As I prepare some stuff to be plopped onto my blog for the weekend, the item I have the most trouble with is the Lavon Smith one. This entry originally seemed like it shouldn’t be a tough one to do. It dealt with a man I’d not had much to even think about for many years, but the Ozarks area theme that arose with my review of Winter’s Bone brought him to mind…as I groped and recalled the town of Fayetteville, Arkansas, which I remembered him as having written from, then located it on a map. And when I started the entry, it seemed (along with all else) a good chance to show (very anecdotally), for those out in the less metropolitan areas of the country, what it’s like to publish the work of someone from the Ozarks area—in terms of sheer industry peculiarities as well as the stark luck or unlikelihood of the whole thing.
But as I worked on the story of Lavon, it became clear I could not tell the story without talking about (pseudonymous) Lori, the editor of the magazine in which his work appeared, on which I also worked fairly extensively with Lori. My story about her is complex but, overall, positive. But this, in turn, made it inevitable I would discuss Cam, the editorial director at the company at which I worked with Lori. Cam in particular, I found, required a lot of discussion of the context in which she figured, and her story is less complimentary…and the emotions you never entirely lose related to such old business came up.
If people think I’m an unforgiving person with what publishing-related stories I have to tell, I don’t think so myself, but I would leave that for those who want to assess me (when I’m not within hearing distance). The point is: work in publishing results in stories; I myself am very much about developing stories; the two of these together mean attention to detail and strong emotions involved with the factual basis out of which arose the stories…. And as much as you learn from tough challenges and being screwed and whatever else, you would simply cease to be human if you didn’t have some of the old emotions come up.
When former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters was interviewed on 60 Minutes recently, should it have seemed so strange that interviewer Steve Kroft’s bringing up the topic of the group’s 1980s breakup would make Waters seem like he wanted to choke guitarist David Gilmour all over again? No, because that’s how the arts are. We create in them; we live and love in them; and we accumulate wounds in them. That’s how it is.
In the case of Lori, Cam, and the rest, this old experience from 1990-91 might not seem to have any relevance outside an account of what my career has been like, for those very limited few who might have an interest in it, except for this: some of the psychological dynamics, and more importantly the managerial stupidity, that might have seemed the province of only the peculiar All American Crafts (of 20-odd years ago) have reoccurred in other (in-house) work contexts I’ve been in, including as recently as in the last two or three years. It is foolish to say they shouldn’t be looked at if, say, people wanted to understand other, more accessible aspects of how the media work (in more recent years), which I can speak on because I’ve been exposed to them, and sometimes been complicit in them, as a much more seasoned professional.
