Tom Petty

Irony: a FB user claims that it's Tom Petty's fault that his father was an alcoholic and drug addict; and that same FB user has a cover photo with the words "MY DESTINY IS MY OWN!" Yes, folks, that's irony. Unintentional irony.

30 years ago or so, Tom Petty described one of the fundamental ironies of life in this land: when you get rich and famous, all of a sudden you get lots of stuff for free, which you could easily buy now, and which you badly needed back when you couldn't afford it.

Petty was very intelligent, very perceptive, very sensitive to the plight of the poor and abused. A lot of that intelligence went into his lyrics. He also was very talented musically. This combination made for songs which touched people. Those songs made us feel as if we knew him personally. We didn't know him, but if felt as if we did. He wasn't that FB user's father, but it felt as if he was. So a lot of us feel today as if we've lost a good friend, or a father or brother or cousin.

So maybe cut us a little bit of slack for a change.

Petty was born in Gainesville, Florida, in 1950, was inspired to be a musician by Elvis and the Beatles, dropped out of high school shortly before graduation to concentrate full-time on playing in a band, and BAM! just like that, 11 or 12 years later, suddenly he could afford to buy all the Nike shoes he wanted, and he didn't even have to anymore.



It's not just millions of us listeners who have been blown away by his single "Free Fallin'" -- Petty himself said he was amazed when the song came out of him. He said it was like a bolt of lightning which came from nowhere.

Of course, it came from the same place as all of the other great songs which Petty wrote or co-wrote. Still, it just goes to show that if you work very hard for decades at something you care about, you might have moments where what you produce is so good that it even surprises you.

Not to step on yr shoes if yr favorite Tom Petty recording is something other than "Free Fallin'". There are many, many great Tom Petty recordings. I'm going to stop now. RIP, Mr Petty. And thanks.

Exile, A (The) Literary Quarterly

I obtained, I do not remember when or how, Exile: A Literary Quarterly, vol 16, no 4, copyright 1992. Probably between 1994 and 1997 in NYC, where I obtained many books and literary journals for free or nearly free. I know I didn't pay anywhere near the price listed on the front cover, $25.00, neither 25 American nor Canadian dollars. Exile is published in Canada.

Like its price, Exile: A Literary Quarterly, vol 16, no 4 is huge for a literary Journal: over 500 large-format pages, around 8 1/2 by 11 inches, I'm guessing. The paper is thick, the volume weighs so much more than any other volume of a literary or scholarly journal I've ever hefted.

Is it also much, much bigger than any other volume of Exile, I'm wondering? I had never seen a different number of the publication, although I'd seen a few more copies of vol 16, no 4, until I bought a copy of Exile: The Literary Quarterly, vol 27, no 1, published in 2003 -- bought it via Amazon Marketplace a few years ago. The Amazon listing didn't say how many pages it had. Imagine my disappointment when it arrived, just over 140 smaller-format pages, about an inch less tall and an inch less wide than the big one from 1992.

The front cover of the one from 1992 has a photo of an Irish poet I'd never heard of, John Montague. Had he just passed away, was the 1992 number so much bigger because it was a tribute issue to Montague? No. He's also published in the 1998 issue, which mentions that he "became, in 1998, the first Ireland Professor of Poetry." He's still alive now at age 87.

Sometime between 1992 and 1998 they changed the A in the name of the quarterly to a the. But there's no doubt that it is the same publication. among the many hints are the identical quotations from Borduas ("Together we will undertake[...]") and Cortazar ("The only true exile[...]") at the beginning of each volume, and the identical editor, Barry Callaghan, replaced some time between 1992 and 1998 by his son Michael.

Maybe all of the earlier numbers are indeed like vol 16 no 4, which would be great, because it is awesome not only in size but also in the selection of authors and artists whose work is printed there: Atwood. Pasolini. William Kennedy. That Montague guy. Croatians, Swedes, Germans, many, many Canadians. On and on.

The prospect is too great. I can't believe it, it's too good to believe, that one number after the next was just as immense and impressive as that one, 4 times a year for years. Vol 16, no 4 must have been a special occasion, for some reason which I have not yet been able to discern.

I cannot find out for sure now by buying every number of Exile, A and The, currently for sale on Amazon. That is not within my current budget. If I win the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature the week after next, I'll be able to buy them all -- but if I win the Nobel I probably won't have to buy any of them, because someone at Exile will read this, and, instead of helping someone who actually needs it, will send me every back issue for free, because of the Tom Petty Ab-So-Lute-Ly Backwards Law of Microeconomics. I suppose it's possible that some nearby university library has every issue of Exile.

Wait, maybe I have discerned why vol 16, no 4 is so splendacious and large: the publisher/editor/poet Barry Callaghan slips in an Afterword just before that long huge list of contributors, mentioning that his dad, Morley, had recently passed, and that "these books, these fifteen years in exile, are dedicated to him."

Hm. I'd read that Afterword before but somehow I never put the huge size and immense quality of this number together with the dedication of fifteen years' worth of the journal by Barry Callaghan to the memory of his Dad.

Now, after 20 years of wondering and having read the Afterward several times, now suddenly it seems obvious.

You see, I'm really not terribly bright. Please help me, someone.

In conclusion, France is a land of many contrasts, and literary journals are fun and mysterious and show how big and rich the world is. Not so much like most TV.

What Do I Have In Common With James Joyce And Ludwig Wittgenstein?

Well, first of all, obviously, they could write their asses off, like I can. They were autistic, I'm autistic. Joyce (1882 -1941) and Wittgenstein (1889-1951) didn't win the Nobel Prize in Literature (and it's not awarded posthumously), and I haven't won it yet. I'm not dead, but I'm freakin 54. Dead, no, grumpy, yes.

Doeblin, Musil, Allen Ginsberg, Ezra Pound, -- didn't win Nobels. All those Scandanavian writers nobody's ever heard of who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, you know who didn't? August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen.

Today they announced the 2015 Literature Nobel, and as you can see, I'm not taking it well. They awarded it to some Belorussian lady, I'm sure she's a wonderful person and very deserving, yada yada, and that her books are magnificent, blah blah blah.

So. Maybe I'll have a great year between now and next October, a huge year, become rich and famous. If I do, of course, it will greatly increase my odds of winning a Nobel ("for his hilarious, poignant and profound blog posts about why he deserves it"), and of course, because of the Tom Petty Ab-So-Lute-Ly Backwards Law of Microeconomics, it will also mean that I will no longer NEED one.

James Joyce really could've used one, that guy dedicated himself to his art, and his art didn't sell during his lifetime. Vincent Van Gogh all over again except that Joyce handled the commercial failure and lack of fame much better. (And better than I am at the moment, yeah, yeah.) I don't know whether Wittgenstein really needed a Nobel, he had a day job as a Cambridge professor.

But it still woulda been nice.

Still. Most Nobel laureates have been magnificent writers, that's why I feel I'm not going out on a limb to say that Svetlana Alexievich probably is too. Who knows, maybe she's so magnificent, and the prize will give her enough recognition, that it will be she who finally turns human life away from its nightmarish aspects, and then I won't need a Nobel even if I don't make a huge splash.

Whatever.

I Haven't Watched Charlie Rose In Over 30 Years

One of the best jobs I've ever had was also one of the worst in that the wages were exploitatively low: $80 a week in 1995-96. I was an usher in a theatre showing Steve Martin's play Picasso at the Lapin Agile. (Movie stars' salaries make headlines, but there are a lot of low-paying and even non-paying jobs in show business, and the producers and studio execs who make more than movie stars and manage to keep their finances out of the news make money off of the movie stars, and the people being paid very little in non-union jobs, and the people not being paid at all. Unionize.)



I could've gone home when the play started, but night after night I stayed and watch the play. It was incredible. It's set in 1904, in the Lapine Agile, a bar in Paris where Picasso hung out at the time. Albert Einstein was never there, but this play is not strictly realistic, and in this play he pops in. 1904 was shortly before he published the papers on relativity and photoelectronics which made him famous. In the play the proprietors of the bar have a ridiculously, hopelessly, unnecessarily complicated system of bookkeeping, which it seems they will never untangle, but young Albert quickly does some amazingly complicated math in his head to help them out. Then people ask him to tell them about himself. Instead of saying he's working on academic papers, the way he puts it is that he's writing a 70-page book about "everything." Someone asks him how many people would have to read his book for him to consider it a success, and he gets the same abstracted expression of his face that he had just a little while ago when he was doing the complicated math in his head to his the bar's owners with their messed-up accounting; and after a while he answers, "One. But it has to be Max Planck."

That doesn't make Einstein as different from other writers as some might think. Sure, all other things being equal, the more people who read my blog, the better. But one person reading my blog, or something else I've written, and then commenting favorably on it, could make me a successful writer all at once -- if that person is Oprah Winfrey.

Or possibly if it were Charlie Rose. I'm not entirely sure about that. Like I say, I stopped watching his shows 30 years ago, because the way that he constantly interrupted his guests, not only verbally, which was bad enough, but also by waving his great big stupid hand in their faces for them to shut up, was driving me mad. So why did I watch his show to begin with? Because he had very interesting guests. And I gather he still does. I gather this partly by channel-surfing past his show and seeing the face of some extremely-interesting person -- as interesting as Cate Blanchett and Salman Rushdie and 4 different Presidents and Harold Bloom -- and partly by hearing extremely-interesting people talk about having been on his show in venues other than his show. Does the amazing list of guests make me want to repent and give Rose another try after 30+ years, see if he's become somewhat less unbearable? No. On the contrary, it make me angry that all of those amazing people continue to prop this jerk up by appearing on his show.

I hope I've made the intensity and unreasonableness of my dislike for Charlie Rose vividly clear.

Still, I suppose that Rose could make me famous. Not Oprah's Book Club-famous, probably, but he could give me a huge boost. I think sometimes about whether I would refuse to appear on his show. I know, I just finished denouncing a teeming host of wonderful people for appearing on his show. I also suspect that I've made it impossible that Rose will ever want to interview me, with this post, if it wasn't already impossible because of other things I've said and written. But maybe Rose is a very magnanimous guy. Maybe he doesn't interrupt nearly as much. Maybe he's stopped with the waving of that big hand in his guests' faces.

(The fact that the guests were so great, even 30 years ago, was what made the interruptions so unbearable. You can understand that, right? I tuned in to watch -- say, Steve Martin, or Ted Kennedy, not to watch Rose talk about Martin or Kennedy while they struggled to get a word in edgewise. Hot tip, Charlie: if you're fortunate enough to have a great speaker appear on your show, LET HIM OR HER SPEAK YOU BIG GOON!!!)

Whether or not to grit my teeth and betray my principles -- and maybe take a strong prescription pill or 3 -- and go on "Charlie Rose" -- that's the sort of dilemma I want to have. And just like the Tom Petty Ab-So-Lute-Ly Bassackwards Law of Microeconomics, the more likely it is that I will ever have a chance to appear on the show, the less likely it will be that I will have any incentive to do so, because, although Charlie Rose could single-massive-handedly make me rich and famous, it's unlikely that he would want me as a guest unless I were already rich and famous, or at the very least, already speeding toward rich and famous.

Anyhow. Whether Oprah or Charlie are ever involved at all in my career rise, or even if they both actively oppose my rise because I've criticized them, if they're petty that way -- the more people who read my blog, the better. I'm doing everything I can think of to get the attention of the publishers and agents and other people who could help my career, including asking my readers, repeatedly, begging them, to mention my blog whenever and wherever they can. My ambition is naked. Yr darn tootin it is. I'm not trying in the least to hide that fact that I want to be a huge, huge, huge success. I know that some people advise those who are ambitious to hide their ambition, to pretend to be humble, and even pretend not to want honours and promotions. (But take the honours and promotions anyway of course, just pretend to do it unwillingly and with protestations of unworthiness.)

Whatever. I'm going a different way. It's one less thing people can accuse me of being insincere about.

Let's Get Serious And Get Me the 2015 Nobel Prize For Literature

For one thing, it would be a resounding slap in the face of the Tom Petty Law of Microeconomics, which is: It's Ab-So-Lute-Ly Backwards. This law occurred to Tom in the 1980's after he and the Heartbreakers had become superstars, and Nike, having noticed that several of the bandmembers seemed to favor their shoes, invited them to some Nike warehouse in order to give them all the free shoes and other Nike items they wanted. The band chose so much stuff that it wasn't clear at first exactly how they were going to be physically able to haul it all away, until some bright Nike employee went and fetched some huge beautiful supple leather Nike bags which were also given to them free, and it was about then when it occurred to Tom that It Was All Backwards, because it had not been too long before that when the band had been so poor that one free pair of shoes for just one of them would have made a significant positive impact on their economic outlook, but back then nobody was giving them free stuff, cause the world doesn't just go around handing free stuff to poor people cause if it did how would they stay poor?! and now they could easily have afforded to buy all of the shoes and book and shirts and jackets and other Nike clothes they were being given, and even those magnificent huge leather bags (the bags seem to have really impressed Tom), but it was all just a fraction of the free stuff they were getting because they were rich and famous, and the rich and famous get tons of SWAG ("Stuff We All Get") because It's. All. Backwards.

Because It's All Backwards, The Nobel Prize with its seven-figure cash component is generally given to writers who are massively successful, who already have massive book deals, some even huger film deals as well, and therefore don't actually need the cash component of the Nobel.

Well, I actually do. (Of course, Microeconomic Backwardness being what it is, as soon as I win the 2015 Nobel for Literature, the publicity will lead directly to book deals and other sources of income and Stuff so that very very soon, I won't need those seven figures Because. It's All. Bass. Ackwards. I am not immune to the Bassackwardness.)

One other thing may be bothering some of you: wondering whether I actually write well enough to deserve the 2015 Nobel. It's okay, you don't have to be afraid to admit this to me if that's what you're thinking. It doesn't upset or surprise me. You probably aren't familiar with all of the schmucks who've won this thing. Go read some Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson, Heinrich Boell, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Pearl Buck, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Sigrid Undset, Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan, Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam, Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf and Bjørnstjerne Martinus Bjørnson, and then come back here and try to look me in the eye and tell me they all wrote better than I do. (Heads up: you won't be able to do it, because it's a dirty, dirty lie.)

Don't get me wrong: most of the Nobel laureates for literature are great writers. But clearly, greatness is not the only qualification for the prize. And even it were: c'mon. I'm pretty good.

And so to business: I don't know exactly who all of the regular readers of this blog are. It's possible that among you are enough Nobel laureates for literature and others responsible for awarding the prize that this is already a done deal, in which case: I sincerely thank you in advance.

But there is the possibility that few of those people read this blog regularly, in which case, you, my other readers, must bring it to their attention. Mention whenever and wherever you can that I'm a wonderful writer and that I should get the Nobel this year.

I realize that, even after all of the excellent points I've made in this post, some of you probably still think I'm silly, and are laughing. So -- tell people that. That's a perfectly acceptable recommendation, in my opinion: "Oh, this idiot, what he writes is just so absurd that it makes me laugh and laugh, and shake with laughter with tears pouring down both cheeks, laughter which consumes and relaxes me until I feel as if I'd had a wonderful long full-body massage." That's a positive statement, it will encourage others to read me, and among those others will be some with enough taste that they'll want to mention to still others that I deserve the Nobel, and so on and so forth. It's all good, Homestyle! Don't think that your contribution to this worthy campaign is too small! It's not! We must all pull together on this rope.

I can offer one more incentive: imagine being part of a campaign which results in a Nobel laureate whose Nobel Lecture, in its entirety, will be the following:

thnk yu verr much pleez

It will be the best-known, best-loved, most-often-cited Nobel Lecture of all time.

(Hemingway -- ha! Please. He's a joke! "He kissed her hard. She pulled away, whispered 'You b-st-rd' and held him tight again. Over her shoulder he looked at the Seine." Okay, I'm out. I can't write that badly on purpose for longer than 3 short sentences without collapsing in a heap of laughter.)

The Tom Petty "It's Ab-So-Lute-Ly Backwards" Theory Of Economics

Not long after they had suddenly become rich and famous, around 1980 or so, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were contacted by Nike. Someone at Nike had noticed that several members of the band seemed to like to wear Nikes. The band were invited up to Nike headquarters in Seattle to take their pick of the latest Nike stuff. Not just shoes but also jackets and shirts and hats and boots and whatever. All free, of course. Nike's point of view was that these guys wearing that stuff was cheap advertising for them. Whether Nike's reasoning was economically sound or not here, Tom and his band soon had picked out so much really nice free stuff that they were starting to wonder just how best to haul it all back home. A Nike employee said not to worry, ran off and soon re-appeared with all sorts of really nice leather bags. Also free, just in case you wouldn't have assumed that.

It was about this time, as Tom was admiring how beautiful these bags were, with really soft and supple leather and linings inside which were luxurious to the touch and so forth, that he realized that, in his own words, "It's ab-so-lute-ly backwards." It had not been very long ago that the economic circumstances of the band were such that a new pair of sneakers were a purchase which had to be thought about carefully, and their shoes often got holes in them before it seemed practical to replace them. Now that they could afford to buy any new shoes they wanted, more shoes than anyone really needed, and really nice luggage to haul all those shoes around in, they didn't have to anymore. (Whether Tom and his band had been flown up to Seattle and back home again in one of Nike's corporate jets or whether they just dropped in when they were in Seattle on other business, I don't know.)

A few years after that, Stephen King, who had already earned many millions of dollars from his fiction and from movie and television screenplays and screen adaptations of his work, was making his debut as a feature-film director on Maximum Overdrive. In addition to his salaries as director and screenplay author (based on his short story "Trucks"), King got a $1000 per diem during shooting, which he never touched. King was not necessarily what you'd call obese in those days, but he wasn't missing a lot of meals either. Apparently he got all he wanted to eat from the caterers on set, then every evening he would come back to the hotel suite he wasn't paying for and toss the envelope with the tax-free $1000 per diem onto the bed he wasn't using, making a substantial pile of envelopes by the time shooting was done.

That was in the mid-80's. Surely the biggest Hollywood per diems today, for, say, George Clooney or Ron Howard or Steven Spielberg, make that $1000 seem pretty pathetic. (You know that villa on Lake Como in Ocean's Twelve where Toulour lived, where Ocean confronted Toulour? In real life that was Clooney's house -- no, excuse me: it was one of his houses. It might still be, I don't know. Maybe in the meantime he's traded up to a fancier Lake Como villa, if there is one.)

It may sound as if I'm enviously sniping at some of the rich and famous, but I'm really not. For one thing, all the people I've mentioned here are rich Democrats. Better them than the Koch brothers. Much better. All I'm saying is that I've discovered a very basic principle of economics, or, to be more precise, that principle was pointed out to me by Tom Petty: if you want to have all sorts of wealth flowing into your possession without your even having to ask for it, the surest way to achieve that is to get into a position where you don't have the slightest need for it.