment should read this novel; it will change their perceptions forever.”

Speaking of reviews and blurbs, if any of you Virtual Memories readers out there have a venue in which to get the book reviewed, and want to give it a read (it’s 240 pages), e-mail me. Just keep in mind that it IS a novel of 9.11, and has some pretty strong imagery.

Just got back from 28 Days Later. I’ve always had a soft spot for the director, Danny Boyle, since I first saw Shallow Grave, back in 1996 or so. I didn’t like his followup movie, Trainspotting, the first time I saw it, but it grew on me over the years. In fact, last summer I bought a poster of the opening monologue of Trainspotting (to remind me, I suppose, of all that I’ve given up so I can have my life as an alien in the suburbs).

I admit that I detested A Life Less Ordinary (but loved the soundtrack), and never watched his next movie, The Beach. But hey: It’s summertime, I’ve been stressed to bejesus over this issue of the magazine (all done tomorrow), and it’s a zombie flick.

Considering the two+ hours of my life that was wasted a few weeks ago by The Matrix Reloaded (freeway scene was fantastic, the “philosophy” was pretty much Lowest College Denominator, and the other fight scenes were over-choreographed), I figured 28 Days Later would be a decent way to spend an evening. Plus, I was hoping that at least one member of the audience would think this was the sequel to Twenty-Eight Days. Alas.

I enjoyed the movie, which is about a plague that has consumed England. The victims succumb to rage, driven to kill (and spread the virus, which is transmitted by blood). We view this new world from the eyes of a man who has been in a coma since the day it began, a bicycle messenger who was hit by a car one morning. He wakes in the hospital to find that London is empty. (For those of you raised on video games, this is done much better than the ending of the Resident Evil movie.) Eventually, he comes across an awful lot of corpses, and then some zombies (they’re not really dead, so it’s unfair to call them zombies, I know).

He hooks up with some other survivors, and learns how quickly you have to decide to kill someone if he or she becomes infected. It’s at this point that the movie then reminded me of a debate I once had back in Annapolis. At the time (1993-1995), I lived in this fantastic house, next door to the William Paca Gardens. Paca, you may or may not know, was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence.

At one point, our house was infested with mice. It took us (two guys and I lived on the first two floors, and a girl lived alone up on the third floor) several days to figure out the clues, but at that point, the problem grew severe. Not content to nibble on bits of cheese and run into perfect half-circle doorways chewed into the baseboard, they grew audacious. I was woken up one night by the sound of one trying to eat through the plastic lid of my Planters peanut container. I shuddered to imagine how huge these monsters could grow if they reached such a source of protein, so I winged my copy of the Bollingen Complete Plato across the room at the target. I missed, and the mouse darted away. But we knew we were in for a fight.

Here’s where the debate came in. The two guys and I opted to poison the mice, but the girl on the third floor insisted on “humane traps.” She felt it was cruel to poison the mice. I, despite my affection for Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, made the following statement:

“We can’t be humane to them because THEY’re NOT HUMAN. See: they’re engineered to survive. We’re engineered to live. There’s a world of difference. We live. They survive. That’s why we don’t breed dozens of children every year or two. I want them to get pulmonary edema and die in front of their families. Better that than my getting hantavirus.”

In the end, we went our separate ways. Lovan, Fred and I poisoned the mice, and Katie used “humane traps.”

This turned out to be monstrously INhumane, because Katie went away for a long weekend, traps deployed. When she got home, there were approximately 1.5 mice left in the trap. I was called upon to clean it out for her, and take care of getting some poison traps in place in her apartment. I felt like Peter Weller in Naked Lunch. And not for the first time.

Let me get back to the movie. See, the characters are in a world where they can only survive, not live. The tension (besides the threat of rage-infected zombies trying to kill them) is the way they come to recognize the greater importance of this struggle. Not the idea of dying with dignity, but of living for something more than the next day. As one character learns to embrace this, another becomes so stripped of himself that he might as well be one of the Infected. It’s an interesting transformation, albeit against a backdrop remarkably similar to the finale of Apocalypse Now.

I’m not sure about the ultimate message of the movie, which I’m still parsing in my head (and can’t really discuss without giving away too much of the plot), but it was enough to make me think, which is a hell of a lot more than the new Matrix movie did.

So, if you’re into horror flicks that you can ponder after, or at least don’t mind the sight of bloodthirsty zombies in an art film, go catch 28 Days Later. [Note: the film appears to be shot on digital video, rather than film, and this REALLY becomes noticeable in the daylight outdoors scenes. I mean, to the point of distraction. I have a feeling it’ll look better on TV, where the details aren’t magnified as much as they are on the big screen. Or maybe I’m just too darn picky.]

All of this said, I’m glad I went to a 6:15 showing of this, and not a late night one. Because the zombie thing has always creeped me the heck out, to be honest. It’s one of those recurring nightmares, a world where everyone is simply massing to get you. You know: as opposed to my daytime paranoia, where I also figure everyone is out to get me, but at least they’re not trying to devour my brain. Well, not physically, at least.

And in fact, this is one of the problems I have with crowds. Not crowds in general, but crowds that are all out for a specific purpose, like at a rock “concert” or something. One of the videos that most profoundly weirded me out was for Drive, by REM. It’s a black-and-white performance video, consisting mainly of Michael Stipe, in slow-motion, crowd surfing. There’s something so fascistic about the spectacle of it, that I was literally revulsed the first time I saw it.

[Also, the song itself is a pretty dull knock-off of Rock On, by David Essex, the latter tune my friend and author Vince Czyz so beautifully integrated into his short story, Zee Gee and the Blue Jean Baby Queen.]

Sweet dreams, baby . . .