No blog for you!

Ha,  ha,  just a little blog humor there. Seriously, it’s when reality—family,  friends, or anal retentive,  dingleberry-chomping fellow employees who spy over your shoulder and report to your boss that you’ve been “spending too much time on the Internet,” forcing me to write this out in a word processing document—intrudes.

Suddenly,  you don’t have a blog entry for days! Weeks! Months!

Really, I have no idea

So how do you get “back on track” and make sure your blog gets the attention it deserves? Here’s six surefire ways that you will put your blog back in business:

1) Lots of bulleted, numbed list. The Internet is a scannable medium,  so you should make your blog as scannable as possible. Even though for a writer such as myself, making a written document “scannable” is akin to saying, “Nobody gives a fuck how well-crafted your sentences are or well-formed your ideas may be — I AM ON LEVEL 129 OF ANGRY BIRDS JUST GIVE ME YOUR FUCKING INFO DAMNIT

2) Links ahoy! Make sure there are a lot of links in your blog to other sites to related content. This generates credibility with readers, and ensures that you get lots of hits from people wanting know if Joshua Bell is gay or not.

3)  Short sentences. Short paragraphs. Short entries. Short short short.

4) Lots of entries, few words! Which is good for someone like me who has nothing to actually say.

5)  Keywords in bold. BOLD IS GOLD!

6) Great headlines. In headlines,  always put a number,  proper noun or a benefit to attract readers, such as “The 6 Ways I Will Reenergize My Blog.” Or “12 Ways the Tea Party, Koch Brothers and the Republican Party Suck Donkey Balls” or “How to Make Millions and Have the Greatest Time Ever Through Reading This Blog*.”

6A) (TOTALLY AWESOME,   SUPER-SECRET BONUS WAY THAT I WILL REENERGIZE MY BLOG): PØ?N! And lots of it!!!

Also,  I could actually think something through,  commit the idea to virtual paper,  and post it here. But that would take work. And who has time for that?

Blogito, ergo sum

*Rob banks, pay for prostitutes.

 

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Auster, a writer whose work I admire, was taking questions following a reading at my graduate school, and I’d asked him about his apparent obsession with money in his fiction. I imagine he was so sick of addressing this particular issue that he turned into a literary anti-superhero and tried killing his questioner with laser beams springing forth from his pupils.

Funny, I don’t mind being asked about my obsessions—in fact, I can talk obsessively about them.

They are broad and minuscule, sublime and ridiculous: The Mayor of Casterbridge, the Cubs, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Elvis (Presley and Costello), certain unknown bands from my hometown, the nature (and unfaithfulness) of memory, Jackie Chan, evolutionary psychology, Spinal Tap, certain movie stars, astrophysics, criminalizing Bud Light.

Also, big numbers. Not the kind of numbers used in counting money, or grains of sand, or even atoms in the universe. Larger than that.  Numbers like Graham’s number, considered the largest number ever used in a mathematical proof. (And if you will stick with this mess, I’ll actually show how this relates to writing. Or fiction. Or Paul Auster’s glare. Or all of them.)

Graham’s number is named after one R.L. Graham, who used it in a proof dealing with an really, really hard mathematical problem. What is fascinating about Graham’s number is despite the fact it was actually put to use, it is beyond human comprehension.

Yes, you can use it but not comprehend it.

The only way I can explain Graham’s number is via exponentials. (And if I mess up the math, please feel free to correct me).

Starting with: 3³ = 3x3x3 = 27, which you already knew. But add another 3 to the top of the exponential string–just one–and you get the following: 3^{33 =327}=7,652,600,000,000 (That’s 7.65 trillion).
By adding an additional three to the stack, and it’s: 3³³³ = 3³²⁷⁼ 3^{7,652,600,000,000}.

Don’t try this at home

Which means multiplying 3 by 3 more than 7.6 trillion times. In other words, stacking four 3s on top of each other creates a really, really big number. So big you can’t calculate it—3^3^3^3 is by far more than all the atoms in the observable universe (10⁷⁰).

Simply stack “3″s that another 61 times (yes, for a total of 64 times) and you get Graham’s number, which is so far beyond the realm of human comprehension that it beggars the imagination.

Compare it to something most of us are familiar with: the googol (the number, not the site engine that deposited you here in search of pr0n-o-graphic pictures). A googol is 10¹⁰⁰—a 10 with 100 zeros behind it.

A googolplex is 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰—a googol a googol number of times. A googolplex is so enormous that if you tried writing out the number, and put each “0″ on an atom, there wouldn’t be enough material in the entire universe to do so.

Now consider this: Graham’s number is far, far, far larger than a googolplex, which is to Graham’s number as an electron is to the Milky Way.

In a sense, Graham’s number bigger than infinity, for infinity is at least comprehensible. To me, Graham’s number is another way of saying that numbers, which are a human invention, exist in their own dimension independent of comprehension. We understand the universe in ways that we cannot understand. Is that the coolest, most amazing, facinating thing ever?

What, you say that it’s not?

The most humbling thing in the universe

OK, so I’m a nerd. In a different life, I would have been a mathematician, if that life actually included aptitude with mathematics. Instead, I became a writer, but one of my preoccupations is describing the cool, the offbeat, the indescribable—like Graham’s number or Elvis Presley or the Cubs.

Like Paul Auster’s fixation with money, I am obsessed.

And if we aren’t obsessed with something, we really shouldn’t be writing.

 

First, the fellow scribe. Among the many lowlights of my graduate program in creative writing was the first fiction workshop. It was a complete catastrophe, as I was the only first-year student and perhaps the only student who wasn’t partially or completely insane.

The first inkling of trouble was “Jennifer.” In the very first class, she presented a novel excerpt about a farm family growing up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and I can objectively say that the result was appalling. Not simply the plot, characterizations, or even the writing itself, but the grammar, spelling and punctuation.

Here’s an action-packed sample:

She said You want to see a man? Ill show you aman.”

We walkd to the creek which I new from swimming in first grad. “Yousee that overthere Thats Fred. He aint got no close on Hes a man”

I said I dont know what your talking about”, but I kept watching

At first, I wanted to give Jennifer the benefit of the doubt and thought she was trying some Joycean experiment with form. When I asked about it in workshop—”Is there any reason there’s a lot of punctuation missing?” was how I put it—she simply said no thats a roughdraft and sorry if theres mistakes”.

I don’t know what was more appalling: Jennifer’s apparently inability to spell or use proper punctuation, or the fact the rest of the class didn’t think it was a big deal.

Pitt of anachronisms

When I protested that the least a writer should do was turn in a manuscript relatively free of errors one might associate more with a second-grader than a 26-year-0ld graduate student, I was hooted down (though it was a learning experience. So to speak).

So when I saw “10 Writing Mistakes Smart Bloggers Make,” I could only think of Jennifer. That, and the end of civilization.

For these “mistakes” are not those of logic, style, length, design, or any other intellectual or aesthetic considerations, but largely of basic grammar:

1. Confusing You’re and Your
2. Using could of and would of
3. Abusing the word ‘literally’
4. Confusing their, they’re and there
5. Confusing affect and effect
6. Apostrophes
7. Confusing to and too
8. Confusing lose and loose
9. Abusing “unique”
10. Text speak (“LOL,” “OMG,” etc.)

Your literally making me piss my pants, because I could of known their effecting blog’s effectiveness too loose the most unique badness of writing. STFU.

Oh, I’ve been guilty of all of these errors save for the last, but not out of ignorance. (Mostly because I was too lazy to check my work). What makes me believe that the end of civilization is nigh is that we even need a list like this in the first place. If “smart” bloggers need to be told that there’s a difference between “their” and “there,” it’s just a matter of time before the video gamers, illiterates, brain-dead jocks and the Jennifers of this earth simply swoop in and take over.

A failure within an epic fail(ure)

The fact is that soon, not only will “smart” people routinely make these mistakes, but nobody’s going to correct them. Improper usage will be considered correct.

And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it except whine. Which I am known to do on occasion, and do quite well. Literally.

 

Well, dadgumit. Just dadgummit.

Yeah, I’m a country boy from West Virginia, but you can stop making assumptions right there, mister. Even though you may think I sound like I’m a hillbilly, I’m pretty smart. Doggone smart.

I just wish I were still a Michigan Man™, if I ever was one.

After a school from Starksville, Miss.—Mississippi! hell, we even make fun of Mississippi in West Virginia!—trashed the Wolverines the other day, my boys are no longer my boys.

That’s because I lost my job as head football coach from the school that has more wins than any other in college history, that has the largest stadium in the country, and the greatest helmets known to humanity. Of course, if my defense hadn’t been as loose as a hooker at a traveling salesman convention…ah, forget it.

Now, this here Bookfraud fella went to Michigan, and tells me he covered the football team for the school paper or some crap when that there Bo Schembechler was coach. And the quarterback was Jim Harbaugh! The Stanford smarty-pants coach who everybody thought was gonna replace me before some NFL corncob offered him $8 billion to coach the 49ers! Dadgummit!

But I ain’t here to complain. I made my bed, leaving my alma mater three years ago (man! Were those Mountaineers pissed!) so I could go chase the big time. Bookfraud wants to act as if he’s productive as a blogger, but he’s really a lazy ol’ coot, so that sumabitch asked me to fill in today.

Here’s the thing: I read a lot, but I can’t say I’m a big writer. But the more I think about it, the more I gotta say there’s more than a little sumpthin’ similar to writing and coaching. At least at Michigan.

Now Bookiefraud still writes, he says, and I never met a sportswriter who was worth more than a loaf that a bear tossed after eating a fried prune po’boy. Fiction writers, sportswriters, court reporters, they are all about the same to me. A buncha nimrods, not Rich Rods, if you ask me.

Know the rules before you break them (especially about words)

Here’s the four sins them writers in the media said sunk me:

1. I was  a “bad fit.”

2. I didn’t know any of the Michigan “traditions,” whatever the bubbasnot those were, like giving the number “1″ jersey to the top receiver, and beating Ohio State, Michigan State, Toledo, and just about anybody else.

3. I was arrogant and didn’t listen to advice.

Let’s just stop at three, Okee dokee?

What Bookfraud tells me is that all three of these are applicable to writing. Like the “bat fit” stuff. You start writing stuff that’s “bad fit” the medium, and you better make damn well sure you have the right form for the right material. You don’t want to stuff novel-length plot into a short story, or make raccoon stew from a possum.

Number two, traditions. “When writing, break all the rules you want, just as long as you know that you’re breaking them,” I read somewhere. Meaning that you don’t piss everyone off for no reason and you don’t write stories with the word “buttjuice” unless you have a damn good reason for them. And I can’t think of not a one.

One tradition Rich Rod left intact
And there’s arrogance. When Bookfraud was a young ‘un, he didn’t listen to advice with his fiction, trying to develop his own voice, and he suffered. Then he went in the opposite direction, and let everybody’s every ass-backwards critique influence him. You got to learn to be humble, and listen to the people you can trust.

Aw, hell, what am I saying? I just got fired, I don’t know squat about writing, and Bookfraud is some Yankee cracker who thinks he knows better than me because he doesn’t speak with a twang.

What? You say Bookie’s originally a  Tennessee boy. And his dad grew up in Arkansas. Arkansas!

My last chance to make it seem like I’d been wronged, and Bookfraud ruins it by being a bigger redneck than me.

Dadgumit.

 

Of course, prior to 2058 I might have to end this life, which has been buffeted by anguish, constant negativity, pain, anxiety, disappointment, heartbreak, and, most of all, unfulfilled potential.

Just kidding! About the suicide joke. I certainly could not kill myself, at least in an obvious fashion, for that would mean Wife and Toddler-Brat would not receive my life insurance money, they could end up destitute, and if there’s one thing a nice Jewish boy like myself I can’t live with, it’s guilt.

Also, I cannot live with sloth. I absolutely despise it in others. But I am often slothful myself (making me what is known as a “hypocrite”)–it is the worst of my seven deadly sins besides lust, but lust at least has the end benefit of getting laid, while sloth has the end benefit of regret.*

Meaning, I regret watching three hours of vital sports entertainment action (read: pro wrestling, Lingerie Football League) yesterday that could have been spent in more productive activity, such as having a sphincter-busting bowel movement or writing this beloved blog.

So it is my New Year’s Resolution, given five days after the fact, to eradicate sloth in my literary life: I shall sit before the computer more, blog more,  write more fiction,  write more non-fiction, engage in more epistolary efforts, and just more words, words, words. Naturally, since the total sum of my writing the past 12 months could fit on the inside of a gum wrapper, merely writing this blog entry will match 70 percent of my efforts in 2010, which ended sometime in September.

I don’t know if all this additional bloviation will actually translate into something actually worth reading, but you can’t make such a judgement unless there is something to read.

So I am going to blog at least twice a week  the next month for whatever wisp of an audience that remains reading this space. Though I more negative than a neutron and more metaphor-challenged than a…than a…

Well, hell, I updated the layout. There’s that to consider.

My message to myself is simple: “Think positive, Bookfraud, think positive. Be superpowerful. Stop making fun of Wayne Newton.”

And if you just got that joke, you really should have stayed in Las Vegas.

*Or not maybe lust isn’t so great:  read “Araby” and you’ll know what I mean. Also, it’s good reading for chuckleheads who say literature doesn’t tell us anything about the wider world or how to live.

 

–Nietzsche

The thing about Twitter is that I can’t truly express how I feel about Twitter in 140 characters, though this item clocks in at a mere 139.

Right now in the Bookfraud household, we are in the midst of renovating a property we hope to inhabit by the end of 2023. Wife, bless her, has done enough research to complete a dissertation on home remodeling; just ask her about sofitt vents or vitreous or low-VOC paint (I dare you). The whole exercise makes me realize why she’s such a good writer. When writing any story, Wife does copious research, be it on 19th century clipper ships or birders tracking woodpeckers. She gets the detail right and infuses her prose with it. Me, I be lazy and just write whatever comes to mind, which usually involves sports, beer, sex or some combination of the above.

When Fidel Castro slams Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over anti-Semitism and how Ahmadinejad’s idiotic invective is making Israelis paranoid, you know that we are officially in bizzaro world or that Castro must be pretty close to giving up the ghost.

Meanwhile, this blowhard makes me want to reattach my foreskin.

Oh, yeah, and this, too.

Going to bat for the Jews

Now that we’ve started renovating, I’ve done a tally of the shit that we’ve gone through in the past five years, and it forms our own private Harper’s Index of Bookfraud Hell:

• Number of home renovations: 2
• Number of home renovations we really could not afford: 2
• Number of moves: 4
• Number of bed bug infestations: 1
• Number of months that life was ruined by said bed bugs: 10
• Number of times bed bugs nearly ended my marriage: 43
• Number of parental deaths: 1
• Number of reports of major parental illness: 2
• Number of times laid off: 1
• Number of months in advance having to sell property on short notice, in the worst housing market since the Great Depression: 3
• Number of cross-country moves: 1
• Number of bags that flew off roof onto Interstate at 70 mph: 3
• Number of traffic accidents caused by bags flying off roof onto Interstate at 70 mph: 0
• Number of properties viewed in new city before buying one: 42
• Number of additional months our douchebag landlord allowed us to stay in our rental while renovating said purchase: 0
• Number of times Bookfraud has considered suicide: 9,355

Unlike love, publishing publicity is a limited resource. It can make or break book sales, and though it certainly isn’t the only variable in separating the best-sellers from the also-rans, a competent book publicist still remains an author’s best friend. That’s why this article, which was posted sometime before the invention of Red Bull or Ambien, is fricking depressing. It just reinforces the truth that if you want to write fiction, do it for the love, not the money, unless you’re James Patterson.

Welcome home

As he dabbles in poetry, fiction, a PhD in English and other endeavors unrelated to acting, the confession by James Franco that he pulls on Charlie a lot somehow just seems perfect.

Finally, I want to ask the chucklehead who plans on burning a copy of the Quran on 9/11 if he could at least have the decency to wait until after Yom Kippur do so, or at least don’t burn it on the Sabbath. Shit, doesn’t anybody respect us Jews?

 

In the spirit of stimulating under-stimulated minds, my high school would convene assemblies to hear speakers debate the issues of the day. That was the occasion for an event that still rankles me to this day, and, in part, explains the appeal of Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and all of our friends in the T-Par-T. It also explains why, to a trifling but measurable degree, many of us write.

The school hauled out a local yokel from the NRA to do battle with some liberal hippie teacher about, you guessed it, gun control. After they had gone through the expected pantomime of debate—the liberal decried the scourge of guns in our cities, while the NRA representative, honest-to-god, actually said, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”—the floor was opened for questions.

Of course, being an NRA member, the pro-gun fellow trotted out the Second Amendment time and again, really never defending the primacy of or need for guns other than the usual “you have to be able to protect yourself and your family” canard. And I had a line of inquiry for him: What if there were no Second Amendment? Why are guns “good” things to own in a modern world when most of us don’t hunt for our grub? Would people really be defenseless without semi-automatic weapons? Would a citizen’s militia really be able to hold off a government takeover by the military?

I don’t think these were half bad inquiries for a 17-year-old boy, especially since 94.7% of 17-year-old boys’ brains are fixated on sex. Unfortunately, I never got to ask them, because when the moderator pointed to me when I raised my hand, a classmate sitting behind me named Miles jumped up, and, in a voice trying to be far more mature than his years, blurted out the following: Hey, man, how can you say that guns shouldn’t be illegal when the whole point of them is to kill people?

When she was good

In retrospect, it isn’t as stupid a question as I’d like to remember it being, but just imagine it being asked in a disaffected voice with a snarling lip and finger pointed at the stage. Miles was Marlon Brando in “The Wild One” without any intelligence, charisma, good looks, or any semi-redeeming feature. Though I had full sympathy for Miles’s point of view, I had nothing but contempt for how he asked it—or really, I was contemptuous that he got to ask his question and I was silenced.

Granted, I guess Miles was par for the course. Teenagers really aren’t particularly bright or mature, and I couldn’t expect my fellow classmates to be Cicero or Clarence Darrow. But the incident eats at me still, 28 years after the fact. I envision it repeatedly, thinking that had I actually gotten to pose my questions and debate the NRA bozo, I would have annihilated him in battle, and won the gun-control debate. Q.E.D.

My recurring desire to relive that moment is much to my discredit, showing my self-centered nature and desire to be the center of attention, no matter how right or wrong I might have been. Which, if you think about it, is really what makes Glenn Beck go, since we have a college dropout convincing much of the nation that he is smarter and knows better than a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, not to mention a gun-totin’ “grizzly momma” who thinks plain ol’ common sense (which those pointy-headed liberals lack) always trumps nuance or pointed inquiry, and that complicated problems don’t require complex solutions.

Before he discovered carbohydrates

People want their voices heard, and would rather have their own ideas validated than challenged; there is comfort in having someone “speak” for you even if it means they have no command of fact or total command of prejudice. Even though Beck and Limbaugh may actually believe the hateful drek they spout, they realize it does their bank account well, and would say it no matter what they actually thought.

That’s actually one reason I write: nobody speaks for me but me, and I have enough ego and not enough humility to believe my ideas actually matter—you don’t have to read between the lines to see the anger in my voice.

And I still want to throttle poor Miles, who I understand now works at the Kerplonsky’s Carpet Discount Warehouse, supervising the guy from the NRA.

 

Anybody who has taken any fiction workshop will hear the following: no matter how well-written a sentence, paragraph, passage, or chapter might be, if it doesn't fit the larger narrative, it's gotta go.

You may not hear it phrased so brutishly. One may be treated to churlishness masquerading as advice, largely from fellow workshop attendees who are there only to flaunt their literary chops or have praise heaped upon their own work:

The writer fell in love with his own voice. (Said snottily)

If you can't kill your "children," then you really shouldn't be in this line of work. (Said contemptuously).

Don't bore the reader with digressions about fly fishing and the protagonist's ex-lover dentist-soldier of fortune named Dirk. (Actually, I would listen to that one).

I have deleted thousands of unnecessary words in my day, but what's much harder for me is getting rid of ideas. I collect them like a compulsive hoarder, never trashing a single thought, no matter if the bulk of them are threatening to keel over and smother me like Homer and Langley Collier. I used to count how many ideas I had for plots, characters or structure, but I lost count after about 200.

I found the blog titles in my blog's "drafts" queue. Some have a few hundred words already; others, none at all. To my horror, I realized that many of them were about not writing, but complaints about the world's indifference towards poor, poor pitiful me.

Worse, I could not remember what many of them were actually about.

So, because I need your help, here is a sampling of unfinished or not-started blog ideas residing in my drafts folder. The meaning of some are obvious, but what about those with no apparent meaning at all?

Care to take a guess? Yours is as good as mine.  And if you come up with something clever, I will actually blog about it.

"Verbal Ex-Lax"

"Being Good Vs. Being Good"

"Less Matter and More Art"

"Honesty is Not the Best Policy"

"VEX Contents"

"Genre Fiction: A Genre I Can't Write"

"How to Not Hold Yourself Accountable"

"Zadie vs. Zadie"

"Write Right Baby"

"Readers, Friends, and None of the Above"

"The Greatest Band You've Never Heard"

"Writing the Bookfraud Way! (Badly)"

"Twitter THIS"

And, my personal favorite, the meaning of which is lost on me forever:

"Beckett, Yah"

I know it was about Samuel Beckett, but whether it was his about his haircut, wrinkles or something about his writing forever remains a mystery.