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(or, “And that’s when the CHUDs came for me . . .”)

The big blackout hit yesterday. I was in the middle of a phone interview for a contract packaging article (actually, I was telling a potential interviewee that I’d like to e-mail him a list of questions, since my strep-addled throat still hurt like a mo’fo’). The computer went down, and the lights went dim, then began flickering like that scene from the Twin Peaks pilot. I finished the phone conversation, and the lights went out for good. I picked up my bag, and headed out to my car, around 4:15. I figured it was a problem with the building, but when I started the car, I realized that several stations on my radio were silent. I found a news station that reported a metro-area blackout. I started driving home, and called the office on my cell to give them that news, so they could start sending people home.

On the road, I called home to see if my answering machine was still functioning. It was! I Got the Power! I held off on grabbing provisions at the local supermarket, figuring that

A) I’ve got power;
B) I’ve got some food and snack-type stuff at home;
C) Thanks to the local Mobil station leaking gasoline into the water supply, I’ve got 6 five-gallon bottles of Deer Park water.

Well, I walked in the door at home and new something was awry. The place was too warm, given that I left the AC on when I headed out to work earlier. Lo and behold, the AC was groaning mightily. I shut it off, figuring that it was underpowered.

In my office area, the desktop PC was continually trying to reboot, then crashing as it approached the Windows screen, lacking juice. I shut that down, too. Moments later, the power went down completely. I was pissed. And I was still exhausted from getting over strep (I didn’t go into the office till about 11:15am, in fact), and still in some pain every time I swallowed.

So I sat down and started figuring out my options. I tried to call friends and family to find out who had power and who didn’t. Lines were overloaded, so it was tough to get through. The radio contended that Philadelphia was unaffected, so I tried to reach a friend down there and see if this was the case. If so, I was going to head down and stay with her (get yer mind outta the gutter!) for the night. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get through to her.

I figured that, if the heat was bad, I’d drag a futon mattress downstairs, where it’s cool, and sleep there. This would involve rearranging a recroom that’s currently in a state of major renovation. I tore down wood paneling from 1968, but have nowhere the put it right now, so the panels are sitting against the walls, with nails protruding everywhere. I like to refer to it as “the least child-safe room in America.”

Given that I was in a state of some exhaustion, and a bit fearful that the end of the world had begun AGAIN, I felt it was my best option to just sit down and stare at the wall for a few minutes. The uncertainty of something like this, not just the question of when it will be over but the reason it happened, is tough on me. Uncertainty fucks with me pretty mightily.

I settled on a decent course of action: get a whole ton of Love & Rockets comics from downstairs, lie down on the futon in the living room, and chill the hell out. If I had my wits about me, I’d have made a titanic G&T before all the ice cubes melted, but I was still a little fever-addled (which, in a sense, sorta obviated the need for a G&T). If still powerless by nightfall, I’d move everything downstairs and start rearranging the Nail-Riddled Panels of Doom (which probably would have made a great fort).

It was around 5:30. My buddy Fink had just called from Seattle to check on my situation. I told him it was tolerable, and thanked heaven that I had strep this week. Otherwise, I would have been sitting in Newark Airport waiting for that Puerto Rico flight when the power went out. THAT would’ve been a terrible situation, since it would’ve been much tougher to get out of there and back home. So there are good aspects to getting nuked with a 103-degree fever; you just have to look for them.

I was about to open up Music for Mechanics when my cell phone rang again (it plays “Hava Nagila,” which I always find funny). A high school buddy of mine was calling from his cell. He lives in NYC. I hadn’t thought to check up on him, which made me fell a little guilty.

“Gil?”

“Hey, Adam. How you doing?”

“Okay. Listen: how far do you live from the George Washington Bridge?”

“About 25 miles.”

“Do you think it’s closer than Scarsdale?”

“Depends on who’s driving, I guess.”

“No one’s driving. I’m around 115th St. right now. I’m leaving New York on foot. I don’t want to be around here when it gets dark.”

“(sigh) . . . I’ll head out to the GWB and pick you up.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll call you as I get closer, so we can figure out where to meet.”

When I say fever-addled, I mean fever-addled. I mean, I’ve got no electricity, I’m getting over strep, it’s still around 90 degrees out, and I’m about to drive toward the biggest metro area in the world at a time that people are likely fleeing like rats. Sounds like a plan!

Now, I may be dumb, but I’m no dummy. I only have half a tank of gas, which would be perfectly fine under normal circumstances, but if I’m going to be sitting in hours of diaspora traffic, I could run out, which would be NO fun. So I’d better fill up some bottles of water for the ride.

Better bring the digital camera, too, in case there’s an image worth preserving. And a book in case I’m waiting a while for Adam. And a notebook, in case I think of anything worth writing (like there’s a chance of THAT happening . . .).

But what if this is actually the first stage of a zombie plague, like in 28 Days Later? Then I’d REALLY be in trouble. Better take the largest steak knife I own. If I had more smarts, I’d have brought along one of the Nail-Riddled Panels of Doom, but hey. In my notebook, I wrote, “Note to history: If I die tonight, it’s Adam’s fault.”

Off to the Bridge. I tuned in the news stations and listened for traffic warnings. The newscasters indicated that the in-bound lanes were closed, and some traffic was being allowed out. I feared a massive snarl-up in Ft. Lee, as well as the preceding traffic foci (like the Rt. 4/17 junction). But there was nothing. I cruised to the GWB in record time, and parked at the building of my old office on Central Ave. Curiously, the Bridge was open. Cars were crossing in both directions, and the toll plaza was functioning at regular shifts. I wondered if the media were lying for the sake of keeping traffic down. After all, it’s not like people could turn on their local TV news and see how the traffic situation is. It’s like going on TV to make fun of the Amish: how are they going to find out about it?

So I walked down to the bridge, and crossed it. I’d never done that before, and it’s a shame, because there are some wonderful views to be had from the bridge. You sorta see it when driving, but I was much more at ease on foot. I took a bunch of pictures (see slideshow). I saw some interesting people, too. There were bicyclists, joggers, businesspeople and hippies. There was also a muscular black guy, wearing dark, pleated pants and a wife-beater T-shirt, and carrying a putter. No, a golf putter. Really. I thought, “He’s either got some new fashion vibe going, or he was profoundly affected by 28 Days Later, too.”

I met Adam about 3/4ths of the way across the span. He’d walked about 9 miles to get there. Heading back to the car, we noticed incredibly bad and loud music blaring a block away. It was coming from Siggy’s, a dive bar near Lemoine Ave. Adam said, “We deserve a beer. I’m buying.”

And so he did. We sat outside and had a beer. Then we got a guy on the sidewalk to take a picture of us, and it was off to Ringwood. Adam initially proposed that we begin a road trip after we refueled (power had been restored in some areas of Rt. 4), but I think he was starting to realize that walking 9 miles through NYC in the heat wasn’t going to treat him too well in the evening.

Overheard in my car:

Listening to the radio with its stories of people milling around the city, Adam said, “Did these people NOT think it was going to get dark tonight? I can’t believe people wouldn’t take more precautions and get the hell out, like I did.”

Laughter, at news reports that NYC mayor Bloomberg was offering PowerBars to people outside City Hall. “Does he have any grasp of irony?” Adam asked. I replied, “But remember: no smoking!”

Adam, an avid Republican, at one point remarked, “I can’t wait to hear the Democrats blame Bush for this.”

“We’ve heard that there are some lights visible in the southern Bronx,” said one radio reporter. I shouted, “You fool! Those are fires!”

Part II to come. If you’re lucky.

Looks like I’ve turned the corner, but only after a SEVERELY bad night. Still hurts to swallow, but it’s not as bad as yesterday.

I had to cancel my press trip/mini-vacation to Puerto Rico, unfortunately, out of fear that I’d rupture my left eardrum from the change in air pressure on the plane. I was looking forward to that trip, too…

Strep and an ear infection. Time to test the wonders of Omnicef. The doctor (first one I’ve been to since November 2000), gave me the powder oral suspension dosage to tide me over till my prescription gets filled. It tastes like an Atkins Strawberry Swirl. Go figure.

I’m gonna go be feverish now.

I’m sick as a dog, with an ear infection that took advantage of a 5-day stretch of REALLY pushing myself (magazine, book publicity work, and a friend’s bachelor party in NYC Saturday night; the latter was the final straw). On the plus side, the Bergen Record’s short piece on Voyant is out. I’ll cheer, but not too loudly, because the fever and delirium might trick me into thinking that someone else is wandering around my house:

8/10/03
“Voyant,” a word coined by poet Arthur Rimbaud, is derived from “voyeur,” one who sees, and “savant,” one who knows. But it’s hard for publisher Gil Roth, founder of Ringwood’s Voyant Publishing, to do either when it comes to predicting the public response to the company’s upcoming book: The Immensity of the Here and Now, by novelist Paul West.

“I’m hoping it will get talked about, certainly,” Roth says.

That, at least, seems likely. For one thing, West is a major novelist (The Dry Danube, Rat Man of Paris). For another, his book is about a still-hot topic: 9/11.

Most important, though, is some of the content. “It’s not very politically correct,” Roth says. “It’s full of rage about 9/11.”

It was this sulfurous element that had West bypass his usual publisher and offer a major opportunity for Roth’s one-man operation, which has published four paperback books since it launched in 1998. This is Voyant’s first hardcover book.

The book’s main character loses his memory after the 9/11 attacks; in his sessions with a therapist, he reveals a bile toward radical Islamists that may or may not reach delusional proportions (there are suggestions that the story may be happening in the future, and other world landmarks also have been destroyed). This is the classic “unreliable narrator” that everyone learns about in English Lit 101, but he’s still bound to make some readers uncomfortable.

“This is certainly not a right-wing gun-nut sort of book,” Roth says. “But this character has a lot of rage.”

Roth, also a writer, made at least one seminal contribution to West’s book: urging that West discard his original title, The Topless Towers of Illium (from Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus“).

“I told him I thought it sounded like a Trojan strip club,” Roth says.

The Immensity of the Here and Now ($23) will be in bookstores in early September.

E-mail: beckerman@northjersey.com

In response to “Tough Crowd,” VM reader Tom Spurgeon writes:

“Don’t you have it exactly backwards? I thought that Camus was in the resistance, and spent a lot of time after the war writing brutal letters and essays indicting the godly institutions for being cowards and supporting Nazi brutality.”

And he’s right! But, at the age of 20 or so, I was a bunch less informed about this sorta thing, operating pretty much on the principle that the French were a bunch of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” and so I devalued any philosophy or art that they created.

And so, to my French readers, I say, “Mea culpa!”

Oh, wait: that’s Latin. How does “Mon mauvais!” sound?

Well, anyway, to make it up to France, I’ll post a little slideshow of my trip to Paris from last October when I get home this evening (as a break from stuffing envelopes).

Sorry I haven’t written. Been busy with the magazine, the book, housekeeping, and the barest vestiges of a social life.

Things are mostly squared away with my printer. My rep is trying to get me 5,000 color postcards of the cover as a make-good for messing up on the cost of dust-jackets. I’m a little worried, insofar as I haven’t seen proofs of the book and the jacket yet, but he assured me I’d get them today via FedEx. Keep your fingers crossed.

Got interviewed by the Bergen Record last night for a short piece in the Sunday paper. My first author, Vince Czyz, recently returned from his former life in Istanbul, and has helped out like gangbusters on the publicity for this book (and Voyant in general). I’ve never been great about publicizing things, which is my biggest flaw as a publisher. I hope.

During my several trips to NYC last weekend, I stopped in on several bookstores (St. Mark’s, Shakespeare & Co., Coliseum and Gotham Book Mart), all of which seemed impressed by the flyer for Immensity. Many thanks to cover designer Sang Lee for coming up with an image that can do a lot of my publicizing for me. Speaking of which, I’ll be labeling, stuffing, stamping and sealing 400 or so envelopes tonight to send off to independent bookstores throughout the country.

Anyway, columnist Jim Beckerman conducted a 15-minute interview for the paper, which gets pretty good circulation in the NJ/NY area. I prefer the Newark Star Ledger‘s sports section over the Record‘s, but hey. When the column comes out, I’ll post a link. No photos of your humble, non-publicizing publisher, fortunately.

I spent last Sunday in the company of my web designer, John Castro, and we spent nearly eight hours upgrading the Voyant site [now defunct].

John and I talked extensively that evening, at the Karma Kafe in Hoboken, which I mistakenly assumed was actually a cafe. Turned out to be a little south Asian restaurant. We had coffee anyway, and discussed some of the more subtly destructive psychological problems I’ve been having since 9.11.

Oh, also: a few days ago, I discovered the second greatest invention in man’s history, following the iPod:

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.