Year: 2003

Sorry not to have written in the past week. Work’s been hectic, and my evenings have been spent at work on that Paul West book (“The Immensity of the Here and Now”). I’m going to publishing it, and hope to have it all put together in time for a hardcover release by 9.11 of this year. This site’ll likely chronicle a lot of that activity, offering some insight into the strange world of small press publishing.

And now, on with the Gil Roth Show . . .

Y Kant Gil Turn Away

I was helping put together an NEA grant application for one of my authors last night (yeah, I know, exciting way to spend a Friday night; sue me), and had VH1 Classic on in the background. For those of you not familiar with it (I think it’s only on satellite), this channel spends most of its time showing videos from the 1980s. And not just later ’80s metal bands or anything; VH1 Classic airs ridiculous amounts of great New Wave tunes and post-New Wave pop. Which is to say, it’s my childhood (youth, really) splattered on a TV tube.

Last night, during the Request Hour, they aired a video for a song called “The Big Picture.” It was from Tori Amos‘ first effort, known as “Y Kant Tori Read.” I recognized the voice and turned to watch the video. I found myself transfixed for the next 4+ minutes. Somehow, a major label felt that they needed to position this girl as Tiffany’s sluttier sister. The hair was teased up, the skirts were short, and she spent the last two minutes of the video bouncing to a beat, with the camera strategically trying to catch some jiggling.

No, really. Tori Amos. Jiggling. Now, this isn’t to say she wasn’t kinda hot, especially in the part where she was wearing leather low-riders and a little green top. But considering how her career took off when she was re-positioned as a demented art-school girl of doom (I’m generalizing; don’t kill me) a few years later, it’s sort of an amazing transformation.

I mean, there are times that I marvel over the career progression of The Beatles. They managed to go, in 4 years, from (incredibly gifted) pop music writers into innovators whose work is so profoundly uncanny that we barely recognize its influence upon us. By which I mean, a bunch of aspects of contemporary music are so Beatles-derived that we have a hard time imagining that they didn’t exist previously. Not to give them sole credit/blame for music today. In fact, they were part of a pretty insanely creative matrix of musicians that drove each other to greater heights through competition. But that’s neither here nor there.

What I’m getting at is that, given the Lilith Fair-like aspect of her later career (which, from what I gather, has led to a bizarrely esoteric recent release), it’s hard for me to imagine that she would’ve been so willing to be marketed like that back in 1988. But then, a lot of people do crazy things for fame. I’m fortunate enough not to have come anywhere close to fame, and instead have negotiated my way through a whole ton of regular life.

And, though I’ve barely listened to Tori Amos’ work since about 1995, I’ll always hold her in a certain regard. After all, without her Little Earthquakes album (plus Diva, by Annie Lennox), getting girls during my senior year of college could’ve been a lot tougher . . .

Spent yesterday down in Philadelphia, helping out my friend Robert Drake. In 1999, Drake was beaten nearly to death by a couple of queer-bashers in his apartment in Ireland, and has been slowly rehabbing since (he’s in a wheelchair now, and likely will be for the rest of his days). After the attack, his loved ones moved him back to Philadelphia, where he lived before moving to Sligo. Yesterday, I drove down from northern NJ to help move him into a new apartment. Turned out that most of the big move was done, with the furniture and TV getting moved on Thursday by Drake’s “chief operating officer,” Butch. The remaining job was moving 70-80 boxes of books to the home of Ed Hermance, owner of Giovanni’s Room, a queer bookstore on 12th & Pine in Philadelphia.

[For reference’s sake (and I know I’ll come off as vaguely homophobic here), I’m straight. I have a lot of queer friends, and one of the books Voyant has published is about as queer as it gets, but hey. Before he was attacked, Drake and I were walking to The Book Trader, and he mentioned that I fell into the “Straight, but not narrow” category. I was glad to find out this exists.]

After leaving Ed’s place, I met up with an old (girl)friend from grad school. We had tea at a little cafe (I quit drinking soda, particularly my greatest friend/deadliest nemesis, Cherry Coke, back in October), talked art and geopolitics, and probably riled some antiwar protestors at a nearby table. My pro-war stance and its rationale tend not to go over very well. My tea-companion, however, understood where I was coming from.

Many of my friends don’t. While my suburban coworkers tend to be much more in support of deposing Hussein, my friends tend to be against it. They tend to believe that it’s solely a blood-for-oil war. I understand where they’re coming from, and I don’t think it’s entirely wrong. Obviously, stabilizing the oil supply from that region would be a boon for America, Europe, and other industrialized countries. However, I’m not sure that these protestors are truly grasping the significance of 9.11 and the necessity of this pre-emptive military policy. I’ll write more about this later, when I’ve put it together more cogently.

PS: If you’re a charitable soul and want to help Drake out, make a tax-deductible contribution to the Robert Drake Health Fund, c/o Arch St. Meeting, 320 Arch St., Philadelphia, PA 19106, or call 215.629.0257.

It was a happier Valentine’s Day than I was expecting. As if in response to my Pattern Recognition complaints, something astonishing happened yesterday. I received what may be the first legit post-9.11 novel.

Background: in addition to editing a pharmaceutical trade magazine by day, I run Voyant Publishing, a small press publishing house, by night. One of the authors I’ve published, Paul West, recently asked me if I’d be interested in looking at a new book of his. We worked together last year to reissue his great novel, The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests and, though sales have been sluggish (we’ve done much better with the scatological queer porno romance mystery academic thriller novel, The Mad Man, by Samuel R. Delany), Mr. West seemed impressed enough by our operations to offer me the new book.

Yesterday, it showed up in the mail. I got home from work and found a shoebox with the return address of Mr. West’s wife, the poet and essayist Diane Ackerman, sitting at my door. Any plans of going into NYC to meet friends on Valentine’s Day were dashed. I sat down and read the first section of the book (65 pages) after dinner, and was floored. Mr. West has thus far seemed to nail down the book I’ve been desperate to see since the terrible events of 9.11. I had to restrain my impulse to call him at home and tell him that we’d publish it. There’s still 350 or so pages, and things could go awry. But I’m amazed at what he’s written so far. (My apologies for the vagueness: it’s deliberate, in order to respect Mr. West’s privacy and not give away too much about an unpublished book.)

Always thinking as a publisher (in addition to an aesthete), it warmed my heart that Mr. West chose a title almost as difficult to remember as The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests: that is, The Immensity of the Here and Now. Never hurts, with books that need word-of-mouth promotion, to use a long and unwieldy title . . .

Feb 10: Traveling to Phoenix for a pharmaceutical conference (day job). Off my head right now, mainly from not getting enough sleep (the result of a double-OT finish to the NBA All-Star Game last night, and my compulsion to finish reading Gould’s Book of Fish before this trip. It bears re-reading, which is as high a compliment as I can give a contemporary book.
I wanted to finish that one so I could have a “guilt-free” reading of William Gibson’s new novel, Pattern Recognition. I was intrigued by the idea that he set the book in 2002, basing it firmly in a post-9.11 world, instead of an indeterminate SF future. However, that reality seems barely to exist, even though the lead character is a New York resident (she’s in London as the novel begins, and has now jetted her way to Tokyo). Only 150 pages in (as if Gibson had written the previous pages before the attacks) do we get a real mention of the attacks, and Cayce’s story of that day. And it was a pretty lifeless story. The character only expresses the moment-to-moment of that morning, then glosses over everything else. While the destruction of the towers was obviously the most traumatic, emotionally devastating part of the attacks, the reshaping of the world afterward should have been much more prominent in Cayce’s psyche.

As is, there’s barely any sign that this novel needs to be taking place in 2002 (so far). Outside of the necessity of talking about a “new century,” there’s no sign of a new world. Wouldn’t cool-hunter Cayce have noticed the hip trend of banging firemen, in the months after the attacks? With all her talk of grading athletic gear brands, shouldn’t there be some mention of seeing these things on donation piles for the relief workers? Not so far (halfway in). The resonances that could bring the book more vividly into our day-to-day are lacking. Perhaps it’s a function of Gibson’s living so far from here (Vancouver), not seeing what the fruits were borne in the months after.

So I”m disappointed thus far. I”ll probably finish the book before we land, given that this flight is actually FIVE HOURS long (I thought it’d be closer to four, for some reason), and they’ve already gone through the 90 minutes of Jennifer Aniston trying to act like she has conflict (“The Good Girl“).

Feb 11: Not much improvement in the book. Read all but 50 pages before the end of the flight. Get to that tomorrow, on the way home. Plenty of action and adventure, and a sorta mystical way of making art that doesn’t sound that convincing. It’s like my buddy Tavis Allison once said about Signal To Noise, a comic by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean: “I know this is supposed to be about the grand, final film in the movie-maker’s head, but all of his descriptions of it seem to add up to five minutes of screen-time . . .”

Gotta find something else to read on the flight back. And have to pray that it’s a shorter jaunt than the trip here, when we spent almost SIX hours in the air, thanks to those darn headwinds.

Feb 12: Finished it up in the morning. Hung over a little from gallivanting poolside with margaritas, but that didn’t alter my impression the book. Not a good sign, Mr. Gibson. So it was essentially a McGuffin chase across semi-exotic settings (London, Tokyo, Moscow), a la Count Zero, except this time it’s not an AI building bricolage, but something equally implausible. It’s a fantasy world, bearing little resemblance to our own. I suppose I was hoping for a more “literary” novel than this, but when you get down it, Gibson’s a potboiler writer. I ignored his last two books, mainly because he seemed like a cheap SF knockoff of Elmore Leonard (whose work I’ve only read a smidge of). No real change here. I’m being a bit harsh, because he DOES get at some of the peculiarities of our Internet culture (though not blogs, curiously enough) in the book. But that almost exists just as a method of moving the plot along.

I’m doing this to prove a point to Chip Delany; namely, that it’s quite easy to keep a weblog. Hopefully, he’ll see the value in such a thing, given that he thinks quite profoundly about a number of subjects and might be willing to share such things with the general public.
But it’s just a thought.