Blog

Sorry to have been away so long. I’ve been too busy making excuses. The stack under the hall table is long gone. All the books are downstairs in the old rec room, which I’m planning on turning into a library/study. Spent yesterday evening tearing away about a third of the wood paneling that’s been on those walls since before I was born. I have visions for what to do with this great space, but no expertise. I hope I’ll be more diligent about it than I’ve been with this blog.

The Immensity of the Here and Now is at the print-on-demand company. I should have 75 review copies pretty soon (another week). Website to follow, provided my buddy John’s able to update voyantpub.com.

Got to show off my lack of Jewish observance, the past two weekends. First, I was invited to Sabbath dinner two Fridays ago by the family that hosted me on Passover. The father’s an American-Israeli rabbi; the mother’s Yemeni. They have 5 kids. Their Judaism is an ecstatic process, filled with impromptu singing and a love of God.

The mother seems to be obsessed with “making an honest Jew out of me;”thus the invite to Shabbat. I warned her that I’m not a very good Jew. Though I can transliterate, I can’t read quickly, and don’t remember very many prayers from my childhood at Hebrew school. More to the point, as I said to her, “There are much better ways to start a 25-hour period of rest and contemplation than by going from New Jersey to the upper east side on a Friday night.”

But I went, met some eligible women I wasn’t too interested in, bantered wittily, prayed, and ate. It was a lovely evening, but I felt like an alien, just like I did at Passover. Not because of anything they did, but because of a certain social ineptitude that I have. I have this real problem with just Letting Myself Go in company. When the people broke into song, slapping rhythms against the long wooden table, I found my back growing stiff and I felt out of place.

This isn’t only a function of being around devout Jews. Last fall, at my friends’ parents’ farm-house up in Granville, NY, I found myself weirdly withdrawn when the other 5 or 6 people at the house began “percussing”with all manner of drums and other instruments (NOT in a Robert Bly drum circle kinda way, mind you). They fell into each other’s rhythms so easily, I was flummoxed as to why I couldn’t get into it. And, of course, the moment you start thinking, you start over-thinking. (One of the few times, in fact, that I was able to get over this stuff was at a party held by the same friends (John & Liz), where I got wrecked, and bongo-ed my way through a couple of songs on Stop Making Sense. Who needs to think when your feet just go?)

This Saturday, I was invited over to a Shabbat/Shavuot lunch, at the home of a girl from high school, whom I’d only seen once since 1989. A far-left, non-religious, suburban Jew back then, she had transformed in the intervening years. At our 10-year reunion, we learned that she’d become an observant Jew (I hesitate to use the word “orthodox,”as it conjures stereotypical images of black hats) and wouldn’t be showing up that Saturday evening until an hour or so after sunset.

(I should point out, by the way, that I LOVE reunions for exactly that reason. It’s not simply the catching up with old friends that I enjoy, but the completely unexpected curve-balls you get thrown at you, like Dorothy becoming Devorah, or Greg the football thug becoming a hypnotherapist. I don’t think my career is particularly shocking to old acquaintances (everyone assumed I’d be “a writer,”), but my willingness to live in a quiet suburban world might freak them out a little.)

Anyway, Dorothy/Devorah invited me to her Shabbat lunch, where she and I talked for probably the first time. We didn’t get along back in high school. We corresponded a few times, following the 10-year reunion, but not extensively. So, when I began telling my stories, revealing the curious histories of my family, she was surprised. It’s a cliche, of course, to think that your life is completely normal, but I really did go many years assuming everyone had tales of immigration and “old country”stories that entailed six or seven old countries. It’s only been in recent years that I’ve realized these stories are exotic little treasures for average Americans.

What happened to the immigrant spirit? The more time I spend in that aforementioned quiet suburban world, the more it seems like people only have stories of their own pasts, that they’ve lost the stories of ancestors overseas.

Maybe it’s part of being a first-generation American, but I can’t really get in the mindset of people who had American parents. It’s a foreign experience to me (ha-ha), not having people who Came Here. But then, that’s sorta why our family went to see the Cosmos, not the Yankees, when I was a kid.

I’m rambling, but any of you who’ve ever spoken to me know that this is pretty mild, as far my rambles go. I’ll go into more details of Saturday’s lunch later.

Sorry it’s been so long. Between the move (to the house I grew up in, which is unbelievably quiet and serene), the June issue (which will be done tomorrow, come hell or high water), the book (which went out to a POD company last week for review copies), and the ads I have to get made (for the new issue of Poets & Writers), I haven’t had time to write. But I plan on getting back to writing by the end of this week, probably kicking off with “The Lama and the King,” which I’ve wanted to write for a while. My main opus, “Gold/Stopwatch,” will have to wait a bit, till I’ve done more research and more cogitating.

But right now, it’s back to 3000 words on biomanufacturing, and another 1800 on the results of my magazine’s annual Salary Survey (item of note: the “most frustrating aspect of the job” for people who earn more than $150,000/year is “inadequate compensation”! Bite me!)

God is love.

No updates lately; sorry. Since returning from Puerto Rico (loads of fun, informative press tour, the discovery of rum and mofongos), I’ve been overwhelmed by the new book, the June issue of the magazine, and an impending move (less than two weeks from now). More soon.

I’m on a press trip in Puerto Rico this week, as mentioned earlier, and it’s been sorta tough to get any blogging done. The perfect sunlight tends to, um, make too much glare on the laptop’s screen. Yeah, that’s it.

Anyway, this morning, before heading out to the beach from my most excellent hotel, I trawled through the news and performed my usual morning info-ablutions, courtesy of CaribeNet‘s high-speed network ($14.95/day charged to the room, but it’s a necessary business expense, since the business center downstairs charges $25/HOUR (!) for net access.

During that time, I read Derek Lowe’s recent blog entry (Pfizer’s Shell Game) on the Pfizer/Pharmacia merger. Derek’s blog (In The Pipeline) is a great venue to get an idea of what’s going on in the intersection of drug development, business, and culture. I liked it so much in its previous incarnation (Lagniappe), that I asked Derek to contribute a regular column to my magazine, Contract Pharma. The first time we paid him is when I realized that Derek Lowe is NOT a pseudonym, and that he had no particular interest in the #2 pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.

I appreciated Derek’s entry today, not least because I tried writing a pair of editorials (I’ll post them when I’m back in NJ) in that vein about a year ago, when several major mergers were being floated in Big Pharma. Derek seems to have hit the nail on the head in the fundamental fallacy of Bigger-Pharma-Is-Better-Than-Big-Pharma: throwing more money at R&D doesn’t make your rate of success increase (and it may just slow down drug development).

Every industry goes through phases of major consolidation and, in some respects, Pharma (and Biopharma) has actually gotten to it much more slowly. The FTC and other groups make sure that no company has too large a share of the Pharma industry, forcing companies to sell of drugs in fields where it might otherwise dominate. I don’t have the numbers in front of me to determine the new Pfizer/Pharmacia’s market share (and I’m too lazy to look it up), but I’d bet it’s less than 15%.

What the merger seems to be about, coming so shortly on the heels of Pfizer’s 2000 acquisition of Warner-Lambert, is covering up short-term R&D problems by buying another drug pipeline. In my editorials on the subject, I talked about this concept, and how it just can’t work in the long term. At some point, there’s going to be no-one to acquire with a meaningful pipeline, and the burden of integrating tens of thousands of new employees is going to wreck the organization.

The question I had then, and still have, is this: Does sales-and-marketing mean more to Pfizer than research-and-development? It’s a tricky question, because without new drugs there’d be nothing to sell, but it could easily be argued that Pfizer bought Pharmacia because it was tired of co-marketing Celebrex (and its successors) and wanted to get the total share of the profits (and perhaps maximize them beyond the efforts of the two separate companies).

The fundamental point of Contract Pharma, is this: If you don’t do something very well (that is, as a core competency), pay someone else to do it. Otherwise you’re just wasting resources that can be focused on what you do best. It’s long been stated that what Big Pharma does best is develop drugs, and sell them. I’m just wondering which one’s more important to them.

Spoke to Paul West earlier (and, for a brief moment, his lovely wife, Diane Ackerman), to make sure we were on the same page regarding his new novel, The Immensity of the Here and Now. At present, I’m wrapping up the process of selecting a printer. This is the first time Voyant has put out a hardcover release, and that’s a different proposition than making paperbacks. The plan is to combine printing of both hardcover and paperback (with the paperback going on sale a year or so after the hardcover), so as to keep overall costs down (even though I need to put out the capital to print the paperbacks that will sit unsold for a year).

Estimates from the dozen or so printers I’ve solicited range from $X to $XX (I don’t want to give away too much info). I mean, there’s literally a 100% range between the bottom and top bids. In fact, the highest bid comes from a company that always sends ridiculously high bids. It’s strange, because this company really goes out of its way to advertise how it handles short runs, sends nice sales materials, and makes plenty of followup calls. But this is the 4th straight job where they’ve come in thousands of dollars above anyone else, with no particular value added. At this point, I included them in the bidding process sort of as a joke.

But, since I now have a pretty good idea of the costs, I’m pretty confident in the cover price that the hardcover is going to carry. This is important because, without it, I can’t send out promotional materials to bookstores, reviewers, etc. Now I can finish up the layout of the book itself, and send it out to a print-on-demand company to make 50 uncorrected proofs of the book. These can then get mailed out to the aforementioned reviewers, as well as people we hope will provide early blurbs for the book.

[Meanwhile, Mr. West will go over one of the uncorrected proofs and turn it into a corrected proof, sometime before July, when I plan to send the final book to the printer (at which time I’m going to need to have a cover design ready for both HC and PB versions: eek!)]

All this needs to get done by the end of the week, since I’m leaving for a business trip/vacation on Saturday to Puerto Rico. I’ve never been there, but it sure oughtta be nicer than hanging out in Jersey all month.

Been battling a blocked toilet pipe all weekend. Not that you all needed to know that, but the headline pun was too good to pass up. Sorry.

My favorite flick of all time, soon to be released on DVD!

I have to surrender. Recent visits to the Strand (plus that outlet mall from the Hugo Boss entry) has added way too many titles to my “to read” pile under the hall table. New titles:

Max Perkins: Editor of Genius – Scott Berg
Delirious New York – Rem Koolhaas
Essays of EB White
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – James Agee and Walker Evans
7 Types of Ambiguity – Wiliam Empson
Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don”t Care” – Lee Server

The only things I’ve read, which will hardly help shrink the stack, are Daniel Czuchlewski’s terrible novel, The Muse Asylum, and Tom Stoppard’s recent Coast of Utopia trilogy of plays, Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage. I’m reserving judgment on the latter till I see it staged. My initial response was of such absolute bewilderment that I have to assume that I’m just missing something that’ll make more sense on stage.

So, in an effort to clear out a little space under the hall table, I am going to admit defeat: I’ve read 90 pages of Underworld, and I’m flummoxed. It’s just a terrible book. The baseball section that gets such praise is so poorly written, filled with such ridiculous pronunciamentos about the nature of the game, that I had to struggle to keep going. But that only led to some sort of idiotic performance art exhibition in the desert. The writing is just lifeless, and filled with inanities passed off as profundities. A buddy of mine once commented, “People like DeLillo for the same reason that kids liked Youngblood back in the 1990s: they feel like it’s not far beyond their own capabilities. It also explains the popularity of Tom Wolfe (the one in the white suit).”

Or, as my senior thesis advisor once put it, when I asked him if he’d read White Noise: “No. Well, I read a few pages of it, but it felt like it was the novel that a lot of professors want to write. That’s not a book I’m very interested in reading.”

So Don DeLillo can kiss my ass.