In Which I Hawk My Book (Half of It, Anyway)

Self-promotion is vulgar, but no one else seems to be announcing or covering the release, so I feel the urge to make a gesture of doing so myself. Anyway I have put out the first half of my novel, available either in hardcover book or downloadable form. Of course I would have liked to publish the whole thing together in one volume but the final draft came to 765 pages and the press had a limit of 700 pages to make me a book. Here it is.
I am very happy with the product as a physical object. It looks like a serious, real book, it is bound nicely, has good-quality paper. In these it is really almost indistinguishable from a new hardcover release by a real author from a major house.

The cover and spine. It reminds me of library binding, but that is not a negative, because I love library binding. It makes for a very solid volume. I own many copies of Great Books that have library binding, such as Thucydides and William James's Psychology, that actually seem more substantial when read this way.

I don't expect anyone to pay the listed price for the hardcover book, which is absurd (and especially as there will be another volume coming as soon as I can format it and get it together), though I suppose I could try to promote it as an opportunity to get a rare first edition of a future classic. As I didn't anticipate huge sales in any event, and having worked on the book for eight years and had it sitting in various places in my house with the possibility either of fire or my premature death weighing on my mind for six more, I decided to indulge in satisyfing my own longstanding dream by getting the hardcover. I am happy I did. If you would like a copy, and your request is reasonable (I'm not sending 100 copies to somebody I don't know with a mailing address in Russia or anything like that), e-mail me and I will send you one (gratis, of course).

My decision to print this was because I was finding that having it exist nowhere in a book form even though I was finished with it was preventing me from being able to devote my full concentration on other literary projects, which I really want to do, because that is what I devoted my youth to the study and practice of, and it is sort of the only, if not skill, serious discipline that I have. Seeing the book exist and on the shelf is exciting, and does make me enthusiastic to write and have printed up other things. I know that I am not an English or French gentleman to be indulging in these personal eccentricities and pleasures by having my writings bound as if I am in any way descended from that tradition of competent and interesting amateurism, but it is a tradition that I like.

Obviously I am printing the book also because I do feel that it is worthy of publication. It probably could have benefited from a certain amount of professional editing, but doing it all myself I was unable to determine what more absolutely had to or ought to go, and so left it as it was. I still need a lot of work with naturalistic dialogue. There is dialogue that I think is good, but it is not naturalistic, and vice versa. As the main frame of the book's action was constructed in 1995-1996, a lot of it will seem dated now; people do not have cell phones or the internet in it on one hand, and on another hand, the level of interaction between social "winners" and "losers", people who are quite wealthy and people who are middle class, the comparatively humble lifestyles even of the better off young people compared to the extreme character of these things we have become accustomed to in the years since may not ring true from a contemporary viewpoint. However the way they are written about in the book is the way I perceived them at that time. I think if the book had come out in 1999, which was the original goal, one could have said it was a promising debut. That promise has probably dissipated--there is a lot of stuff in this book, especially the humor, that I just couldn't do now. I've lost it. I'm also not sure that I am smarter now than I was then. I know more, and understand more, I suppose, but I find that this knowledge tends to paralyze my thought and capacity for experience, because of all the doubt and conflicting ideas that it produces on every occasion, so that I do not really have anything even nominally to offer most of the time.

You can enjoy a preview of the book here. My back cover blurb is a little over the top. It was not quite real to me when I was doing it, and I figured no one was likely to ever read it anyway, which so far has been true. Here is if you want to buy it. I guess you can get the preview by going here too.

Referencing an earlier post in which I confessed my lack of acquaintance with most the oeuvre of Walt Whitman, I was reminded of it again when I was in Philadelphia recently and was confronted with the product listed below at a barbeque I attended (the host, knowing of my literary interests, had very thoughtfully purchased this beer just for me). Walt Whitman ale is, for reasons that I think are explained on the bottle but which are forgotten, a kind of blond hefeweizen type drink. It was good, I'd give it a 7.5-8 rating. I wanted to pour it into a glass and show my audience its beautiful color but my wife drank the last remaining bottle (I brought some home with me) before I could do this.

Walt Whitman--"When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"

It's short, so I might as well type it out for anyone who hasn't already got it memorized:

"When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."

Gil Roth, over at his site, has a semi-regular feature on famous authors of whom he has never read anything. Apart from this single 8-line poem, which I read for the first time when I was 38 years old (judging from the Internet, everyone else apparently reads this in high school; but as I attended three different high schools, I must have managed to miss this whenever they read it at any of them. I avoided ever having to read The Lord of the Flies this way as well. On the other hand, I got to read A Separate Peace and Great Expectations twice), I am 0-fer on Walt Whitman, and that includes the rest area, which I believe is south of Exit 6, where I always turn off to go to Pennsylvania. Since many people consider him to be the greatest poet in the history of the United States, as well as one of a very small handful of genuine literary world-geniuses that America has ever produced, this is a rather significant omission. I expect if I can manage to live another ten or fifteen years I will get through the whole Leaves of Grass someday. It is on my List somewhere, and I will doubtless adhere to my List unless some exciting vision of a different course of life jolts me to leave it off and pursue another line, which seems unlikely. Normally I would hold that it is better to be acquainted with the greatest achievements in any field as early in life as possible, that one may have more years to be able to incorporate their animating spirits into one's own intellect and person in a somewhat natural-seeming manner; though at the same time it is perhaps one of life's understated, though I think inevitably disappointing thrills to have a few potential treats left to anticipate for the slog of middle age. Besides, I admit I have always been a little wary of Walt Whitman. His champions tend to present him as a kind of authentic, almost perfect American--earthy, unrepressed, self-created, alive to the subtle rhythms of the language and life of the new world. His persona thus manages to be both a repellent and a reproach to me at the same time, for I am the absolute opposite of this type of American--i.e., I am the hidebound sort--and thus can expect little affection from anyone who considers Walt Whitman a prototype of our best type of selves. Given the poem's evident place in the current intellectual life of the nation as a high school staple, I am not going to indulge in any earnest analysis of it. You may assume I, a man of wide reading and experience of the world, understand its insights more than adequately. Of course when I tried to answer the two questions on the poem in the GRE test guide which is the source of my reading list I missed them both. The first one was: "All of the following oppositions or contrasts are present in the poem EXCEPT" (A) applause/silence (B) scientific analysis/mysticism (C) mathematical certainty/error (D) light/dark (E) group/individual. The correct answer was (C). I chose (D), not because I actually thought it was right either--I guess the question involved too much complicated thinking for me--but because I figured that contrast was too obvious/ mundane to merit serious consideration in a masterwork of poetry. The second (of course there had to be a second) was: "Which of the following words has more than one meaning in context?" (A) Figures (line 2) (B) Measure (line 3) (C) Applause (line 4) (D) Mystical (line 7) (E) Perfect (line 8) Th answer was (E). I think I refused to play the game at this point, like the cats who refuse to push levers and demonstrate logical thinking skills to receive food in science studies as mice and dogs do. One could interpret any of them as having a double meaning, except applause. I thought both questions were rather weak, really. I certainly hope the reason for my having to spend most of my life warehoused at a great remove from any kind of living society of learning and litterateurs is not due to these kind of subtle, teeny-tiny little faux pas. I'm sure it is not, is in most part due to failings of much vaster and probably insuperable import with regard to understanding what art, thought, etc, and their relation to the vital life signify. But still, the small failures constititute a substantial part of the big.

Having established now that I probably don't have the slightest understanding of what the poem is about, I suppose it hardly matters whether I liked it or not. This is a blog entry however so naturally I am going to try to tell, anyway. Here is what I wrote in my book: "I like it, I see it, the American atmosphere. Nature being outside the lecture-hall for a man to indulge in is well-(?conuited). Word choice good. Poem is good/it effects, it is quite ingenious." Oh my. I also thought significant the "forces of reason/science" represented by such words as "proofs", "figures", "ranged", "columns", etc, and thought the word "moist" supposed to evoke life. On a few further perusals I do still like the construction of this poem, the unlikely subject/conceit, and the amount of punch that is packed into a very small space of lines. When I said, "I see it" however, this was a bit misleading. I see it as a construction of my imagination, as what I think the atmosphere of America as presented by Walt Whitman is supposed to look like, but not as any kind of immediate participant in its language, its attitude, the feeling it conveys. I have failed as yet to connect with it on any surer ground than this.

Due to the bridge named after him which connects Philadelphia with Camden, New Jersey (where he lived most of his later life and is buried), people in that part of the world still have to invoke Whitman's name aloud a lot (I think this gives him a lot of power/positive energy even from the regions of the dead, doesn't it?), which, according to the local colorists, they pronouce as "Wall Women". For the record, as someone who lived--well, at this point, only about half my life--in that area, I assure you, the only people I ever heard pronounce the poet's name in any way resembling "Wall Women" in reference to the bridge were such as had actual learning or speech disabilities.