About "About"

As a “newsie,” I notice trends in language. I can’t help it. I spend a lot of time reading newspapers and surfing web sites for news, and as I have pointed out in this space before, the one thing journalists do best is imitate each other. One of them starts doing something and pretty soon they’re all doing it.

And then the next thing you know, we're living in perpetual tape-loop. Since journalists love to imitate each other, certain words and expressions are always becoming "trendy," the definition of which in this case is that we all then get promptly beaten to death with them. To the point where I, anyway, am ready to grab my head and scream.

Yes, I have examples. You knew I would.



Have you noticed, for instance, the way that in recent years everything seems to “resonate” with this or that segment of the public? “This tax proposal resonates with homeowners.” “The senator’s question will surely resonate with African-Americans,” etc.

Why don’t you go “resonate” on the freeway?

If I hear one more thing described as a “wake-up call,” I think I’ll take two Sominex and go to sleep so I don’t have to hear anything called a “wake-up call” for a while.

And then there’s the super-irritating disappearance from daily English of the word “problems.” I can’t figure this one out, but I suspect it’s a hangover from the politically-sanitized 1990s. For some reason the under-30 crowd has decided that nobody has “problems” anymore. They now have “issues” instead. “Ashley had issues with Bob’s gambling.” “I have issues with people who use cell phones in restaurants.” “So-and-so had software issues.”

No he didn't and no, you don’t. You have problems. Not issues. For God’s sake, children, there is nothing virtuous or democratic about calling a spade a diamond!

And now, from our fingernails-on-the-chalkboard department, ladies and gents, I present the latest drive-me-nuts trend in the arts and opinion pages: it’s the disappearance of the word “about,” specifically with regard to the activity of thinking. Nobody thinks “about” anything anymore. They just think the noun, proper or otherwise.

“Think Rachael Ray.” “Think Barry Bonds.” “Think Enron.” “Think Ovaltine on steroids.” “Think Acapulco in the winter.”

“About” took a hit a long time ago with regard to the act of talking. Remember? “I’m talking money.” “I’m talking results.” “We’re talking sports here.” It was a bit of tough-guy shorthand, a way of making clear that you meant business and weren’t beating around the bush. You heard “I’m talkin’ results” and you pictured a guy who looked like Alex Karras on your TV screen, assuring you that some snake oil called Grapefruit 45 really would take 40 pounds off you in three weeks.

But “Think this” and “Think that” doesn’t even have the tough-guy cachet. It smells of journalists trying to sound hip and cutting-edge. The problem, as usual, is that they’re all doing it now, so it no longer smacks of anyone’s personal style, like the late Mike Royko saying “Sez Who? Sez Me!” It’s the latest verbal antenna ornament. Every smartass movie reviewer and columnist has got to have one, and they’re all whipping in the breeze, the same size and color.

This is the most aggravating trend in language since the disppearance of the word “said.” Under-30’s don’t, and have never liked, the word “said” for relating a past conversation. When I was in high school, young girls, including my own younger sister, used to substitute “go” for “say,” hence reducing people from human beings who spoke words to animals who make noises. I’d hear her on the phone, “And then I go, ‘What’s the answer to that question?’ And then he goes, ‘I don’t know.’ And then I go, ‘Well, if you can’t answer the question, what are you doing here?’ And then he goes, ‘Well, you asked me here.’ And then I go…” Ooh, that used to set my teeth on edge.

But not as much as its later replacement, starting around the beginning of the first Clinton administration and still persisting today: “Go-for-say” has been replaced by “Like-for-say.” You know what I’m talking about. “And then I’m like, ‘What’s the answer to that question?’ And then he’s like, ‘I don’t know.’ And then I’m like, ‘Well, if you can’t answer the question, what are you doing here?’ And then he’s like, ‘Well, you asked me here.’ And then I’m like…” Ooh, that sets my teeth on edge now, and has for about 15 years.

What is the matter with “I said” and “He said??” Do we absolutely have to talk stupid among ourselves?

Think Cindy Crawford. Think moron. And knock it off, okay?

I knew he was a barbell boy, but I didn't know he was a boor...

On Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, bored in the early afternoon while my wife Valerie was out showing real estate, I decided to go for a walk.

Took the Metro to Foggy Bottom and started hoofing it around the corner from 23rd Street to M Street in Georgetown. On the way, who do I encounter walking along the sidewalk but…Arnold Schwarzenegger? That is correct. Governor of California and Hollywood movie joke Arnold Schwarzenegger, scarf around neck, was walking (dashing is more like it) along M Street. I don’t know what he was doing in Washington, but evidently he was shopping in Georgetown, which is what anyone would be doing there on the day after Thanksgiving.

We were going in opposite directions. I stopped and did a double-take. He’s not as tall as one might think. He saw me recognize him and winced, with a bit of a smile. But when I said, “Aren’t you Governor Schwarzenegger?” his bodyguard immediately dashed up and interposed himself between me and Ah-nold, telling me in no uncertain terms that I was to “respect” the governor’s “privacy.” Hey, celebrities who want “privacy” shouldn’t be roaming Georgetown in the middle of the afternoon on the day after Thanksgiving.

Nonplussed (as this gorilla grasped my arm) I simply said, “Hey, I’m from California. I just thought I’d say ‘hello.’” By this time Arnold was half a block away, still charging in the general direction of K Street. “Hey!” I shouted after the gov. “Brett Davis is a friend of mine! He knows you!” “Yes, he does!” Arnold yelled over his shoulder, not slowing his pace one bit. End of encounter.

When I got home I wrote him such a nasty letter. Imagine a politician pulling this Greta Garbo routine, and with a constituent, no less. So another marketing-based illusion is shot to hell. Arnold Schwazenegger, whose web site calls him "the people's governor," and who makes such a big show of being a populist, an anti-politician, and despite a slew of regrettable movies displaying the acting talent of a garage door opener, a regular guy, turns out to be no different from any other obnoxious celebrity who goes out in public with a bodyguard nearby to ward off autograph-seekers.

And I didn't even want his autograph. I just wanted to say a friendly "hello" to the governor of my home state.

I'd like to think the photo above was taken in a crowded Georgetown boutique at the very moment some unlucky shopper decided to challenge Ah-nold for the last scarf on the bargain table. Now there would be a picture of a regular guy.

"Vanity" press? Why the hell not?

I had an idea this morning in the bathroom, where many of my most illuminating thoughts come to me.

All my life I’ve been agonizing about my failure to become the kind of “professional” writer that it was my goal to become when I was about 17. In my youth I dreamed of becoming the next Hemingway. But with the death of Norman Mailer recently, we have all pretty much acknowledged that there aren’t going to be any more Hemingways; the age of the celebrity novelist is over. Yes, there are still a handful of serious writers around, but I would bet you a double soy latte that if Cormac McCarthy or Don DeLillo walked into Starbucks, nobody would recognize them. Philip Roth maybe, but even he wouldn’t be recognized by anyone under 40.

For decades it has been a source of head-bashing frustration to me that I could never get past the gate, never get anything I wrote in book form published by a legitimate publisher, paid for and marketed by that publisher. In other words, that I have never in all these years of writing been able to gain access to “the country club.”

I’ve discussed the reasons for this in my journal ad nauseum: I majored in the wrong subject at college. I didn’t attend graduate seminars in creative writing. I didn’t do the networking necessary to make the connections in the publishing industry that you need to get a book published. Publishers and agents receive 10,000 manuscripts a day. They’re not going to look at all of them. Naturally they’re going to gravitate toward the ones that come from people they already know, or come recommended by people they already know. A manuscript by an unknown author, unless it comes with the imprimatur of John Updike, has about as much chance of getting published as a fourth-year student in a state university dramatic arts program has of landing a leading role on Broadway.

But it suddenly hit me this morning…so what? What if, at age 52, I change my whole attitude and decide to regard writing as a hobby? Sound silly? At first blush, yes. Jejune? Certainly. Unserious? Perhaps. But if I ratchet down my expectations and regard my writing – and, by the way, the self-publishing of my writing – as a weekend activity that I pursue purely for my own amusement and that of a few friends, that puts a whole new complexion on the subject. If I’m no longer striving to become the next Saul Bellow, what the hell do I care if so-called “legitimate” publishers look down their noses at me for publishing my books through iUniverse.com or one of its clones? Let ‘em get their noses hooked on tree branches.

Yes, publishing by on-demand services (P.O.D.s) is more expensive than it used to be. iUniverse charges about $600 now, roughly six times what they charged when I published my novel Tower-102 through them in 2000. But if I’m bringing out a book every year to 18 months, that’s certainly a cheaper hobby than say, skiing. And there are historical precedents for such things. William Blake printed his own books. Walt Whitman hawked Leaves of Grass door-to-door. And had it not been for the succes de scandale of Tropic of Cancer, who knows how much longer Henry Miller might have gone on selling his “mezzotints” on the street?

In 2001, when a fellow named Charlie and I joined forces briefly to see if we could whip up a few sales for our self-published novels, I found Charlie extremely bitter. He had gone to great lengths to try and get his novel accepted by a “real” publisher, even spending a considerable amount of money on an agent, (when anyone could have told him that an agent who charges you a fee is, ipso facto, a charlatan) and he had bought into the rhetoric of the so-called “real”publishers and of the sniffers you encounter at book fairs: if you published your book through iUniverse, Author House or any other P.O.D. service, it was just “vanity” publishing and you weren’t a “real” writer. I, more sanguine I suppose because all I had spent was about $100 and I was trying to regard the whole thing as a lark, tried to convince him that we didn’t need the approval of the extended-pinky snotbuckets. We were doing our own thing and to hell with them. My friend Lucia told him, over a lunch the three of us shared, that she came from a part of the world (South America) where there was absolutely no stigma attached to publishing your own book.

But Charlie wouldn’t be convinced. Deep down, he felt that he had no right to call himself a writer because someone else hadn’t published his book for him.

And deep down, I could see his point. Because, in all honesty, part of me felt the same way. I knew I was good enough for Scribner’s, and I’m sure Charlie believed he was too. But there comes a time when you have to face facts. If you haven’t gotten into the country club, you haven’t gotten into the country club, and there’s no point in banging your head against the wall because you’re never going to see yourself interviewed on Oprah or see your book written up in the New York Times Book Review. Eventually you have to make a decision as to whether you’re doing this for love or doing it for ego. (And what delicious irony, by the way, in being able to think of so-called “vanity” publishing as a repudiation of doing it for ego and an affirmation of doing it for love. But it is, in fact, possible to see it that way.)

Oh, it’s not that I’ve been entirely unsuccessful as a writer. I’ve written plenty of journalism, been paid for it, even won an award or two. But I’ve been unable, so far anyway, to make the transition from the newspaper-or-magazine page to the book between covers. The truth is, the age of the journalist-turned-novelist was pretty much over by 1945. I’ve discussed this in my notebooks, and if I had been aware of that historic fact when I graduated from high school in the 1970s, I probably would have majored in something other than journalism in college. But in 1973, the year I started college, my thinking about the writer’s profession was still back in the James T. Farrell era.

You can’t go back and undo the past. And even if I were to get into some university MFA program in creative writing, (I’ve been turned down for two of them in the past 18 months) at 52 I’m too old to become a “promising young writer.” So my choices are: (1) Bag it all and start keeping bees, (2) Resign myself to writing “for my desk drawer” or (3) Go ahead and make use of a P.O.D. service when I finish a book, post it for sale on my web site and those of whatever friends will do me the favor and just not worry about whether I ever become an accepted member of the “literary community,” which in any case is dissolving as the world goes digital and becomes increasingly compartmentalized by the Internet, the iPhone and 500 channels of satellite TV.

Samuel Johnson might have said that anyone who writes for anything other than money is a fool, but it could easily be counter-argued that anyone whose primary interest is making money had better be in some other racket besides writing, unless they happen to be John Grisham. There was a time when the word “amateur” (derived from the Latin “amat,” meaning love) had a positive ring, not a negative one. So what if I decide to just abandon the oak-and-calf routine and settle for treating the writing and publishing of my fiction and memoirs as a hobby, and to hell with the fact that I get ignored by the Washington Post Sunday book section? I don’t even read the Washington Post Sunday book section anymore. If I don’t read them, why should I care if they read me?

Norman Mailer, 1923-2007

Norman Mailer died this morning. Too late to make the Washington Post print edition, but the news was all over the Internet when I got up. He was 84 and died of renal failure.

In a way, it’s an end-of-era moment. Mailer was frequently a clown and almost always wrongheaded politically, but he was also something much more important to his century: he was probably the last living writer who aspired to write the Great American Novel. In the 1940s that was something every young writer wanted to do. But today’s young writers aim to write movie screenplays and journalism; the idea of the Big Novel is pretty much dead, and as a matter of fact shortly before he died, Mailer conjectured in an interview that the novel itself, as a form, is on the way out. Could be; in another context he lamented declining interest in serious fiction in the country at large, and Mailer’s lifelong antagonist Gore Vidal has estimated the audience for serious literary fiction in America these days at something like 4,000 people. There will be no more aspiring young Hemingways, the thing Mailer himself was in his youth, along with so many others.

In the spring of 1995, Mailer came to Washington, D.C. on a tour to promote the book he had just published about Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. I was in the audience at Olsson's Books, Metro Center that day (Olsson's Books is now long-gone), and I raised my hand and asked him if there was going to be a sequel to Harlot's Ghost, his 1991 novel about the CIA. My reason for asking was because Harlot's Ghost had concluded with the words, "To Be Continued." "Time, energy and money permitting, yes," Mailer answered my question. "I think the story of Harlot's Ghost is an important one that deserves to be continued." No sequel ever appeared, and I'm not surprised. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that there are no second acts in American life; there were few if any sequels in Mailer's. Married six times, the father of nine children, and with a Manhattan rent to pay, he churned from one big-money journalism project to the next, with fiction squeezed in between gigs. He was primarily more journalist than novelist anyway, just as Hemingway was, in my opinion, more short-story writer than novelist.


It's not surprising that Mailer failed to write the Great American Novel, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered much if he had; it would no longer have been recognized as such once the Newsweek front cover had faded, and would have been on remainder tables within 12 months. Yes, we still have our serious writers, the Cormac McCarthys and Don DeLillos, but they play to small audiences and no one would recognize either of them if he walked into Starbucks. Mailer was the last American author who conceived of the writer’s role in society as a big one, who openly boasted that he wanted to be as big as Dostoevski. Such bravado often made him look silly and certainly brought its share of ridicule on his head, but I already miss the world in which someone could aspire to be as big as Dostoevski to begin with. These days everyone wants to be as big as Paris Hilton or Tupac Shakir.

When he published Ancient Evenings in 1984, Mailer told an interviewer that he had written a novel set in ancient Egypt because he felt so completely a stranger in Ronald Reagan’s America. I doubt that that was the real reason. I always suspected that he wrote that novel because he wanted to prove that he could "do" historical fiction as well as his old rival Vidal. But the remark had a certain prescience, given the fact that America became progressively more and more a strange land in the years after Reagan to someone with Mailer’s youthful dreams and priorities, and I had those same dreams myself when I was young; as late as 1976 I, too, dreamed of being the next Hemingway. “He who dies on Thursday is quit for Friday.” If the novel is indeed on the way out, Norman Mailer won’t have to watch the final streaks of its particular dusk. R.I.P.