[Go one entry back for the first half of this story. Edits 7/6/13. Edit 7/30/13.]
My visit to Professor
Gass’s house
Though it may seem as if I was all about serious, lonely
student work then—and despite everything, I did a fair amount of production of
papers and other work then, though some of it wasn’t among my most stellar as a
student—there were some surprising social times. Such casual get-togethers
happened among sets of us students several times, which is one of the charming
things I remember about that brief, sadly-ending time I had in grad school.
There was a dinner party a bunch of us students in the first class had, at the
apartment of one of us, and that person made most, or all, of the dinner. There
was a cake with some liqueur in it.
Among our professors, McClennan himself made a point of
inviting me over for “a drink” and a solid talk at his house, which eventually
happened. (I don’t remember what I drank, or even if I did, there.) I found he
had a system of cubby-hole-like shelves in which to store some copies of
others’ published philosophy papers, for his research purposes (it was from
this system that he let me borrow, among others, a copy of a paper [on weakness
of will] by philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt, which I used in my paper on akrasia; Frankfurt later became famous
for a republished old paper that was produced by Princeton University Press
under the title On Bullshit). Today,
professors would store pdf (or other types of electronic) versions of papers on
a thumb drive, or home hard drive, or such.
I remember visiting the sadly simple apartment of Jose, the
Brazilian student, who was just getting settled where he lived when I sold him
a few items of furniture—a chair and, I believe, a table or carpet—when I was
preparing to leave WU and St. Louis.
By the way, underscoring what my monk-like brief life was
there, in my own room, in a dorm-system three-bedroom suite in the graduate
dorms at WU, I had no bed. I was not able to have a bed shipped there from
home, obviously; and though I mentioned to Professor Barrett I had no bed,
which he at first seemed apt to rectify as a sad state of affairs, he later
offered no help for this at all. It
completely slipped his mind, and once I passed by him in a WU quad with him
seeming like he didn’t even see me.
In my separate bedroom, I slept in a sleeping bag, on a
“cushion” or two or so carpets on the floor. I lived like some terrorist in Passaic, N.J.,
who had a recipe for a homemade bomb in his rancid backpack. How did I do it,
sleeping like that, when the summer receded with horribly noise cicadas outside
and brutal heat in late August and early September? I did, but I would never
live like that again (both as a matter of fact and per preference).
Anyway, one day, one of the older students (I think it was),
who knew Gass and I think house-sitted for him now and then, was going to
house-sit for him. (I don’t remember why.) Gass had two daughters, I think, at
home then; but they were going out for the night. (For years I thought he had three daughters, but from his Wikipedia
bio, it seems he only had two. [Update: From a New York Times article published in about 1998--look here for an article dated in March 1999, though my original clip has movie ads on the back suggesting it came out in late 1998--I find he had three children from a first marriage, who didn't live with him by 1987, and two daughters--twins--from a second marriage, who likely are whom I saw in 1987.]) They had (I think I saw both) the same round faces
he has, and they had a shy, amenable-enough manner around us grad students.
So the house-sitting grad student, myself, and at least one
other student were in Gass’s study, watching a TV program (it might have been
some cable program—cable was still a relative luxury in those days). The study
had its walls all completely lined with books on shelves—I had never seen
anything like it (since then, I have, in another person’s house). I never saw
Gass himself in this visit to his house [he was out, of course], and I’ve
sometimes wondered what he would have thought if he knew I’d visited there.
Maybe not much. (Somehow, I recall this arrangement with us graduate student
friends over as having been acceptable enough, per the house-sitting student’s
claims, but if you think it sounds weird, it does strike me as a little weird,
but not as much as you might think it was.)
As you can see, I described this peek at his home
generically enough that I don’t think I’ve violated privacy. He lived in an
old-time suburban “rowhouse”—not a faceless tract house, but a nice place with
big spaces between each brick-fronted house, each seeming fairly similar to the
other—on a nice, tree-lined street. [Update: From the Times article referenced in the update above, I find the writer referring to his house as a "Colonial Revival" type--which sounds about right. (Don't count on me to become a real estate agent.) All the houses on his street basically looked this way--from my somewhat foggy memory on the area. I do recall his house as seeming quite nice--and the Times article suggests three stories, which sounds right.] All this seemed typical of Midwestern
cities like St. Louis [for a "nice" within-city-bounds area].
It seemed like a very nice accommodation for a professor,
but St. Louis
as a city struck me as rather remote for my own purposes, seen over time. It
wasn’t quite as large as Washington,
D.C., and not quite as
cosmopolitan. Whether it would have seemed to me at age 18 a nice place to go
to college, when ideas and learning are a huge part of your world, and you
enter college and a new town all impressionable as I was at 18 in D.C., I don’t
know. I do know I didn’t feel nearly at home at WU in 1987 (when I was 25) as I
had grown to feel at GWU in 1980-85.
Gass’s advice on
literary agents—not timed right for me; and an anecdote from my experience on
an erratic agent in 1986-87
The advice Professor Gass gave about agents may seem sage,
but it was ironic in how it came into my career then. This is for a couple
reasons.
A general, historical observation
First, for many lower-tier writers who were still doing
attempts at literature—what have been called “mid-list” writers, a concept that
I only first heard of at the Johns Hopkins conference I went to in June
1986—getting an agent was not essential in the mid-1980s. In fact, no one—but no one—talked about it at the JHU
conference. Instead, you tried to get published “the old-fashioned way”—by
submitting queries or whole manuscripts directly to publishers. Richard Bausch, who was one of the teachers (who was also a published writer) at the
1986 conference, spoke of sending 10 copies of his latest book manuscript to
publishers, similarly (in my view, not in his) to how you might apply to a
graduate program or medical school by applying to 10 different schools. I
remember feeling it a bit daunting that you could send out 10 copies of a manuscript,
because, for one thing, wasn’t that costly for photocopying? (It would have
been for me.)
One learning experience I had at the 1986 conference is that
many writers were taking the tack of sending short stories to the likes of The New Yorker magazine, which I don’t
think I’d ever considered for myself (not before the conference, and I don’t
think after). As it happened, the big “in” literary style for writers then was
“minimalism,” a new kind of realism, and it was represented by Jayne Anne
Phillips, Mary Robison, Raymond Carver, and others. The New Yorker was apparently looking for new talents in this area.
I neither subscribed to the minimalist school nor, I think, would have thought my type of work would be published by The New Yorker, so that route I wouldn’t
take.
I did start as a writer by doing short stories, first in
1976-77, but I didn’t try submitting to a magazine for a long time (I thought
teachers could help me get published, in the late 1970s); and I only started really
trying to get them published by paying magazines probably in the mid- or later 1980s
(after college). But I tried only for “little magazines,” small-circulation
things that focused on upcoming literature writers. I never got anything
published this way, though from 1976 to about 1987, I had written maybe 55-60
short stories (some silly, and a minority really substantial).
It goes to show how much has changed in close to 30 years
that you’ll see blog comments from young aspiring writers (at least, I saw one)
who talk about the idea that whether a short story will provide entrée for a
writer lies in how it sells (attracts
individual sales from readers). This is silly. Given that short stories are often
published in magazines that feature other
items, too (others’ stories and/or articles), there is no way to know whether
any particular story drives sales for the magazine, or for itself.
In the old days, the value to upcoming writers’ publishing
stories lay in a critical view, in how they were regarded by the relevant
community of editors and the like. If Joseph Heller or Thomas Pynchon had
published short stories in various small magazines, then when they had first
novels they were working on, and their agent (Candida Donadio, as it happened)
was trying to get a book publisher to accept a novel of theirs, she could refer
to the short stories that created a buzz within the New York publishing
echelons. There, of course, was no way to say that a given story attracted X number of sales.
This modern, petty, sales-oriented view of short stories
echoes a more fundamental change among writers, which is toward the more
pecuniary. If writing has always aimed to getting paid (with some young Turks
quoting Dr. Johnson’s statement that only a blockhead would write not for
money), today’s young Turks don’t know how things used to be for writers.
Today, many want to write genre work, tailoring themselves to given publishers’
desired types of work—in effect, playing
to a market. They also play to a market that eagerly consumes these works.
This may caricature it a bit, but this definitely gets at the big difference
between genre writers and the older-time writers of literary fiction who may
have been aiming toward the “Great American Novel.”
There was no obvious, direct connection between every little
writing effort and “the dollar” for the more literary writers. Modern genre
writers seem to think there is, for the novelist—and certainly the depressingly
small-time chat I’ve seen on blogs about what writers’ understanding is about
certain deals to get little genre books published, makes it seem like the whole
process, whether developing a writing voice and focusing on the writer’s favored
material that is salable work (or the specifics of the production and
publishing deal), is simpler and more “delivered into your lap,” like someone’s
terms for working for commissions in a salesman job, than anybody seemed apt to
discover in aiming to be a writer in the 1980s, if not also before.
This also aims toward a look at how young people still seem
suspicious of literary agents, as if agents’ main motivation is money: aren’t
they really all about money?
In a sense, yes—this is as true as it’s ever been. But it
shows how things have changed that now agents are the gateway people to getting
books published by the large trade-book houses, whereas 25-30 years ago, it was
low-level editors at the publishing houses themselves who were the gateway
people. Today, playing to markets, with works that attract readier pay, defines
the stock-in-trade, so it makes sense that agents are right on the front lines,
because money (a key consideration of the way an agent would handle a book) is
a readier component of the business. Back in the 1970s or so, when a Robert
Coover or a John Barth or a Thomas Pynchon was writing a literary novel, or
when a writer of lesser stature was doing this, who knew how it would sell. It might get critical notice, a good
review in The New York Times or The New York Review of Books, and get
the writer an “invite” to a party with George Plimpton, Carly Simon, and
others. But no one would have said it would readily
sell, so agents weren’t always part of the deal-making.
Those writers who did have agents were really defined as
being part of a major vanguard, with a Candida Donadio hawking them along these
lines, where editing, critical notice, a certain panache related to the type of
work, and all else conspired to create interest that might drive sales. So
agents made sense here, as the writers were more bankable propositions, and not
simply for moving scads of genre pulp. By the 1980s, when a Mary Robison or a
Richard Bausch was getting reviews from the likes of Michiko Kakutani in the Times, these writers didn’t always earn
so much money. So maybe some didn’t even have agents; agents were for
money-makers, and wouldn’t take these mid-list writers. Beginning writers were
even more likely to be ignored by agents. This simplifies the matter, but it is
a quite consistent hypothesis, in part, for what was clearly promulgated in the
likes of Writer’s Market by the
mid-1980s.
Said Writer’s Market
pointed out that some 80 percent of literary agents charged fees (beyond the 15
percent commission, and the non-commission fee later became the type of thing
that was scorned and deemed a common “sign” of a “scam agent” in the eyes of
some after about the year 2000). Here is what I said about this “80 percent”
fact in my book manuscript on the Bauer
v. Glatzer case [extract indentation removed]:
…I have a copy
of the 1986 edition of the Writer’s
Market reference book, published by Writer’s Digest Books, which apparently
was owned by F&W Publications, the same company that publishes today’s
version of the book. The 1986 edition of the book addresses the issue of
“Should I Pay an Agent?,” and includes, first quoting one literary agent’s
statement:
“ ‘Our agency reluctantly,
regretfully, has joined the ranks of fellow agents, over 80 percent of whom
charge some manner of reading fee to cover the costs of servicing manuscripts
from new authors,’ one agent tells potential clients. ‘Yet we remain not in the business of reading for
fees.’
“That’s the kind of agent you’ll
want to deal with—one not in the business to make money from reading
manuscripts. Despite this statistic, there are
agents who charge no fees over and above 10 percent to 15 percent commission.
In fact, the agents we’ve listed here work on a commission basis only.”
Here we see a puzzling situation: an
agency claiming to be “not in the
business of reading for fees,” but which must “regretfully” charge a reading
fee. Well, how do you know if the agency is interested more in your fee than in
your work? Also, note how “80 percent” of agencies are claimed to charge fees.
That makes it seem rare a writer will find one willing to work with him that doesn’t charge a fee.
For someone like me, given how un-central (and meanwhile how
often fee-charging) a literary agent seemed to be for writers in the 1980s, an
agent seemed, you presumed, like a “definite plus” who might increase your
chances of getting a book published, but by no means was he or she essential
for every beginning writer.
My odyssey with Gene Lovitz
In fact, in early 1986, when I was still living in Arlington, Va.,
I secured an agreement with a Gene Lovitz, and agent within his own company of
Pegasus International, to try placing with a publisher my novel The Folder Hunt. Lovitz was even quoted,
in a call-out, within the 1986 Writer’s
Market as if he was a reputable, representative agent. Probably getting the
“contract” with Lovitz was an important means of emboldening me to start
writing what became my novel A Transient.
And he charged me an initial fee—I think it was $100. He took a copy of my
manuscript, sent a letter of acknowledgement, and then off he was, I assumed,
trying to see what he could do to publish it. “Stay off the phone” was a
routine item of advice in, I think, the blurb on him in Writer’s Market.
Meanwhile, I finished an early form of A Transient, went to the JHU conference, and experienced some
difficulties regarding my graduate school career-arc in summer 1986.
By September 1986, I wondered, what had become of Lovitz’s
representing me? I’d left him alone for months,
figuring that was what was proper to the informal agreement. (There was no
signed contract.)
Sometime in the fall, I tried calling him. I got no answer.
There was one day, I believe in September 1986, when I called every 15 minutes
or so throughout an entire day. (His number had no answering machine or
service.) I got no answer every time I called, except one particular time I got
a busy signal.
I perhaps wrote him (I’m not sure when), but got no answer.
I didn’t try contacting him or his office again until, I
believe, early spring 1987. (See, in those days, I did what was sane—I didn’t
just cravenly depend on my whole career’s being based on getting a book
published; I had other irons in the fire. Paid work at a bakery; the tortured
graduate school route; other writing projects; VISTA
service when my Peace Corps application ran into a road block in 1986. So you
left the agent alone, and hoped for the best.)
In about March or April 1987 (I have records on this, but
don’t look into them right now), I got ahold of who was apparently Lovitz’s
assistant, a Carole Morling. She was a darkly honey-voiced woman maybe in her
fifties, reminding me of someone who might have smelled like a mixture of
cigarettes and cloying cologne. She made some excuse about what was going on
with my manuscript. For what probably seemed a good tactical reason, I arranged
to send her a copy of A Transient. She
took it, and via the phone she got back to me with some starkly critical,
scornful remarks. (These might have come in the later spring.)
One of her assumptions was that A Transient was meant to be a “mass-market paperback kind of a
deal” (almost exact words), by which standard she felt it failed—and this assumption
about what kind of work it was was clearly wrong (and certainly it was not
implied by the input of most of its reviewers at the JHU conference). This approach
of hers was more generally way out of line, I felt, because I knew A Transient was better than The Folder Hunt, and Lovitz had
supposedly been handling FH for over
a year. I left some starkly critical remarks on an answering machine I was able
to reach, responding to her feedback about A
Transient. (I have a tape-recording of this message I left.)
Eventually Lovitz himself got back to me on the phone. He
remarked in passing that Morling was a trusted associate whose opinion he
valued, but blah blah blah…and (the start of telling signs) he said he didn’t
know what happened with The Folder Hunt;
maybe I should send another copy, because, you know, the copy they had could
get coffee stains, etc. I decided I would send another Folder Hunt; I made clear to him they need not handle A Transient (this itself was a good
decision). But now the Folder Hunt
edition I sent was a later one with its most notable change being a different
first chapter, which was rather weird given the nature of the rest of the book.
I thought submitting this version was a good move at the time.
This might have been in April, or a little later. Maybe it
was May or June.
There was no response from Lovitz until August or September.
This time, he sent back the manuscript, with a review form by an anonymous
reviewer who used a checklist or such, with some typed general remarks, and
there were a few pages of the manuscript the reviewer had written remarks on.
On the first page of the novel, which represented the newer first chapter
(which I would say, from my own perspective today, was inadvisable to replace
the original first chapter with), the reviewer had written in his green ink
something like, “Worst first sentence I’ve ever seen.” And then: “Worst second
sentence I’ve ever seen.” He made some bizarrely mocking remark about some
reference in the manuscript to someone else’s use of illegal drugs. The
reviewer’s general remarks included that I “couldn’t write a lick” or such.
Lovitz’s cover letter said that when he’d accepted FH in early 1986, he had done it
cursorily (maybe he hadn’t used a reviewer then, as he hypothetically could
have claimed), but now—though he backpedaled on a bit of the reviewer’s
venom—he agreed the novel shouldn’t have gone out to publishers. (Actually, I
don’t know for sure if he had ever sent it out.) (He didn’t realize this edition
started differently from the earlier one.) So he had to decline handling it.
End of my relationship with Lovitz...about 20 months after I’d first
“contracted” with him (or, first gave him a manuscript).
Incidentally, in fall 1985, a few months before I first contracted with Lovitz, I
got a personalized, encouraging-sounding response from an editor at Doubleday
when I had submitted FH to a contest
that publisher sponsored. Not that this meant much; the novel didn’t win the
contest, or get a separate offer of publication.
After the Lovitz experience ending in later summer 1987, I
was happy enough no longer to seriously try publishing FH, for quite some time. (Only in 2009 did I start preparing it,
not as a serious novel to try to circulate apart from important editorial
comments added to it, for self-publication.) But I still had A Transient (for which, actually, I
retyped and minorly edited some pages on the student computer system at WU in
fall 1987).
Anyway, this
experience with Lovitz was what I had under my belt when William H. Gass
advised me about getting an agent. Given this, and given that agents
weren’t essential for writers at the time more broadly, I duly recorded Gass’s
friendly comments in some detail, but I was not quick to get another agent for
the foreseeable future.
In fact, within the decade of 1985-96 or so, I got far more
responses of a personal or otherwise direct type from editors I wrote to directly than when I worked with agents—I
have some of the letters in my files (including, all regarding A Transient, from Doubleday in 1986,
Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1987, and Knopf in 1988 or so). I worked with
one agent, a Mark Connolly, in 1989 for A
Transient—he tried only one publisher, didn’t get acceptance, and we ended
our relationship. I worked with Richard VanDerBeets, a California agent, in 1991-92, and he tried
(apparently valiantly) to place A
Transient, submitting to five or six publishers, and didn’t land an offer.
In general, I found I had a much better touch, getting responses that could
allow me to tailor future queries, when I
worked with editors directly than through agents. I felt I could represent
a book’s point better than an agent.
Both Lovitz and VanDerBeets ended up on “scam agents” lists,
held by genre writers or groups, by about 2000 (see End note). I remember seeing Lovitz mentioned on a crude Geocities
Internet posting of supposed bad agents in about 2002. But by that time, the
whole set of assumptions, and particular factual claims, about what made for a
“scam agent” and who was this began
to be established. And as it happened, by then, I was no longer working as
hopefully and diligently to get a novel published as I had within 1985-96. I
had yet another agent, starting in 1997. That, again, would turn out
unavailing.
Gass’s experience, and what good
his advice offered
In any event, Gass’s advice about getting an agent was
notable in this way: he spoke from what had worked for him, and his general
type of advice would seem (anachronistically) more “what has been the
smart-money/mainstream advice” for the
past 10-12 years (to 2013). It did not reflect the main way you could get a
novel published, for a lower-profile
writer in the mid-1980s. Apart from all this, with how I’d fared with
Lovitz in 1986-87, I was not apt to get an agent too soon, by late 1987. In
fact, it is probably in part because of my experience with Lovitz that I
copyrighted, for the first time, a book manuscript—a version of A Transient, as an unpublished work—in
1988. Part of the rationale would have been that you never knew what you were
going to encounter in the publishing world, as Lovitz was an example of for me
at the time.
Gass’s advice to me wasn’t all “irrelevant” or “not good for
me yet.” His remarks that you could take years to get a book published, and
that you should learn to deal with the waiting well, were very sage.
Gass as a Plotinus
among Joycean writers, and his value to a beginning writer
As a “Son of Joyce,” as I said in subpart A, and as I’ve
suggested in this subpart, Gass seems like a late arrival, his bigger, more
adult tomes arriving late in his life, and arriving, even in 2013, beyond when
such books were both widely reviewed, esteemed, and read—the 1950s through the
1990s or so. Maybe you could call such works particularly germane to the Cold
War, not so much to today’s Internet and petty-terrorism days. Also, he seems
more like a philosophy professor who happened to have time, and marshal the
resources, to make a few worthy novels, but only a few.
On a more “general nature” or “general project” level, he is
like Plotinus among the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers: as
Bertrand Russell wrote, “Plotinus…, the founder of Neoplatonism [sic], is the last of the great
philosophers of antiquity. His life is almost coextensive with one of the most
disastrous periods in Roman history. … [But he] is not only historically important. He represents, better than any other
philosopher, an important type of theory.” (A
History of Western Philosophy [New
York: Clarion/Simon & Schuster, 1945], pp. 284,
285.) Plotinus would have an important influence on medieval (Catholic) philosophers,
Russell notes (p. 285). But he would represent the last breath of a certain
originality in ancient philosophy, before the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages
would shroud European civilization for several centuries before the Renaissance
and Rene Descartes would start to breathe new life into western philosophy.
Maybe Gass is like this within the history of Joycean writers.
But Gass isn’t simply about a certain “ideal” kind of
writer, but I think is also a certain kind of “practical” writer. There’s a way
Gass proves a point about being a writer of esteemed trade books, in a way I
would somehow come to learn in my own way: and this is in how what you become as a writer, in terms of material covered, and
timing of books, depends on sheer happenstance—it can exemplify the idea, “Life
is what happens when you’re making other plans.” As I said, he became less
a John Updike, with many novels to his name, than a philosophy professor who
happened to put out a few respected novels. If publishers wanted to make money
off a fiction writer of his ilk, he was not their man: too few novels, and too
much for a selected readership. This might have been fine for Gass. (Was it
fine for the literary world in terms of what it would have liked out of him?
Hard to say, and I myself wouldn’t venture to say.)
Moreover, his type of novels seemed—in the likes of The Tunnel (1995) and Middle C (2013)—like well-crafted things
addressing un-shallow themes that were like the kind of unusual, Hieronymus
Bosch works that would be turned out by a man whose usual paid work meant he
had very unusual tools: in Gass’s case, lines of thinking brought about by an
unusual strain of philosophy, and having come of age in the shadow of the
thunderhead of World War II. What
“dental tools” he had, he used to create novels that were unusual birds carved (as
they could only be) with same.
His flights of imagination even in an essay seem the stuff
that you have to be in a certain frame of mind for; consider this: regarding
how we read determined meanings into literary texts or not, “Absurd connections
produced in this way [following Jacques Derrida’s kind of indeterminacy theory
about texts] are found to be funny…because we still see in the various parts of
these jumbles a grimacing face or a tired dog or the picture of a nun peering
out a barred window onto a wet courtyard covered with scarves” (The New York Review of Books, June 20,
2013, p. 55). He’s giving examples of what (almost any) texts should be
expected to convey in specific instances, while seeming to grasp at flights of
ideas. This type of disputation, sane enough, is typical of him.
Would this be of much use to the people I would end up
writing about in my nonfiction since about 1995? Would it even turn on
Professor Schwarzschild? (Oh, let’s not
think about that.)
I myself warped into a kind of writer I didn’t expect when I
first did A Transient in 1986. Who
knew I’d write on matters related to politics in the 1990s, and on
human-services-type messes (as I did regarding support-group experiences) and a
legal mess (the Bauer case) in the past decade? I would be writing on the difficulties and messes of how this society
tries to provide legal and political and health-care means for people to lead
dignified lives, but just as quickly, the “system” fails to provide for all that
such people need—it screws up big-time, sometimes.
I’ve become a writer of “people in trouble” and a societal
system in even-bigger trouble, in a sense. I’ve
become a writer about what it takes to maintain dignity in an ever-fraying social
“fabric.” No more the philosophic and psychological-realist niceties of A Transient.
My type of route hasn’t been Gass’s route, of course.
It ain’t over till the Big Bear sings: Mr. Kodiak Grizzly makes a speech
“We’re
no longer fighting the good fight, we’re a bunch of dingleberries scrounging
around couch cushions looking for change to buy lunch. We’re racing—but to get
the last package of adult diapers on the shelf before we can’t buy our own with
a coupon…. We no longer seek God, peace of mind, synderesis, or anything else
of that sort—we just want a decent cup of coffee, or the next best thing….
“We
don’t get a federal health-care law with vision and fairness, we get a
cobbled-together erector set of clanking safety-net ideas and wishful thinking sprayed
with holes like a sieve, not averse to embracing virtual giveaways to power-suited slime who in essence will not
have a conscience about making ‘good dollar’ off grandma’s lumbago. And
with bunting around this law blazoned with the idiot canard of ‘No more will
people get their health care only in the emergency room, driving up costs for
everyone!’
“We’ve
become craven assholes, and none of us gives a shit.
“We’ve
gotten to the point where the main hope for the Republican party is Chris
Christie, a virtual fist-pounding ward boss whom the small-time morons cheer
for.
“The
only place we seem to see anything upholding the standards of ‘brave, clean,
thrifty, and reverent’ is a dispenser that says, ‘First pull up, then pull
down.’
“We
don’t dump our useless garbage, we put it through law school. We are so
desperate for what makes a leader that we’ll even take, as a prerequisite, an
un-descended testicle, as Hitler is alleged to have had.
“But worst of all, we make these
observations, and suddenly some of see we have an unexpected date with the Grim
Reaper. Time runs out, hearts have attacks. The ideals are
left for others to grope after. Life goes on—for some if not for others. But
whether there is quality attached to it, well, that’s so often the luck of the
draw.”
Spying Kody’s sudden halt and a
weird look on his face, Sir Teddy Bear says, “What’s the matter, Kody?”
“My BPH. Have to go piddle,” and Kody gallumphs off.
##
End note. Lovitz
and Pegasus International are listed in the information site Preditors and
Editors [http://pred-ed.com] as “Not recommended” and as charging a fee. As for
VanDerBeets, his firm West Coast Literary Associates is similarly listed, as
well as being noted there as listed as a “Top Twenty” worst agency by Writer
Beware.
