Category: literature

Posted on

Tongue-tied and painful

© 1990, Dan Clowes
© 1990, Dan Clowes

This month marks the 13th anniversary of one of the dumbest thoughts ever to cross my mind.

I was covering the annual Toy Fair for a trade magazine. Held in February in two buildings on the west side of Madison Square Park in NYC (it’s moved to the Javits Center now, I think), the fair brought together makers of toys, gifts, games and children’s products with distributors and retailers, to hash out orders for the next year. For some exhibitors, it was a big media event, with trade and consumer press conferences for product launches.

On my first day, I rode a cramped elevator to visit a crib-maker whom I needed to interview. Or maybe it was a breast-pump maker. That’s not important now.

What is important is what happened when the elevator reached my floor and the door opened. There was a man in front of me. I would say we were face to face, but he was at least six inches shorter than me. Still, his face was instantly recognizable.

And as we stepped aside to get past each other, I had the dumbest thought ever: “Wow! One of the toy companies actually hired a Gilbert Gottfried impersonator for the event!”

A moment or so later, of course, I thought, “You idiot! No one could make a living as a Gilbert Gottfried impersonator! You just missed your chance to –”

— to what? As I headed to my appointment, I wondered what I would actually have said to Gilbert Gottfried: “Love you on Howard Stern!” “You should’ve got more screen time in Ford Fairlane!” “Can you do that Arthur Godfrey impression for me? Or the senile Groucho Marx?”

I have to admit, I’d have been tongue-tied. Of course, he would’ve been incredibly uncomfortable, too, but that’s little consolation.

* * *

A few months later, at the annual Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association annual show in Dallas, I found myself sitting beside Jean Kasem in an overstuffed food court. She was at the show to promote her line of boutique cribs.

I’d wised up since that February and realized that this was actually Jean Kasem and not an impersonator or robot duplicate. Still, I found myself unable to acknowledge her, although I did have a joke that I simply didn’t have the balls to deliver:

I would have gone into Italian teamster voice and said to this towering, lovely, blonde woman, “I know you! I know who you are! You were on Cheers! Goddamn: Rhea Perlman! Right here at JPMA! Man! That is AWESOME!”

* * *

A year or so earlier, I went to see Bob Mould play at a 400-seat hall at Georgetown. The hall was inside a campus building and there was a long line snaking up the stairs to get to the door. Mould, on the way up the stairs, had to wait beside me on the landing for a few moments, waiting for people to move aside so he could head backstage.

Standing beside him, I thought, “I have no idea what to say right now.” It’s not that I was totally in awe of him, but the first few things I thought to say were inappropriate:

  1. “I really love your music.” – Well, yeah, you’ve paid to see me perform, so I got the idea that you like my stuff.
  2. “Put on a great show tonight!” – Should I? I thought I’d just half-ass it and cheat my paying audience.
  3. “Good luck!” – Why don’t I kick you square in the nuts?

So I just said, “Hey,” and he did the same, and then he went up the stairs.

* * *

I’ve gotten a lot better with this stuff over the years, as I’ve met or bumped into more “famous” people. Part of it stems from realizing that they’re still people. Sometimes, ignorance helps too, like the time I met Frank Miller at a friend’s birthday party. In this case, it helped that we’d been talking for almost half an hour before I realized that he was Frank Miller. A friend of mine admitted that he would have genuflected before Miller all night if he’d been at the party.

But I admit, having adored Miller’s work throughout my teens, that if someone had pointed him out to me beforehand, I probably would’ve either avoided talking to him, or come up with some incredibly elaborate opening comment that would have made him really uncomfortable.

Which brings me to my big question:

What living celebrity (artist, actor, athlete, etc.) would cause you to have an absolute fawning meltdown, and why?

(I don’t mean like my Bob Mould story, where I couldn’t think of anything good. I’m talking Chris Farley meets Paul McCartney level of tonguetied-ness.)

Posted on

Payback!

Evidently, if you click through this

us_banner_kindle_468x60_04_08_115

and order a Kindle 2 from Amazon, I’ll get a 10% kickback!

I really like my v.1 Kindle, and the improvements in v.2 aren’t significant enough for me to upgrade, but if you’re on the fence about whether to get one, you can read my rambles about the device in general here, here, and here.

My biggest complaint remains that the store doesn’t have all the semi-obscure (read: less commercial) stuff that I read, esp. that Everyman’s edition of Montaigne.

Posted on

6th Bloggiversary!

Today’s the 6th anniversary of Virtual Memories! Congratulate me!

I’ve had a lot of fun doing this, and I hope you readers have gotten something good out of it. I’m always glad to find that there are people reading my stuff. At my day job, I was kinda shocked the first time I was at a conference and someone mentioned a joke I’d put in my From the Editor page. I’ve gotten more comfortable with the idea of that audience, and I’m thrilled that there’s some sort of readership for this site, too.

As a treat (to myself), I’ve gone back to the second post I wrote (the first one was just a test item). You’ll find it hard to believe, but it was about whether I’d get around to reading the huge stack of books under my hall table! Some things never change!

So let’s go back to the list and see what I finally got around to reading from those days since 2003:

READ

UNREAD

Looking over that “unread” list, I don’t have a ton of regrets. I’d most like to get around to reading D.H. Lawrence, maybe the Schama book, and Byatt’s Possession. Of the ones I did read, I rank Little, Big at #1, then Gould’s Book of Fish, then all the rest.

I’m going to try to read those Stoppard plays again sometime, since I just didn’t follow them well enough. I was probably just reading for volume, which is never a good idea.

Thanks for coming by. And please leave comments, if the spirit moves you.

Posted on

0-forum?

When I was a small press book publisher, I was put on the Comp list at Bookforum. Despite not having published a book since 2003 and closing down the company in 2004, I’ve remained on the freebie list. The new issue arrived last week, on the heels of my 0-fer festival (here, here and here).

So, of the 60+ books that got reviewed in this ish, how many of them was I interested in reading about, and possibly buying?

Two: The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews by Robert A.M. Stern and Herbie Archives. (Curiously, Dan Nadel’s review of Herbie — a comic book about a fat guy who gets superpowers from enchanted lollipops — was placed in the nonfiction section of the table of contents.)

I still need to check out William Vollmann’s essay on why Nazi photography is creepy. Or maybe I don’t. And Tom Vanderbilt’s review of books on how the suburbs and the internet are alienating or fragmenting or something seems pretty blatherous. I did have high hopes for this Richard Price interview, but then I discovered that it was a Richard Prince interview.

I’ve been going on lately about my inability to read contemporary books, but I realized that I should check to make sure I’m not full of crap. To that end, I checked through the last 3 years of my list of All The Books I’ve Read, sorted by date of publication, and realized that I am full of crap! Here’s a PDF of 2006-2008, each year sorted by book-date.

I decided to include all books from that year and the previous one as “brand spankin’ new,” arbitrary as that seems.

  • 2006: 5 new books (2 novels), 11 overall published this decade, 35 overall
  • 2007: 7 new (4 novels & 1 play), 14 from this decade, 31 overall
  • 2008: 8 new (6 novels), 13 from this decade, 29 overall

So I guess I have been more susceptible to book-hype lately! Or there were a bunch of good books out last year. Still, maybe I should follow the suggestion of one of my newer readers (hey, Zeke!) and put a ban on any books that are fewer than 3 years old.