I don’t make New Year’s resolutions because they are crap (and the reason the damn gym has been so crowded lately), but I did think near the end of 2009 that 2010 would be a great year to start wearing more red lipstick. My beauty routine, so to speak, is pretty low key — my hair and makeup take less than ten minutes on work days — but there’s something appealing about red lipstick, which for some reason I stopped wearing in my twenties. It’s one of those classic items everyone looks good in — including glow-in-the-dark-pale, dark haired types like myself. Only once have I ever written an article about makeup, but one of the most enjoyable essays I’ve gotten to work on was about the influence of music on personal style. Fashion writing is boring, but the connection between our creative influences and the way we dress actually interests me quite a bit.

This came to mind the other day when I was observing some of the young hipsters who wander around Wheeler Hall. Back in the 80s and early 90s, when I was wearing the most outrageous sort of shit I will ever wear (ankle length velvet gowns with a motorcycle jacket and a necklace made from human finger bones; flowered 1940′ aprons over torn jeans and under a shawl collared grandpa cardigan that reeked of pipe smoke; blue glitter harem pants with a ripped Iggy Pop tee shirt; 50s shirt dresses with a head scarf wrapped like a turban and so on), another girl of an independent, creative temperament could spot me at 10 paces and know we had something in common. I’m not saying women of my generation dressed better than Gen Y, but in my experience (probably colored by living in Oakland/Berkeley), we took a hell of a lot of risks, and these became a sort of radar for one another, sort of like the faded tattoos and piercing scars we now sport in our 30s and 40s.

I don’t see a lot of outrageous style at Cal. There’s a guy who dresses in head-to-toe purple, and there are a lot of girls who favor the Williamsburg look from two or three years ago (tights as pants, flannels, those lace up dance flats, bedhead), but there aren’t a lot of people taking big risks. Some of this may be a reflection of the blending of subcultures that’s taken for granted now. You can wear Nike Dunks with stovepipe jeans and work the counter at American Apparel; you can wear a cardigan with a dookie chain (or a skinnier version of one) and shop there. Indie rock and hip hop style sit comfortably side by side around here. Guys of all colors started strapping straight leg and skinny jeans down low, hip hop style, a couple of years ago. Girls of all shades wear doorknockers. I spend my weekdays immersed in a population of 18-22 year-olds, and they don’t dress to match their taste in music anymore because they listen to — and like — a little of everything. It’s not that I think we should be matchy-matchy with what we’re listening to (I’ve been listening to Rennaisance motets lately, and I’m not rocking doublets and hose), and I like the fashion mashups people are sporting, but I do wish people would be a little more individualistic, would stop worrying about what people will think and start dressing the way they feel. Even if I look a lot more conventional now, that’s what I still try to do. Now I wonder where my finger bone necklace went, because that would really elevate these damn jeans I keep putting on.

Late on Friday, my book, along with thousands of titles by Macmillan authors, vanished from Amazon. MacMillan titles (Macmillan umbrellas my publisher, Henry Holt, along with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Picador, and multiple other imprints) are now available only through third party sellers, and none of our books are available on the Kindle. This whole mess apparently boils down to a debate about the pricing on Kindle books; Macmillan wants Amazon to charge more, because the 9.99 price point apparently boils down to a loss, so Amazon told them to go f*ck themselves.

Capitalism! Always fun for authors, who typically don’t see a damn dime after their advance.

I’ve blogged before about not being a fan of the Kindle (too expensive for most people, not open source, annoyingly named), have no interest whatsoever in the Nook (seriously, with that name it should come bundled with a cat), and being in the ever-shrinking group of my friends who do not own a smart phone, ebooks just never crossed my radar. I don’t have anything against them in theory, since they’re just another manner of disseminating information, but my own book fell into some sort of contractual loophole when Holt tried to design an interactive ebook version of it for iPhones/iPod touches, which somehow never quite happened. I mean, as far as I know the design happened, but the ebook didn’t. The problem with the Kindle is that it binds you to Amazon as long as you have the device, much like iPhones bind you to AT&T, whose coverage, from what I hear, is pathetic. I guess I’m just not into binding, if that’s not TMI.

I suppose this mess just underscores the same thing I’ve been saying all along. Support independent booksellers. Powell’s has signed copies of my book, IndieBound can track down a copy anywhere in the US, and if you’re lucky to live within range of a brick and mortar store, all the better. Lots of libraries have it in stock. And if your local library doesn’t have it, email me and we’ll work something out.

Edited to add: Following in the path of these other MacMillan authors, I’m removing Amazon links from my site for the time being. I’m not sure anyone who wanted to buy a book about independent culture would do so from Amazon anyway, but if you’re gonna act like a big bully, well, you can suck it.

Please indulge me for a moment while I conduct a little experiment. Apparently, readers are more apt to “feel connected” to writers when we tell personal stories and share photographs of our families and friends. Also, posting videos of our readings on YouTube supposedly helps people to become interested in our books. There are two major issues with this formula as far as I’m concerned: I don’t own a camera, and I don’t like it when people film my readings. Why? Because for some reason I will never comprehend I do not photograph well… at all. Something happens when you point a camera at me and I retract my chin into my neck, and thus I am mostly photographed looking like a constipated turtle. I only have one chin in real life, and not much of one, yet in photos I have a whole stack of them.  So you are spared snapshots of me and my husband and friends doing the boring sort of shit we do: going out to eat, talking, walking around, watching movies, reading books. It’s not like I am out there tearing it up on the weekends much these days; I am a 39 year old introvert, people. Back in March, however, I did go with my friends Stefanie and Bean to see Leonard Cohen at the art deco wondrous Paramount Theater here in Oakland, and I will share one — and only one — image of Sage and myself from that event.

Yes, that’s about how happy I am getting my photo taken. And that’s Leonard Cohen’s tour bus in the background. From my expression, you can tell that I really wanted it to run me over at that moment.

The semester started off on an Old Testament note with hail hammering the windows, lightning strikes illuminating the skies above the Berkeley campus, and hordes of wet and shivering students cramming the hallways. I always begin the semester with the usual syllabus hoo hah and a short assignment, and it got me thinking about the inevitable critiques I’m going to have to write on all of my students’ essays in a couple of weeks, and the fact that I will feel like a dick afterward. Look, I love teaching, the classroom part anyway, and I believe it is a vocation and a calling and all that, but I am unconvinced that anyone in their right mind enjoys writing comments on essays. Maybe I’d feel differently if I taught creative writing, but I suspect not. I always feel terrible after I finish a pile of grading.

Which in turn made me think about internet book reviews and blogs. My students occasionally comment that I am a “harsh grader” but after some of the things people have written about my own books, I can only think, wow, in comparison to the pundits of the blogosphere or internetlandia or whatever we’re calling it these days, my comments on essays are like a freaking Hallmark card. But I do have a sense of humor, and so I thought it might be kind of funny to assemble a few of the meanest, weirdest things people have written about my book. Mostly on Goodreads. I kind of hate Goodreads, and I’m beginning to think the democratization of book reviews via the internet is kind of terrible. But let’s do this anonymously! Wouldn’t want to start any trouble or anything…

Those who have been part of the culture will find the book to be like a late night conversation with that one friend who wants to show her indie cred by talking about what everyone else has done and how she knows all those people from her work and that she is one of the first people to have seen Smoosh play, but now their parents are exploiting them and what’s up with Care Bears on Fire?

I hate hipster academics.

The worst music book written in the last ten years.

Kaya Oakes lacks the literary finesse to execute the history behind indie culture in an engaging and entertaining way for the reader… considering I bought Miss Oake’s [sic] book in a super-sized Barnes and Noble…she might think twice about criticizing the corporate book chains and major publishers that are to thank for her book receiving residuals and royalties. (side note? HAHAHAHA royalties? HAHAHAHA)

A wildly inaccurate account of the notable events of “indie” culture in the past 15-20 years.

I don’t know that I’ll finish this book, the weather changed and the covers curled back to expose the cheap and pulpy inner core.

So, to all of my past, current and future students, now you know: you are getting off so, so easy.

Lest this blog go rusty and unused now that book promotion for S&E has mostly ground to a halt, I thought I’d start using this space to fill you in on some of the stuff I’m doing as I marinate and research the next book project that I’ll hopefully be heading into this year. I started the new year by getting away to read and work on the book proposal — with the spouse and a huge pile of books up the Northern California coast to Gualala, a spot I’ve visited two or three times a year for nearly a decade and hold dear when I need a shot of no email, no phone, and nobody who knows me. Then home again, then off to a three day silent retreat. The only real weirdness about keeping the silence comes during mealtimes. It’s odd, to say the least, to be among 30 odd women eating and not talking, pretty much the opposite of mealtimes in my family with three vocal sisters. I don’t want to reveal exactly where I was, but suffice to say they do treat you very well while you’re meditating, reflecting, and stewing in your thoughts. I’ve become increasingly interested in monasticism over the last couple of years, and this was just a tiny taste of what it’s like to live that way full time. Thomas Merton called living in silence being “in the grip of the present”, and this turns out to be true. When you’re not speaking, you have to turn what would be chatter or the banal commentary we fill our days with into something else, and after the initial frantic feeling that something is wrong, that nobody will hear you, you begin to realize that the chatter in your mind is actually, finally, slowing down, and you’re forced to pay closer attention to what’s going on in the moment. By the time the final day rolled around, my voice came back painfully, like some small creature had been nesting in my throat, and I immediately burst into a rolling monologue of f bombs and s bombs, like I’d been saving them up all along. That’s just how it comes out, sometimes.

There’s a Facebook meme going around where you can make a collage of your status updates for the past year. I’m kind of horrified of it, because I suspect that 90% of my updates from the year were about book promotion, and there’s nothing worse than thinking back on the annum and realizing you honked your f*cking horn that loudly for that many months. It’d be like discovering you had food on your face for an entire year and kind friends tried to let you down easy by ignoring it while everyone else wondered why that mustard smudge was still there and if you were perhaps trying to start a new trend.

Converse to all the self-promotional activity I very grudgingly engaged in, 2009 was in many ways my year of learning lessons in humility. I think this actually began in late 08 when my editor started sending me comments on the manuscript in progress. After years of working on magazine edits in Word, I was shocked to see that big New York publishers edit in pencil. Pencil! And they make lots of comments, which are super helpful in most cases but still — one toils away on a book alone, with little feedback, and then FedEx envelopes start appearing covered in pencil marks. And then copy edits come a few months later… in pencil! Red pencil, as a matter of fact, and you have to write “OK” five million times for each edit.. in pencil! Green pencil in this case, and thus the damn thing begins to resemble a Christmas card sent from a demented writing student. And then fact checking and legal. And galleys and ARCs, and then marketing meetings (all on the phone, via conference calls where everyone is talking over one another and insisting I join Twitter, and I’m in sweatpants on my sofa in California picking lint balls off my socks while they’re in the Flatiron building in midtown Manhattan eating bagels. For some reason, I always imagine New York publishing people eating bagels.).

Hype is terrifying, because it does not last and inevitably ends in disappointment, a word I think most writers are intimately familiar with and still struggle to spell correctly. In my case, most of the hype revolved around reviews that were supposedly going to happen and did not, and occasionally about events that were supposedly going to draw crowds and did not. In the latter case, I learned not to give a sh*t, and happily read to groups of five or six people and happily read to groups of a hundred plus. But in the former case, humility became important. You cannot control book reviewers. You cannot control them when they express an interest in your book and then change their minds, and you certainly cannot expect a good review (thus these are a pleasant surprise when they happen). You can’t even expect Amazon reviews, especially if you wrote a book excoriating Amazon for undermining independent bookstores. But you can expect people to complain loudly and ad nauseum about why the book should have been about such and such a thing or such and such a place, or, in my favorite bad review of the year, why the book should have been written as a long form poem that I could “wheat paste to [my] student’s foreheads”. I think I might be sued if I so much as touched one of my students, so I passed on that particular suggestion.

But this is all part of the lessons in humility. My mantras throughout the year went from “I hope people like it” to “at least he/she didn’t call me fat”. Thankfully, however, I also found lot of support from a very unexpected source which I won’t go into here, but suffice to say I learned the practice of gratitude along with the practice of taking punches. Gratitude for my friends, who bought copies and flogged the book to their friends and came to events and listened to me piss and moan. Gratitude for my husband, who came with me on the world’s most absurd book tour and attended almost every reading I did — including the one in a church. Gratitude for my agent and editors, who massaged and pushed the book into publishable shape. Gratitude for my family, who also bought lots of copies and handed them out. Gratitude for the friends I made, the other writers and booksellers and a few readers who I got to know. Gratitude for quiet places to go and reflect on all of this. A lot of changes happened this year, both internally and externally, and even if I occasionally felt like the world was sh*tting all over me, I also occasionally felt, for lack of a better and less cheesy word, blessed.

Suspect the world does not need another review of Mary Karr’s newest memoir, but I do have some scattered thoughts on it. I feel, however, that they must be prefaced by multiple caveats, which may be the scattered thoughts in disguise. Caveat one: I’ve not read any of her other books. Have seen occasional poems of hers in magazines. Caveat two: She studied with a poet I also studied with, who makes a couple of appearances in this book as she begins to ascend into the poetry firmament. Caveat three: Much of this book is about poetry and the journey toward being a career poet, an occupation I’ve abandoned (fodder for a different blog entry/essay, but much of what Dan Nester writes here is true for me as well), so I tend to view that part of her story with a jaded eye. Caveat four: It’s a recovery story, and I’ve never had a serious problem with alcohol; aside from some typical twentysomething years of social binge drinking, I grew up to be a teetotaler. That being said, I do come from an alcoholic family, so I’ve witnessed quite a bit of what she describes. Caveat five: The book was loaned to me by my friend Father A, who’s a Paulist priest and someone I have a deep admiration for. Lest I sound like Ann Lamott, who always seems to be quoting her “priest friend”, I’ll just say that Father A was a writing teacher in seminary and reads a lot of interesting things.  And finally, caveat six: I was working at a bookstore around the time the big wave of memoirs began, and I’ve been appalled by some of the terrible writing that’s come out of this genre and the Augusten Burroughs, “I’ll write five memoirs before I’m fifty!” megalomaniacal style of rubbernecking, navel gazing memoir (no, they are not all like this, but you know what I’m talking about). However, I’m particularly interested in female writing about spirituality at the moment, so I’ve been trying to overcome my memoir-phobia in order to read some sublime stuff (Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness, Theresa of Avila, Hildegard Von Bingen, etc) and some utterly appalling, smug, irritating, trite anti-feminist crap (Ahem, Eat, Pray, Love. Michael K over at Dlisted refers to that one as “Queef, Fart, Poop”, which just about sums it up for me).

Karr is clearly a better writer than Elizabeth Gilbert, and no matter how much I can’t get into some aspects of her book, she can turn a phrase and tell a story — which ought to be plenty enough for a memoir. The thing about this book, however, is the sense of weariness about the enterprise (and this may be my misinterpretation having never read her other memoirs). There’s a kind of steady narrative interruption throughout where she stops in order to have a flashback, but these often feel like retreads of stories told elsewhere, and that’s again coming from someone who hasn’t read said stories before. Nonetheless, the vividness of some things here is irresistible, and I like the fact that she’s hard on herself; real writers are really fucking hard on ourselves, and in my experience we don’t really like ourselves all that much, which she gets. After recovery, however, Karr starts praying — I’m totally fine with that — but she also starts loving herself, and gets a great job (tenure track!) and publishes books (interestingly, she does the same thing I complained about in regards to Julie and Julia and says “blah blah you’re not a writer until you publish a book”, then repeats several times that the book was ignored, although it lead to accolades, tenure, better publication of her next book, meeting famous writers et cetera; I was confused about this part of the narrative). She has a torrid affair with David Foster Wallace (though her writing about it doesn’t feel exploitative — I had to re-read her description of him a couple of times before the faint ping of recognition went off), she becomes a responsible mother, forgives her own mother for being insane and drunk, and so on. It feels like a rather pat “happy ending”, and dampened my enthusiasm for the book. Her conversion story only takes up less than a forth of the whole thing, and she seems to have picked Catholicism kind of randomly — she complains the Episcopal church wasn’t heated enough in winter — and it’s kind of bunched together version of what must have been a pretty significant experience for her. I found myself liking Mary Karr the writer more than Mary Karr’s book, if that makes any sense. Perhaps it just needed a more merciless editor who might have trimmed down some of the digressive passages, but as much as the writing itself was compelling, much of the story left me a little confused.

You can tell I’m on a break from teaching because I’ve managed to read five books in seven days — much as I had great students this semester who really wrote well, it’s like I’m dying of thirst for books. God, what a cliche. Sorry about that.

After a long and demoralizing end-of-term* meeting yesterday (at which we were reminded that due to budget cuts, none of our excellent part-time faculty will be back in the spring semester), I came home and lumped out on the sofa for many hours, and caught most of Julie and Julia on the pay-per-view. I’ll spare you the same comments most people probably made about this film (blah blah Meryl Streep is awesome Jane Lynch! etcetera), but it did make me want to say something about the end of the film, in which both Julia Child and Julie, the contemporary blogger who whines a lot, both get book deals. In Child’s case, her cookbook arguably did change a lot about the way Americans cook, but in Julie’s case, she keeps repeating (and repeating) throughout the film that “if no one publishes you, you’re not a writer.” The end result in her case, as far as I can tell, has been a couple of whiny memoirs, the latest of which is taking a critical drubbing. Near the end of the film, there’s this kind of perverse sequence where she gets a zillion book offers because her blog was written up in the New York Times, and (it’s implied) lives happily ever after.

This bothered me and is still bothering me this morning.  The message I try to send my students — knowing that the vast majority of them have no desire to be full-time or even part-time writers — is that anyone can write, and that you do not need to publish a book, or even an essay, poem, whatever, to be a writer. Also, speaking from personal experience, while publishing a book is a cool thing to do, it does not necessarily change your life. I’m guessing that the vast majority of authors are still working at the same jobs they had before publication. Also, in these lean times in the publishing industry, we have to shoulder almost all of our own publicity, which is a nightmare for introverts, and since many writers are introverts, the end result is some halfhearted Twittering and Facebooking and some lame stabs at querying Slate and The Daily Beast (who, ahem, might never get back to you). Sure, it’s an awesome moment when your galleys and ARCs come in the mail, and for the couple of months that your book is interesting to bookstores, it’s equally cool to see it displayed on tables, but — and this is what bugged me about the film — your daily life is most likely not going to change that drastically. I joked when my first book came out (after nearly two years of delays) that I was hoping to wake up with clear skin, straight teeth, and lustrous hair, which obviously did not happen, because I still have to use acne medication and my teeth are still jacked up. Nor have I been able to generate any additional income from freelancing, since I published my second book around the same time that the newspaper and magazine industries went into their current death spiral. Nor have any job offers “floated down”, as Mary Karr says in her new memoir (which a friend just loaned me) about landing a tenured gig , because academia is also gasping for oxygen.**

I fear this may sound just as whiny as poor Julie in the film, but I was reading some blog comments about it and one poster said that sequence with all the book deal offers made her cry because she wanted that to happen for her so badly. I hope it does — I’m not such a hard -hearted cynic that I would want to deny anyone their dream — but I do wish people understood that unless you are very, very, very lucky or have extremely good timing to pick a subject that really hits the zeitgeist, publishing is a brutal, cutthroat business and an uphill battle for any kind of attention. Someone told me recently that less that 10% of books sell more than 5000 copies, and while 5000 sounds like a lot to someone like me who comes from a small press background, that means that 90% of books are considered to be commercial failures.

The bottom line message here is that you do not have to get a zillion messages on your answering machine all promising to CHANGE YOUR LIFE via publication to be a writer. The thing about landing a book deal is that it opens your eyes to the fact that writing is now your job. You are being paid for it, and that changes your relationship to the process — it’s no longer just about you and the work, because an army of other people are now involved, and they are working for a living too. If you’re lucky, like I’ve been, many of those people will become your friends and will really care about you and your writing. But you’re just as much of a writer if this never happens, and there are so many other ways to be published.  And you’re still a writer if you never publish a damn thing. When my father died, I found sheaves of poems he’d written over the years, many of which were brilliant and heartbreaking, but he never expressed any interest in publishing them, and never whined or complained that he wasn’t a writer because that didn’t happen for him. Like a lot of people — myself included — he wrote because that’s what felt right in the moment. All of the other stuff is just a bonus. It’s writing in the moment, because that moment counts, that matters, and lasts.

*End-of-term, though I am not yet done grading, which is another story entirely.

** Though, I should add, I would not resist such an offer.

Some writerly folks decided to use today as a day to pay tribute to our agents on our blogs, and since I think my agent is the cat’s pajamas, I decided to join in. My lovely agent is Michelle Brower, who recently relocated to Folio Literary Management. Michelle is pretty much solely responsible for the existence of Slanted and Enchanted, since she contacted me based on an essay I wrote for Kitchen Sink and asked if I wanted to develop a book proposal. If it weren’t for her, I’d probably be writing long, cranky essays for obscure literary magazines nobody reads… well, I actually still do a fair amount of that, but thanks to Michelle I also have a book that people can buy pretty much everywhere. She has also been an excellent advocate for my work and helped me learn the ropes of the proposal process, working with editors, signing contracts and all the hoo hah involved in the business side of writing. Also, though she is super sweet she’s got a steely interior this comes in very handy in contract negotiations), and has a knack for picking clients whose work is unique, funny, and interesting. I’m very glad she’s decided to stick with me!

Today was the last teaching day of the semester, as Berkeley enters its first “Reading, Review, Recitation” period, which other schools call “Dead Week”. Normally, we’d have another week of classes ahead of us and wind things up around December 10th, but the RRR period was announced right around the same time the University started furloughing folks, so RRR may really be about the fact that there aren’t enough custodians still employed by UC to keep the classrooms clean. Anyway, my R4B students — the ones in the underground music class — asked me whether I was working on a new book, and I told them something I haven’t told you, dear reader. I am. I’m at the very beginning, just getting my feet wet, not really ready to tell you much about it stage of things. The proposal is mostly done, I’m hoping to knock down another three chapters or so in the bleak midwinter, and I’ll just let you in on a few things:

It’s a genre I swore I’d never mess with.

The people who wrote crappy reviews of Slanted and Enchanted will probably like it.

The people who wrote good reviews of Slanted and Enchanted will probably hate it (one of my students astutely observed that this means I am now following Bob Dylan’s career pattern).

It’s nonfiction, will be written in first person, will also involve field research and a lot of mucking about in rarely visited parts of the library, and will bear a closer relationship to much of the writing I did for Kitchen Sink than S&E did.

It will probably offend a lot of people.

More to come…