Category Archives: writing

Irv Chimes In

“OK, so at this point you’ve written, let’s see, at last count, 91,180 words for this planned Book of Irv.  You’ve started another website to begin sorting through that mountain of words, which interested readers, so to speak, can find here  (along with a handful of nice photos of me) and… what?  Do you really, and I say this in all seriousness, do you really expect anyone to give even the rumblings of a shit about the life of your brilliant, bitter, complicated, charming, malicious father, no matter how engagingly you set it out?”  The skeleton looked idly off to the side as he said this, having no eyes to make contact with in any case.  

“You know, it’s an act of almost hilarious hubris, for a man with your long proven track record of non-participation in society, to think that suddenly you’ll be able to sell your idea of an engaging and soul-troubling book to a reputable publisher, be paid a few thousand dollars to complete it, with the help of an insightful and generous editor, see it published, well-reviewed, tour the disappearing bookstores and elitist universities promoting it, talk to Terry Gross and Leonard Lopate, and, somehow, get to carry on my work, whatever the hell that was.  Your own well-chosen words, Elie, from the other site:    

It is my foolish intention to carry on my father’s work by writing a book to move the hearts and minds of its readers and help to launch the non-profit of my dreams, a collaborative student-run workshop for the children of the doomed.  

“Not exactly approved by the marketing department, and we’ll get back to the ‘children of the doomed’ line in a little while. Presumably, this book will also serve to fully explain why you devoted the last five years of your life to dreaming up, fine-tuning and conducting this now dormant student-run animation workshop for public school  kids in poor neighborhoods.  After describing, in maniacal detail, how your father instilled this difficult mission deep in your heart.”

Well, yes.  I’d make sure to inform Terry Gross’s people of that larger motivation.  I’d have to write an epilogue or something covering that, so she could ask me about it.  

“You do recognize how mad and unlikely of success this plan of yours is, don’t you?” he asked with skeletal stoicism, even as he flashed his now eternal grin.  

“You know, I recognize that you can write, you could always write.  It used to torture your sister, being compared to you, because you did whatever you wanted in school with seemingly no effort, while she had to work like a dog. In fact, in all my years teaching, I don’t think I ever had a student who put in as little effort as you consistently did, outside of the many kids I had to fail.  And that’s saying a lot.”

Back up a second, dad.  We talked about this the last night of your life, my sister feeling compared to me and how hard she had to work and all that.  In fact, you used the same cliche then: work like a dog.  Let’s clear up the record here:  you agree that my sister also writes very well.  

“Oh, absolutely, she’s extremely bright and articulates her thoughts crisply, no doubt about it.  I’m just saying.  It’s one thing to have that ability, quite another, as you’ve noticed with your few attempts to close sales on your talents and ideas here and there, that selling is a completely different exercise than clearly setting out a complicated truth, moving someone’s heart or letting your creative spirit soar freely.”  

Mmmm.  Maybe better to just talk about the fucking children of the doomed, at this point, than to linger over the daunting challenges I’ll be facing as soon as I start trying to flog this book in the marketplace of screaming, idiotic ideas vying for clicks.  

“We’ll get to the children of the damned in a moment, but I have a suggestion for you first.   Those two irrelevant (to my story) pieces you linked to in that long post yesterday about the talent for malice– the ones about your former friend Andy with the mental health issues — why not stitch them together with a little living connective tissue and send them off to some place like The Sun?  There’s a dramatic arc to that as a story, much of it already told, this mentally ill eternally needy little brother mooching off you for decades, manipulating you with much of the same psychological set up as your dear old dad– the relentlessly dark wit, the fierce self-hating intelligence– and how, in the end, the only way to resolve things with him was with brutality.”

“Interesting story, I think, and it’s almost ready to stand on its own, would take little work for you to shape it into a nice piece.  And maybe you could make a couple of grand selling it to a place like that, get your foot in the door, even at this late date.”

“Same with some of the chapters you’ve written for this book about me.  How many books have you read with that long catalog in the beginning crediting where the individual chapters were originally published?  That would be the way to get started, I would think, not that I’m any kind of expert on these matters.”

I vow to you now that I will order a copy of the Writers’ Market, like I’ve been planning to do for months.  Before this day is over.

“OK, that’s a start.  I won’t mention how many times you’ve inked that phrase into your little notebooks since February, with that optimistic little eternally unchecked check box next to it.  Look, I know your life is a bit of a challenge but look at it this way: you’re trying to do something important with your life, put your talents to their fullest social use, and most people must be content to work at jobs they hate if they pay enough– and those are the luckier ones.  The masses of people work in shit jobs they hate and don’t get paid nearly enough to do.  There’s something to be said for being the kind of idealistic idiot you stubbornly continue to be, plus, you have the funds, for the moment, anyway, to go for a life of integrity as hard as you can.”

You wear me out, old man, as you always did.  I’m going to open another window in this browser and order the Writers’ Market.  Then I’ll come back and we’ll say a few words about the children of the doomed, the children of the damned, and also, a few about the children of the goddamned.

Hats Off To Larry

Sometimes it’s good just to do something for the joy of it.  I pick up the guitar in that spirit sometimes, just for the happiness of making pleasing sounds come out of it.  I write this one today in that spirit, to remind myself of the only partly sardonic good luck I have to find myself me, given the alternatives.  

Last winter I went to court, dressed shabbily, I realize now, to represent a nattily dressed fellow who walked with a cane.  A very well-spoken man a lawyer friend of mine represented.  My friend had filed and served all the appropriate papers and made a motion for a judgment on default, since the defendant never answered any of his papers.  The judge needed to hear the damages to make an award and this would be done at a one-sided trial called an inquest.  My friend was not comfortable speaking in court, and since I was used to it, I examined the plaintiff at the inquest.  With me walking him through the story, and nobody to object that I was leading him, he told his story about an insensitive Bronx dentist who had treated him badly.

“And what did the defendant do when you told him you were in pain from the temporary cap that was cutting into your gums and cheek and making your mouth raw and bloody?”  I asked the plaintiff, in the manner of Fred Astaire leading Ginger Rogers.

“He told me ‘get the fuck out of my office’, excuse me, your Honor,” he turned quickly to the judge who nodded nonchalantly for him to continue.  “Then he called me cabron,” he repeated the entire Spanish phrase which he began to translate for the judge.

“I know what cabron means,” said the judge, “in English it’s cuckcold.”  

I nodded at the judge and the plaintiff and there was no reason to emphasize that what the hot-headed dentist had actually said was “get out of here man whose wife I fuck like every other man with a dick fucks, you dickless fucking fairy.”   No point, Judge, I confirmed with a glance.

“And after the police left and you told the dentist you would get a lawyer and sue him, what did he do?”  I asked with fake innocence, since anyone could tell I knew full well the answer to this twenty thousand dollar question.

“He picked up a stack of his business cards, threw them in my face and said ‘give these to your fucking lawyer, cabron, and get the fuck out of my office’,” I nodded with obvious sympathy.  The judge was impressed by the defaulting dentist’s cold-bloodedness.  I didn’t need to add what he would have said about the court, the judge, the law itself, if given the chance.

“Here, cabron, take these for that fucking homo judge who’s going to hear this case after I wipe my ass with your lawyer’s fucking legal papers, in fact, I have a box of a thousand business cards here, wait, here they are, and you can tell the judge to have a nice time and watch the paper cuts when he shoves all of them up his syphlitic asshole.  Now, go, and please, have a very nice day, cabron.”

 This would have been overkill, I thought.  In any case, it was unnecessary.  The judge, suitably inflamed, awarded a judgment against the dentist that was, with the 9% statutory interest, about $20,000.   When informed of the judgment against him the ill-tempered  dentist remained unconcerned.

I learned today that, pursuant to some papers we filed with banks and a marshal, $12,000 of Medicaid payments, on automatic deposit to one of the good doctor’s bank accounts, was seized by the marshal.   My friend and I will split a third of that sum.  “Ha hey!” I said, “better than being summoned for jury duty.”

I called a friend who is actively concerned about me.  I don’t blame him for being concerned and wanted to give him a little upbeat news.  When I told him the story he was very happy.  When I told him I’d write it up and send it to Larry, maybe get another $250 for it, he laughed.   Then I told him, quite seriously, that I’d return to my regularly scheduled pissing and moaning now and he wisely rang off.

The good news cheered me up briefly, I have to admit.  But I’m over it now, and looking for new thrills today.

 

Correspondence with a weasel

Looking for some papers just now to serve in connection with a rare payday as a lawyer, I came across this great correspondence from my early days at law.  The first letter was sent by a guy who ripped a friend of mine off, almost 20 years earlier, for $750.  It is priceless, as you will see when you read the detailed response.

When I got out of law school, my friend asked how long a judgment is good for (a judge had agreed the man, a lawyer, owed her the $750).   Turns out it’s enforceable in New York State for 20 years, at 9% interest.  The original $750 had grown to a considerable sum over the 18 or 19 years.  I grabbed that sum from his bank, legally freezing the amount owed in his bank account.  

When he found out he called in a rage, to tell me that I was a fucking low-life, scum of the earth, goddamned fucking piece of shit.  I allowed that all this might be true, but I was more interested to know if he would consent to the money being released to my client.  He was not at all mollified by this reasonable approach, cursed me louder and hung up on me.  

Later that day he decided to take the high road.  Here’s how it went:

November 2, 2000

via TeleFAX  

Dear Mr. W____,

I take strong exception to your heavy handed collection methods on behalf of your client.  This is an eighteen year old matter which has had no activity during the intervening years.  Simple inquiry would have revealed that I am a member in good standing with the New York Bar, and that I still own, reside and work at ___ Street., Brooklyn, the situs of the dispute between Z___ and myself.  A telephone call or letter would have sufficed.  Your behavior is typical of that which increasingly places the legal profession in disrepute in the eyes of the public.

Please send by return FAX any and all documentation regarding Z___’s claim, whether in your possession or Z____’s possession.  Additionally, please send me any and all correspondence between yourself and Republic National Bank/HSBC or any other institution which in any way relates to any attempt at collection in this matter.

If you do not intend to comply with this request please so inform me by return FAX.

You may rest assured of my best intentions.

Very Truly Yours,

To which I apparently replied:

Brother I____:

I regret that you found my collection methods heavy handed but I had little reason to expect you to pay this debt voluntarily, as you proved me right by not accepting my offer to lift the bank restraint if you paid it voluntarily now.  

I relied on the representations of my client that you would do everything in your power to avoid paying the money as you had demonstrated a pattern of unwillingness to pay this $750 debt in the past; first when you breached your contract with her, then when you refused to pay Judge Michael H. F____’s judgment after trial, when you made an appeal that you never perfected and later when you brought various counterclaims that removed Dr. Z______’s next Small Claims case from the jurisdiction of the Small Claims Part– brought because there was no acceleration clause in the contract you had with her and the court had instructed her to bring a separate action for the remainder– to the Civil Court that you then had adjourned at least twice and finally defaulted on.  Only the fact that M___ Z_____ was a pro se litigant saves you from having the marshal levy on twice the amount you still refuse to tender.

I had little reason to expect good will on your part and, in light of your attempts to weasel out even now, I’m glad I took the certain route to a tiny fraction of your wealth.   

Regarding your belated discovery request (discovery is only permitted in Small Claims actions with prior judicial approval, by the way) nothing requires me to provide you with copies of anything, you have the ordinary access to them through the channels you know so well as an experienced attorney.

Yours sincerely,

(and I might well have signed it)

“Juan Snyde-Bastid, Esq.”

A taste of blood to a shark

Sekhnet periodically goes on a strict diet, cutting out most of the foods one should avoid to maintain a healthy weight:  bread, pudding, pasta, desserts, fried food.   During these healthy times she refuses to take even a bite of any of these foods.   “It’s like giving blood to a shark,” she says, “if I have one bite I’ll have to eat the whole thing, and more besides.”

I’m thinking about that because, while I spend at least an hour a day tapping here at the keyboard, taking a sharp knife to my words and hitting “publish” at the end, it is only recently that somebody else took a dull knife to my words, published them and sent me a check.  

“Cah-ching!” I said, as I signed those babies and fed them into the ATM.

Got a taste of blood, after years of honing rows of teeth to a razor sharpness.  One may quibble with the things I write here, wonder about a man with so much time on his hands, so seemingly unable to do most other things that normal people do.  

The hour or two I spent tapping out a thoughtful piece on the word “motherfucker”, for example, is it really worth writing about, for f-word’s fucking sake?  (unsuccessfully searched this blahg for the piece I wrote about the fascinating etymology of the word and my father’s didactic role in bringing it to my attention.  Maybe it was on my previous blahg?)

Anyway, that’s it.  I got a taste for blood now.  I want a nice tall glass of it, and another one after.

 

You Want to Laugh, do you?

I rarely find myself reading something and laughing out loud, LOL!  I don’t think I’ve ever ROTFLMFAO, but on rare occasions something in print tickles the old funny bone and makes me roar in my chair.   This bit did zee trick, LOL!

The author, always funny, was a good friend in high school who I lost touch with (or, ‘with whom I lost touch’, if you prefer the stick up the ass).  I stayed friends with her ex-husband and, through an on-line magazine he writes for that pays a few bucks for 1,000 word pieces, I discovered more than a dozen written testaments to Helene’s wicked wit yesterday.  There are a few tragic ones among them, although even those are leavened with her distinctive irony, but scroll down the list, every one is worth reading, and none more than 1,000 words or so.  

The list of Helene’s stuff  which she just reported bears the editorial mark, here and there, of that lovable “scamp” who improves good work with a deft, sometimes daft, touch (hey, Larry, where are you when the reader needs you?) is here.   Czech ’em, but only if you want a larf.

Writing for Pay

Writing for pay, like doing anything for pay, is not a job for the squeamish.   Squeamish, we are informed by a wonderful dictionary I have somewhere, means “exhibiting a prudish readiness to be nauseated.”  Such prudish readiness is not a desirable quality for a person entering the marketplace.  You want to do business in the marketplace and never be nauseated?  Good luck, pal.  That’s why you write here on WordPress, after all.  Here on a blahg read by a small handful, nobody will ever randomly change your words in exchange for a check.  On the other hand, no check for $250, or even $5, will ever be mailed to your home to pay for  your single malt scotch.   So get over it.  

I mean, really, isn’t it churlish, childish and even a bit arbitrary to be upset when a sentence that you wrote:  

It was always hard for me to understand how a man with my father’s many great qualities could be such an intractable asshole.

is rendered:

It was always hard for me to understand how a man my mother absolutely adored could be such an intractable asshole.

There is meaning, there are shades of meaning, and things that simply mean what they mean, if you know what I mean.  I can easily understand that many people love other people who are intractable assholes.  It may be another thing to recognize the lovable qualities myself, even as I also see the intractable asshole.  But that, I suppose, is simply nuance.  And nuance, as we all know…. fuck nuance.  You want nuance or a check?  Your choice, it’s a free country.

Cliches are another thing.  Just because I avoid them like the plague doesn’t mean some editor will be able to resist quickly swapping in the familiar rather than yielding to the more precise description I’ve put together.  

But I am a whiner by nature, as should be clear to anyone who has read even a couple of these posts.  In fact, instead of writing my next pay day, a generous fee for not a lot of work, something I sat down to do, I am whinging here about how hard it is to see even the most innocent and well-meaning violence done to my inviolable prose. 

Wee wee wee.  Or as the editor might style it:  oui, oui, oui.

 

Schmoke

“Schmoke,” says the Israeli firmly, with that delicious pronunciation of the Yiddish word schmuck, which comes originally from the German for jewel, but, by reducing the man to his ‘jewel’, his procreative parts, renders him ridiculous, a putz, somebody who should know better, much better, not an idiot exactly, because not stupid, but something worse than an idiot, a kind of schvantz.   Which is like calling a dog “a tail”.  

“Nu, very interesting, schmoke,” says the Israeli, not interested at all.  “People do not buy an idea, no matter how ingenious.  You have an ingenious idea, that’s wonderful, mazal tov.  We are happy for you, your idea is the idea of a genius.  There’s no question, genius idea, wonderful, we love it, honestly, we love the idea.  But to sell an idea….” he stretches the phrase out, drawing out “sell”, watching you lean forward.  He waits, taking his time, to emphasize his point and to emphasize that he’s a successful salesman talking to a schmoke.

“Fucking Israeli,” you say, but it’s worse than saying nothing, really, because you actually said nothing.

“You do not sell the idea.   Only a schmoke thinks you can sell an idea.  An idea, it’s like a flavor, a gas, a color, you can’t hold it in your hand, you can’t touch it.  An idea you can’t sell.  You can only sell the implementation of an idea, the system for delivering some version of the idea.  If you don’t realize that by now you have been trying to put together the wrong puzzle, I’m sorry to tell you.”  

“Fucking Israeli,” you think, but the guy makes an excellent point.  Worse, he knows he makes an excellent point.

“People don’t invest in you because you’ve got a brilliant idea, trust me.  They don’t really care about the idea at all until they read about how it’s been put into practice, until some other genius explains, in a prestigious journal, how you managed to take this genius concept and actually put it into practice.   Took this amazing thing you imagined and made it real in the world so every idiot could point to it and say– hey, look at that amazing thing!  I need that!  Think of that schmoke Steve Jobs, the fucking genius Jesus of Technology they are making all these movies about.  His idea, I put all your two thousand long-playing records on something so sleek you can fit between the cheeks of your ass, the sound is better than your fancy quadrophonic stereo, I’ll put ten thousand albums on it, I’ll put fifteen thousand albums, and movies too, and a hundred of your photo albums.   If he can’t deliver it and make you pay whatever he tells you you have to pay — you never heard of Steve Jobs, I guarantee.  I hate that schmoke, personally, but you have to recognize what he did.  It wasn’t the ideas themselves, though they were smart ideas, things nobody thought of before, but the way he delivered them.”

He leans forward and pours another round from the bottle on the low glass table.  Under the table polished tiles glow in the golden light of the small city holy to three major world religions.

“I don’t call you a schmoke to mock you, please understand.  I say it with love, or at least with rachmunis.  It’s hard to have integrity in a world like this, OK, almost impossible.   You want to live as a man with integrity, better be very rich.  If you are very rich, you can have as much integrity as you like.  If not, well, I’m very sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, and I know it will not go down smooth, like that scotch you brought over here– and I thank you, it was a wonderful thing to do and I hope you will do it every time you come see me– I’m sorry to break this fartlike news to you– you say ‘breaking wind’ right, it’s a fart?– but the working man has only the integrity of doing his work well.  Ideas can be terrific, but they are not the same as work.  Work is what you have to do to make your idea real.  If you can show me the thing that is in your head, or better yet, have somebody else show it to me, a very beautiful girl delivering perfectly the excellent script you wrote for her, then we can do business.”

“Otherwise,” he looks for a second at the caramel colored liquid catching the light in his glass, “please, don’t waste my time.”  He tilts back his glass in the Jerusalem sunset and savors his drink.  He closes his eyes, smiles, shakes his head as if he can’t believe it.   “Oh, Jesus Christ and Jesus of Technology, this is good whisky and you are a very nice guy, even if you are, also, and I mean this in the best possible way, a complete fucking schmoke.”  

What did you think you were going to hear, schmoke?

Stats Corner

One thing I love about baseball is the stats.  You can look at a sheet of numbers next to a bunch of names, arranged as a box score, and quickly learn virtually everything about the game these people played.  Few stats are as straightforward as the numbers in a box score, though, of course, a blooper that falls in and rolls is indistinguishable from a shot that caroms off the wall at 120 mph.  “That will look like a line drive in the boxscore,” says the announcer of the dribbler that stops halfway to the hot corner as the runner reaches first and gets a perfectly valid base hit.  Most stats can be manipulated any number of ways, like words, moods, standardized test scores, economic numbers, people who want to please, fearful souls, etc.

WordPress offers stats, along with your free blahg.  Stats let you know how much traffic your site is getting, how well your little on-line journal is doing as far as readership.  You can see, for example, how many visitors you have on any given day, week, month, year.   You can see the numbers of likes, comments, views.  I look at these from time to time and nod, observing what an obscure little corner of cyberspace the gratuitousblahg occupies.   Rearranging the stats like the entrails a sooth sayer in the time of Caesar studied for omens of the future, I see this smiling augury.

Screen Shot 2015-10-04 at 3.41.27 AM

Not a bad trend, I think, coyly trimming off the tell-tale column to the right that shows the actual numbers.  But look at the trend, if you will; it is the trend I am getting at here with this chart.  I have reason to feel slightly encouraged by the steady uptick in annual visitors, do I not?  In ten years time, at the present rate of increase, I will have as many visitors in a year as the average porn site gets in a few hours.  Progress, by any measure, I’m sure we all agree.

Stirring the entrails with my stick to divine further trends I notice an odd contradiction in the stats.  Although I’ve stopped complaining about it, as much as I am able to, long time readers of these posts will know I’ve often sung sad songs about the difficulty of getting any feedback on anything.  The echoes from my adversarial childhood make me more susceptible than some to the sting of silence by way of response, though I think anyone  who expresses herself does so with some hope of a response.   (Note the sensitivity of my gender choice there, gentle reader.  I was encouraged to do this in law school, of all places.  Funny, I know.)

The most dependable form of response in real-time, something that, sadly, cannot be heard in cyberspace, is a laugh.  A laugh is also gratifying because it’s usually honest, spontaneous and an instant of blessed relief for everyone involved.   Not so with a response to other kinds of expression– they require both thought and action, even if each might take only a few seconds.    

Much non-response is simply the result of most people being too busy to read, hear or watch something they thought was pretty good and then take even more time to type “nice”.  “Nice” seems insufficient, so after a moment of searching in vain for a better four letter word they sensibly move on to the next thing.  

On top of the fast pace of modern life, it also doesn’t even occur to most people that a person who spends time creating something would be gratified by the encouragement, even as they applaud even a mediocre live performance (writing isn’t a performance, read it publicly, then we’ll clap) and most people remember to compliment the chef at dinner when a new dish is served (hey, nobody asked you to serve me this crap, bub).   Social behaviors change when people are anonymous, which is whey they created the “like” button, although the chart for gratuitousblahg likes is too ambiguous a little mountain range to be of any use to us here.

There is pleasure and satisfaction to be had from doing a thing as well as you can.  These excellent things are not to be sneezed at.   Recognition that the thing is well-done, interesting, has provoked a thought or feeling, welcome as the validation might be, well… no one can hear you shake your head in cyberspace   Anyway,  have a look and quick ponder at the next telltale graph, comments on the blahg since its ‘launch’ in August of 2012.   And, please, no comments, this one’s on me.

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