One Penn Stater’s Response

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Penn State is one of the top-ten largest universities in the country and has one of the biggest alumni associations in the world. It’s no wonder that America had accepted the blue and white gloss hanging over Happy Valley as an authentic representation of life in State College.

Now that the glaze has cracked, the country should feel nauseated as it learns how school officials enabled the sex crimes of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. Nauseated, not shocked.

Evil acts and cover-ups are as old as human history. Writing about the horrors of the past, James Baldwin said that they reflect the “everlasting potential” of human behavior, and that if we don’t recognize this truth, then “we know nothing about ourselves, nothing about each other.” Horrible things can happen wherever people walk … even on Penn State’s sacred ground.

Two crimes occurred on PSU’s watch: the abuse and the failure to report it. Yet instead of focusing on justice, too many reports are lamenting the blow to Penn State’s reputation, as if the school and all of its employees are immune to corruption. Isn’t this response – positioning the image of the school above the crime against the individual — sympathetic to the attitude of officials who allegedly covered up the story?

Yesterday, Philadelphia Daily News columnist John Baer wrote that the scandal “damages the long-developed image of clean and wholesome ‘Happy Valley.’” This isn’t something to mourn. If the university’s image was upheld at the expense of even one defenseless child, then it deserves to be damaged.

 

Grimm and Krim

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I’m not impressed by the new NBC show Grimm. But while I couldn’t agree more with Slate’s review of the pilot as “a familiar procedure in big bad wolf’s clothing,” I’m looking forward to the next episode. Why? Because the series puts me in touch with a fantasy world that I pretended to escape years ago.

About forty years ago, essayist Seymour Krim wrote about the immortality of our childhood dreams in “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business.” In it, he says that “thousands upon thousands” of us are “victims of the imagination in this country,” romantics who “have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls.” Prey to the “heavyweight world,” some of us hide our “epic longing to be more than what we are” and succumb to the roles that society allows us. Others, we dreamers, live with more hopelessness, searching for our “private super-adventure serial out on the streets of life.” Grimm indulges this fantasy.

The NBC series, adapted from the Grimm Brothers’ compilation of cautionary German folk tales, integrates the mythology of our old story- books into the present. On its website, NBC defines “Grimm” as the name of “an elite line of criminal profilers … charged with keeping balance between humanity and mythological creatures of the world.” We are empathetic towards the characters in these stories, especially the Little Red Riding Hoods and their Protectors, but not as cartoons, and not as adolescent plays – we see them as versions of ourselves, fully cast on television as adults who hold jobs like us in the world where we live. We watch them because we remember role-playing these archetypes as children. Krim says this early play-acting defined our natures, “strange and special manifestations of a time and place that will never come again.” Who among us didn’t dream of finding a Fairy Godmother? Of outrunning a Big Bad Wolf? Of becoming or destroying the Snow Whites of the world? For better or worse, Krim was right. These characters informed our natures just as teachers did. And perhaps, more honestly than most of our teachers, their original messages warned us of life’s dark endings. It was our loved ones who kept many of us from the true stories.

Grimm speaks to us from the time and place that Krim says “will never come again,” and so it feeds our fantasies, if necessary resurrecting them into our conscious worlds. It appeals to Krim’s “thousands upon thousands, ” people who like to be reminded of the dreams that, increasingly exposed by our age, haven’t abandoned us in spite of some of dark, painful paths.

So even though I’m not impressed with the storytelling, I will watch Grimm and help it hopefully succeed. Because, as Seymour Krim says, “There’s something beautiful about being an American sucker.”

How’s the marketing going, then?

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we is got him came out on August 18. Since then, I have been marketing. I’ve enjoyed it for the most part, meeting readers at colleges and bookstores, giving small talks and larger lectures. What then haven’t I liked? Answering questions.

It’s not that I don’t know what the questions will be – often I get them up front. If not, they aren’t too difficult to anticipate. I don’t mind answering questions about the writing process, my writing process, writing in general, etc.; what is more complicated for me is answering questions about character motivations.

I wrote about these people for a long time, and I know that their behavior is surprising. But I feel that now, as I look at the packaged book that I am so fortunate to have, I don’t want to analyze what is in it. I did that during the crafting of it. we is got him stands on its own. My relationship to it has now become “reader” more than “writer.”

And I like talking about books with other readers. Just not this one. This one is for others to discuss without me, because I still am the author, and it isn’t possible for me to engage in an impersonal conversation about my work.

What is possible is for me to use this book as a vehicle to meet other people who share my research and reading interests. And to talk to them about writing, about true crime, about how and why we observe human behavior the way that we do, about writers and writers’ lives and the publishing process and even why it is frustrating for me to talk about what they might want to know most.

So I think my first interview deserves a C. I talked way too much about the plot.

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Will the piece attract readers?  Yes.  Will it help to sell the book?  It will spread the word on the story, which in turn will or won’t sell itself.  What I learned was that I need to be more judicious about how much plot summary I reveal.

I think I gave away too much because it was my first interview, and I was out of practice of doing what I tell my writing students to do when writing analysis: to tell me why something is important, not what happens.

Authors are storytellers.  We want to tell the stories that we’ve written.  It’s natural then to treat author events like showcases where we read our work or summarize the story.  But our audience knows how to read.  And it is smart.  So are authors.  We are, then, presenting to ourselves.  I get bored when I’m read to, and I feel patronized when people state the obvious to me.  Maybe this is why author events get bad press.

When I think back to the interview, my answers defaulted to the plot.  That was the easiest thing to talk about.  Had I given a short summary and then used the journalist’s questions as opportunities to elaborate on human- interest aspects of the story, making connections to allusions from history and pop culture, I would have better served the book and the audience.  I would have also been more interested in talking to the journalist, not just answering her questions.

I think I have a goal then, for my author events — a goal that interests me.  I want to find a way to have a conversation – through well-placed rhetorical questions for larger audiences – with other readers.  Using the premise of my narrative, I want to use my story to connect with other stories – stories that we read, stories we remember, stories we can tell again.

 

How do I do this?  There was a good example today in the Op-Ed section of the Times.  I’ll think about it more for the next entry.

I realize that in promoting the book, I’m not really selling it.

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Slate agrees with me.  On the site’s culture blog browbeat, Nina Shen Rastogi writes that she hasn’t gone to author events to buy books, but “because I’ve had an hour to kill and it was raining outside.  I’ve gone because I needed a free first-date activity, or because I happen to know the writer.”

I’ll add another, arguably more popular, reason: I’ve gone to events to see and hear what my favorite authors look and sound like in person.  But like Rastogi, I don’t go to potentially buy a book.  I’ve decided whether I’ll buy it or check it out of the library before entering the venue.  I can think of one exception, when I purchased a memoir because I found an author’s talk engaging.  And you know what?  I hated it.  The author’s personality was better than her writing.  I didn’t get past Chapter 1.

So is my fear that I’ll disappoint readers by being more interesting than my writing?  I don’t think so.  Although now that I think about it, I hope my prose, like my personality, is moody and engaging … a little shy perhaps, and in need of a compassionate listener who enjoys parakeets and grape blow-pops.

About ten years ago on Slate, writer Jennifer Howard compared bookstore readings to “slow torture sessions.”  “No matter how desolate the experience,” she blogged, “at least you can expect the people who do show up to have a nodding acquaintance with your work – otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten off the sofa to come hear your deathless prose.”  Excellent sentence.

I’d like to think that what I say and how I say it will drive the marketable success of the events.  If this were true, I would plan more enthusiastically.  But people may not come to see a first-time author, and if they do, it’s probably because they need a cheap date or a favor returned.

So am I supposed to pretend that my ability to “sell” the book is something other than an invisible figment of publishing’s imagination?  Am I supposed to ignore the obvious and embrace the performance?

Yes, I think so.  And because marketing, no matter how unattractive, is part of the publishing deal, I’ll do it as best I can.  I just need to figure out how to best use this preparation time – time I’d rather spend researching another project than planning for presentations and interviews.

It’s marketing time. I hate selling things.

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When I started researching we is got him five years ago, my writing mentor Laura Wexler told me that I needed to talk to everybody I could about it: friends, the dentist, people on the bus – anybody who would ask questions or offer an idea that I hadn’t thought of.  Her advice freed me to promote my storytelling ideas.

But as I sit down to prepare talks about the book, I’m having a hard time gathering my thoughts.  I don’t know whether I should re-enter the research and re-read the narrative, or if I should plan on the Andy Kaufman method: show up at an engagement with a science textbook and just start reading out loud until everybody’s left the room.

What I need to be able to do is convince an audience to buy my product.  So regardless of how I feel, I need to focus on capitalism.  Why should you buy my product?  Out of all of the shiny covers in the bookshop, why pick up this one?

“Because,” says the annoying redhead in the front row.   “It gives people a window into America as the country moves from its first into its second century.  It uses the first recorded ransom kidnapping investigation as an occasion to explore the frustration of the working man at a time when industrialization is redistributing wealth and the country is fighting a depression.”

“And,” continues another redhead beside her, “it explores the tensions between the working class and the men who tried to control it: the Republican politicians in Philadelphia and the young metropolitan police force.”

“Perhaps more importantly,” echoes the whole class of redheads, “it reveals the role of children as economic resources in post-Civil War America.”

“WRONG!” responds the teacher.  “You’re not listening to the question.  It isn’t ‘What is the book about?’ It is ‘Why should you buy it?’“

Does talking about a book really sell it?  I haven’t read every book that I’ve purchased in my life.  And some things that I’ve really wanted to read I’ve checked out of the library or grabbed at a used book store.

Buying and reading are two different activities.  As a writer, I tell stories.  I want to tell them, not sell them.  If nobody buys them, am I a failed storyteller?

“Yes,” says the teacher.

So they tell me I need to blog.

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I’m not sure how anybody has the patience to read the online musings of another.   The only personal blogs that interest me would be those of people I had crushes on in yesteryear.  I haven’t looked to see if Todd, or Chris, or Dan or Phil kept a blog.  If I did, I’m afraid I’d spend too much time reading it and reentering my lovelorn past.  Is that why you’re reading this?  Do you have a crush on me?

 

It’s a vain question, but isn’t blogging a form of vanity?  I told my writer friend Ly Nguyen once that I hesitated to express all of my thoughts in my journal.  He said this uncertainty came from vanity.  I didn’t want to admit it, but he was right.  Who, though, did I think would care to read my illegible diary entries?  More importantly, who was I hoping would read them?

 

Probably you.

 

Unlike my journal, these pages won’t contain random musings — I’ll wait for them to wrestle my other arm before those kick in on Twitter.  These entries will be thoughts on topics that interest me.  Out of respect for you, reader, they will have germinated for longer than a day and taken longer than an hour or two to compose.