Back Flacking

I have resumed my book flacking activities, part of the time anyway. I'm working on a freelance basis for Planned Television Arts, known as PTA, a division of Ruder Finn. They've been around for years and are one of the leading book publicity firms. I worked with them often when I was on the publishing side of the business, so I knew what I was getting into. They're a great bunch of people and very accommodating: I'm doing a lot of it from home, with some time in the PTA offices in New York. We'll see how it works out for everyone involved, and where it might lead.

I've alerted many of my media contacts that I'll soon be hitting them up again for author interviews and such. They thought they were rid of me heh heh, so the collective groans and muttered expletives that greeted my news were quite impressive. (Actually, the response has been very gracious and encouraging.)

Meanwhile, having been away from it for four or five months now, I can tell you unequivocally and without fear of contradiction that commuting really sucks, even once or twice a week. Particularly worthy of note are the exquisitely excruciating twists NJ Transit injects into the experience. How do they come up with that stuff?

Things I'd Like to See This Weekend on C-SPAN's "Book TV"

Saturday
10:00 am: J.K. Rowling
Discussing the origins of her popular novels, Rowling reveals that the Harry Potter books were inspired by Satan, and that through them she plans to seduce the world's children to witchcraft and sorcery and usher in Armageddon and the thousand-year reign of the Antichrist as foretold in the Book of Revelation. She also discloses that her next book will be about cute little bunnies.

11:00 am Ian McEwan
McEwan discusses his difficulties coming up with book titles, and admits that his novel Saturday probably should have been called Thursday. He also reveals that his 1998 novel Amsterdam was supposed to be called Rotterdam ("I always get those two mixed up," he says).

2:00 pm: Roundtable
Naomi Wolf, Tom Wolfe, Paul Wolfowitz, and Wolf Blitzer discuss Fox in Socks.

4:00 pm: Roundtable
Michael J. Fox, Vivica A. Fox, Jeff Foxworthy and Fox Butterfield discuss Beowulf.

6:00 pm: Roundtable
Dee Dee Myer, Yo-Yo Ma, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Boutros Boutros Ghali yadda yadda about Absalom, Absalom!

8:00 pm: The State of American Publishing
Authors Nevada Barr, Richard Florida, Gary Indiana, and J. California Cooper compete in skeet shooting, track & field events, and Greco-Roman wrestling to determine who will claim this coveted title.

Sunday
10:00 am Malcolm Gladwell
The author of Blink discusses his work-in-progress, Trim, about why some people never seem to get a haircut even though they really really need one.

11:00 am Obscure Dickens
A series profiling lesser-known Dickens characters. This week: Seditious Peatbog, the tragic caterer from Great Expectations, who waits decades for Miss Havisham to pay for her wedding reception until finally he rots in his chair.

2:00 pm The Selling of the Classics
Scholars discuss how product placements found their way into classic works of literature. Topics include Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Dumas's Three Musketeers, and repeated references to Starbuck's in Moby-Dick.

6:00 pm Antiquarian Bookseller
Rare book dealer Seymour Glib recounts his lifelong love affair with books and the many pleasures it brought him, until his wife found out. Glib describes romantic weekends in Tahoe with a Gutenberg Bible, long walks on the beach with a Shakespeare First Folio, and acts of intimacy performed in motel rooms with the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.

Happy Bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday, a day to celebrate James Joyce's novel Ulysses and its protagonist, Leopold Bloom. The entire story takes place on June 16th, 1904. Bloomsday is typically celebrated with public readings of the novel and a tremendous amount of drinking.

I must have mash-ups on the mind, but I'd like to publish an edition of Ulysses that injects all the monsters and nymphs and sorceresses from The Odyssey into the novel--not metaphorically, but literally. It would be great to suddenly have a giant cyclops striding down O'Connell Street, gobbling up Dubliners by the handful. Ideally this would occur in Episode Four, just as Leopold Bloom is defecating in the outhouse, which would put our hero at a particular disadvantage. Wouldn't this be a great mash-up? Wouldn't this generate a terrific lawsuit?

Meanwhile, in honor of Bloomsday, I've posted a list of songs relating to Joyce and Ulysses over on Classics Rock! It's already been featured in the publishing industry newsletter Shelf Awareness, tweeted by Ron Charles of The Washington Post, and Facebooked by Deirdre Donahue of USA Today. Happy Bloomsday!

The Snatcher in the Rye

Here's how I'm going to make my fortune: I'm writing an unauthorized sequel to John David California's unauthorized sequel to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. My book will turn the Holden Caulfield series into a trilogy! It's what the kids nowadays are calling a mash-up, combining characters from The Catcher in the Rye with plot elements from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I'm calling it The Snatcher in the Rye.

The plot: Holden Caulfield has finally realized his dream of working in a big field of rye where children are playing. His job is to catch them before they fall off a nearby cliff. It doesn't pay much, but since there aren't a lot of employment opportunities of this sort, Holden considers himself lucky to have it.

One morning Holden notices that overnight, crop circles have appeared in the field of rye. He soon learns that these elaborate designs are a message from an alien race! They come from a planet almost exactly like earth, except on their planet they don't have to dial '1' when making a long-distance call. Turns out these aliens do all their writing in crops. A field of grain is their preferred medium for writing and information storage, and they have long since run out of room on their own planet, even with abridgements. They picked up an old radio broadcast from earth that mentioned "amber waves of grain," and have come looking for something to write on.

Holden tries to convince the authorities that the crop circles are an advance warning of a secret alien invasion. No one will listen to him, mostly because they can't understand why anyone would give advance warning of an invasion if it's supposed to be a secret. Holden is further hampered in his efforts by the fact that he's about 103 years old. Even kindly Dr. Miles Bennell won't listen because he's too busy hitting on Becky Driscoll.

Back at the crop field, Holden finds strange seed pods growing amidst the rye. They soon turn into exact duplicates of the children, who are then replaced by their emotionless alien doppelgangers.

The story ends with Holden running into traffic in the middle of the Interstate screaming, "They're phonies! All of them! Can't you see? They're all a bunch of goddam phonies!"

Lawsuits welcome.

Catcher in the Rye Got Caught

I'm pleased to report that the list of Catcher in the Rye-related songs posted on my Classics Rock! site last Friday drew some attention. Gloria McDonough-Taub at CNBC featured it in the Bullish on Books blog on the network's web site, and gave it a shout-out on Twitter as well. Ron Charles at the Washington Post also tweeted about it. And Deirdre Donahue of USA Today posted it on Facebook.

I guess it pays to have two blogs. Perhaps I should start a third....