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Tonight I'm very pleased to welcome Steve all meant for the international debut presentation of his new book of essays and stories in titled This won't take but a minute honey. Well leave the description of the book to its creator. I can tell you that Steve Almond is one of Harvard bookstores favorite local writers. You may recall his dear Barack letter is from The Huffington Post or seen his guest columns in The Boston Globe poets or writers or elsewhere. Or perhaps you are aware of his occasional music scene called the tip more traditionally Steve is the author of the story collections my life in heavy metal and the evil Bebe chow. And of the novel which brings me to you coauthored by Juliana got it's about got the got it right. But there you go. He is also in the nonfiction books can be frank and not that you ask which is a collection of autograph autobiographical pieces covering topics from Oprah Winfrey excuse me to sexual failure and many varieties of shame. His next book will be published next month. His next book will be published in April of next year entitled rock n roll will save your life.

I have it on good authority that Mr. Ahmann plans on bringing the nasty to all of us tonight. So this should be interesting. Everyone with my thanks for your patience. Please join me in welcoming the one and only Steve Allman. It's actually not going to be very nasty tonight. By my standards unless there's a special request for sexual failure. In fact throughout the reading I'll be unable to attain an erection that's helpful to you. So the first thing I need to do is think Heather and think Bronwyn who's back there making books in their life you made it. For making this happen and thank you guys for coming out. And I need to find out what sort of book you want to buy if you want to buy a book. My goal for this evening in a purely mercenary political way is to outsell Sarah Pailin.

I just love the idea that in the Globe Best Seller you know fuck not list I'll be higher than Sarah Pailin please make my dream happen so that when we do get together I'll be like yeah I heard about your book but it was kind of down at the bottom I read. So here's here's what you can do and just remember the holidays around the corner. It is an ideal stocking stuffers or Hanukkah equivalent Stouffer's Stouffer's. So here's the deal for the. This was the original cover of the book. It's actually two books we can't hear you. OK. It was originally this cover with the lady and her whip. And I'll go ahead and hand these around and then the nurse who's got the medicine it goes in your tissue. OK. You know that medicine. And so you can take it. OK. And then I asked him designed two new covers and he did this one.

If. You want you to have this OK and you flip it over and she's suddenly no longer tan ok. And if you look real closely she's got thorns coming out of her. OK so that one you guys can all look at and pass it around and. And then and then this one this amazing cover which is a skull with a flower motif. OK so we've got a skull with a flower motif we've got Lady discreetly nude Modigliani ask OK and we have a nurse and dominator x. OK. So just on first thought best thought just to get a rough count so that Bronwyn knows he's going to make these books while I'm babbling. They're going to be made while we're here together. How many people like the looks of the skull cover. Is this going to be a difficult audience I need. Okay so maybe I'm seeing. Guilty in do it maybe half a dozen That's surprising I thought that would get more play

naked lady with thorns. I will remind you said her pale and sells a lot of fucking books people. OK so that's about a dozen of those guys and dominate tricks in earth. Interesting all there you were all hiding OK so that's about that looks like about two dozen So Bronwyn. If you can hear me. About two dozen of the original cover and and maybe a dozen of each of the others. OK. The other thing that people often or when we ask questions I'll be happy to talk about this designer but the first thing I need to do is explain to you that he designed the book for free. And he is a guy who recently just did a New Yorker cover He's one of the most famous illustrators in the country easily a rising star in that world. I know him by pure happenstance we were both drunk it seemed right at the time. I'm not ashamed of it. His name is Brian Stauffer and I like your attitude. Bring that throughout the reading.

That's what this fucking mean. His name is Brian Stauffer S T A YOU F F E R. He's absolutely right Brian suffered. So now I'm going to read a little bit from the book. Oddly enough. And then and then I'm going to answer questions about how it got made and Bronwyn who runs the Espresso Book Machine will come in at the end and answer questions about how you all might be using the machine in the future. So I'm happy to answer questions about how this thing came into the world and I hope you won't be shy about asking questions. The book is really two books. It's a book of 30 short shorts they're all about three to five hundred words and then 30 short short essays on the psychology and craft practice of writing. That's what it is. I conceived of it many years ago and think god the means of production are now makes it possible for me to just put it into the world. So let me read some of these short shorts and then I'll read some of the essays.

The stories are all divided into little sections five stories in each section the first one is called imperfect command of history they're all based on history. It's called that age 91 and a small hts of the commercial unit speaks the commercial unit was the unit was out in front and the Russian army that was charged with finding that Hitler and the other high ranking German officers. We knew this. Can anybody hear me by the way in the back. OK we knew this. On April 28 one thousand forty five in the Reich Chancellery Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun. He kissed her hand and made her his wife. She wore a blue dress and a gray stole. Four days later he and Braun entered a sitting room. She swallowed a cyanide tablet and kicked over a flower vase. Hitler bit into the pill and shot himself at the same instant. He had heard reports of Mussolini hung like a sausage in a public square and feared bombs of sleeping gas. He ordered his

body and bronze burned. Some days later the story circulated about Hitler's valet that he had fed bits of the dead to Blondie his German shepherd. We were never able to confirm this but we heard the dog upon our approach howling at the artillery. The rooms of the bunker were low and dark padded like coffins. We found in one the notes written by the physician who attended Hitler. His penmanship was exquisite. By the end he was prescribe in the future ninety two different medications for cramps insomnia cocaine and his eye drops and fed amines with his tea. A vile sea brown liquid under the linen bed covers and another room we found Goebbels wife. Her six children were laid out on cots as if awaiting a bedtime story. Poison chocolate on their tongues. Above ground in a fountain lay a man who resembled Hitler the same pallid face and black smear of hair. One of the fellows in our unit began to scream it's him it's him. The commander came walking quickly

after a quick inspection he scoffed. This man wears darn socks. Just before dusk the commander found Hitler's body and that of his new bride. They were in a shallow grave outside the bunker. They had been partially burned. Later the commander came to my tent. He had been drinking and his eyes were full of tears. Smoltz he said I want you to guard this with your life. He handed me a box no larger than a heart though that exact shade the commander said his teeth are in this. I don't know why he gave that box to me which contained the last remnants of the Angel of Death. It is always the women who handle the dead. We allow history to pass through us like a violent wave and we hold fast to the present. I have nothing more to say. So. Well OK. You like being depressed. So that was the funny part of the book.

And it's just gets even funnier. This is called I want to buy the guy a drink. Who in the dead of a scowling New York January spots My Great Aunt Meda on sixty fourth and Central Park West staring doubtfully at the icy cross walk and who this guy some handsome young fellow on his way to a bar with friends to drink. Turns back races across the street takes her arm in his and escorts escorts her to the other side. The two of them leaning in walking slowly not unhappily somewhat sexily in the voluntary lingering of what youth knows of what it is to be old and more so after shepherding her under the awning of the restaurant where she will dine. He turns back in front of all his friends and says Can I have your number so that all nature can do is smile and shyly demure in her humming Rhineland accent and accent as rich as pot roast simmered for hours and delicate and beautiful. This

moment one for the ages one to make us young again. All of us and foolishly hopeful as in love. Right so these are just little. It's OK. These are like I say these are really just very short little stories and I figured I'd read a Boston story. So this is a Fenway. This is an ode to Fenway but it's set in 2001. Before we were just assholes remember when we were noble. It's written in two parts one what if either Red Sox fans here. Yeah I fucking hate the Red Sox. That's why it's fiction. What if I told you I like adversity. Not for the purposes of guilt but simply to struggle to be in a condition of greater awareness or that I don't mind obstructed sightlines great green pillars pitted with rivets. What if I'm not just being contrary but stubborn in my desires like the people who live in the neighborhood whose porch is in front walks cause the rakish and

cemetery of our ballpark. What if I told you I don't especially want to win it all. Would this be heresy. That second best somehow fails to afflict me that making the owners more money to buy better players to beat the Yankees does not feel like a victory earned so much as bought at the price of who we are as a city. Scuffed by history aggrieved out of change like the guys forking Italian sausages on Yaki or the Irish bachelors darting like swallows across Brookline scalping cheap seats to tourists to a stadium is not a museum. I'm not one of those jerks yodeling whoa every time fate shifts on her throne the stadium is just a place for people to gather close together. One of the last ripe with longing exposed to the risks of hope and its duties. But I don't like the idea of the rich man telling the poor man how to eat his

distraction and where structuring environments. I know it's always been this way. I'm not naive. Only I am. I need to pretend I need a broken down old stadium stinking of beer and mustard and rain falling like flour before the sodium lights. Every time they talk about you know rebuilding Fenway it just makes my soul vomit. This is I lived for many years in Somerville and there was a stock market there in Somerville and I would always go to the Star Market in my awful pathological writer loneliness and just try to make some time with the cashier I didn't it wasn't even you know Fleur I just was so fucking lonely and and this is the result. This this piece is the result of those efforts it's called unfriendly cashiered. Not rude which would imply all the tired grudges against fate as would

bitter or hard bitten or impervious with its slender Caprice just unfriendly as in not interested in being your friend not interested in your clothing or chummy witticisms in what you are buying today. Just there at the register with a name tag. My favorites work it down in the mouth markets the leaky emporiums with carts that are a tetanus threat and off brands whose lettering croon sweetly off key. And what I like second best about them is that they watch everything a step ahead of your complaints and stupid coupons. Tired of your voice before you even speak. These are men and women and moon to mood generous only incompetence. You and your strawberry soda and salsa and your low watt public friendliness face they don't care or. Make a joke and they'll stare at you like you're naked and disappointing. And what I like best about them is this stout refusal to provide the situation

to obey the curse and slogans of our age with its pathological all teary already and salesmanship with its spirit the color and composition of hot dogs and best of all those moments when something unusual and true and funny happens when a spoiled kid throws up from too many animal crackers or the unctuous new bag boy rams a plate glass window where the manager slips on the ice outside on her ass and the cashiers all in a row and against every grain of better judgment grain. That's like a tough crowd those. You know either you're just going to really applaud or we're all going to feel pathetic. So just let's wait to the end of the pity clap is it hurts all of us in the end. It's not good for any of us. I'll just read one more of these and then I'll read just a few of these essays This is called How you know you're an adult. Case anybody was wondering.

Suddenly socks don't seem like a lousy gift at all. A nice pair of socks silk or a cotton blend and a subtle color to slate or OAP grr. Suddenly you see yourself in nice socks you covet other men's socks you walk around the city where you live coveting other men's socks. With their socks your life might come together more convincingly figures of authority would be given pause women would associate you with words like saying. I should been looking for an excuse to use that word for years and just landed in front of me. You're not obvious about this new what to call it interest you don't linger around the dainty sock racks looking for Lorna urge your friends to go barefoot in your home. You drop hints though keep up a healthy correspondence with the surviving grandparents make a point of Thank You Notes. You do these things. Exhibit

A little Grace a little love. And just like that your feet slip inside the fabric and you rise and walk like a grown up. So now I'm going to read some some of the essays and I'll just say that I'm happy to talk more about why I decided to put these two together and my central purpose in writing these essays was that I think there are a ton of craft books out there. How many of you are writers or aspiring writers. Okay terrific. OK and how many of your teachers are students of some great. And how many of you just wandered in because you thought Al Gore was speaking. So it's going to be a disappointing night for both of us. Yeah. So there are all these craft books out there and and they say lots of laudable things about technical matters of writing but those of you who are trying to write know that what's really happening when you're writing is that you know you're really shut up in a room making decisions and you're terribly fraught about all those decisions.

And there are all sorts of psychological and emotional forces in other words that are keeping you from doing that work. And that's what these little essays are all very short are about. I deal with some issues of craft but I'm primarily interested with the psychology and practice of writing which I don't think gets talked about it's too squishy. So I just read a few of them. The first piece is called two forces. The first is an absolute conviction in the importance of your work the secret and shivery sense that you have been called to the language in some spiritual capacity that you and you alone have stories the world must hear that these stories are ready to spill out of you with the hot urgency of scripture. And that when they do you will be recognized as a rare talent a writer of the first order and eventually why fight it. The fucking Messiah. You are not the messiah nor in all likelihood are you fucking. But this mindset is generative in nature it tends to produce a lot of work.

Even if this same work later makes you cringe. The second force is the creeping suspicion that any sustained effort to write is doomed that you will never transcribe the story so perfectly arranged in your mind will never convey the brilliance and depth of emotion sloshing around in there. And even if you do the best result you can hope for is that your mother will drive to your apartment with a crock pot a crock pot full of soup and ask why you're depressed rather than quitting though you will persist in this enterprise and that's become an ongoing embarrassment to your friends and family. A person without proper dental care. A person of possibly questionable sanity inevitably arriving at that point years from now in which you are loitering outside a restaurant just enjoying the smell getting your bearings as it were when your former fiance shows up with her new husband the surgeon and pretends not to notice that you are missing a couple of teeth in the mid incisor range and instead asked not unkindly how the writing's going. The technical

term is writer's block. You will never Ridge yourself of these opposing forces they are what you get for choosing to shut yourself up in a room alone when the rest of the kids are outside enjoying recess. Welcome comrade. In the I'll just read the second one because that's so depressing. It's called it's called bullshit detector. Before I depress you further let's take a big step back and ask one of those overarching questions of which obnoxious know it alls like myself are so fond. Ready. Here it is. What is writing. Seriously what's the essential activity once you boil away all the romance. If you guess making shit up you are wrong. If you guessed applying language to divine human truth you are both wrong and pretentious. If you guessed the brief painful phase that comes after several hours of procrastination you are technically correct but vague writing is decision making nothing more and nothing less. What

word. Where to place the comma how to shape the paragraph which characters to undress and in what manner it's relentless. If you refuse to pass judgment on these decisions if you walk around thinking you're the messiah you'll wind up settling for inferior decisions by which I mean imprecise contrived masterbate Tory ones trust me. If on the other hand you can damn yours your decisions you'll lose the Improv is a Tory momentum upon which all narrative construction depends. The only surefire solution is to develop the capacity to pass reliable judgement on your own work to second guess your decisions without second guessing your talent. If literary critics actually did this sort of thing anymore we might call this a critical faculty employ the term Hemingway preferred bullshit detector. The idea is not to slow your rate of composition via compulsory revision but on the contrary to make better decisions in the first place and to recognise when you haven't quickly without succumbing to the opera of self-doubt. The idea is to attain that elusive

state in which your decision making becomes intuitive rather than labored. And then I go on in detail how you develop it. But I'm not. You have to buy the book. I'll just read a couple more of these. This one is called What I mean when I talk about love. For many years I was reluctant to tell my girlfriends I was in love with them. I viewed love as a code word for certain emotional promises I had little hope of keeping and therefore made the typically scuzzy masculine argument that love was an arbitrary threshold. Who really knew what it meant and what mattered was how I behave not the term fix to those behaviors. This was the part of the story just before I got dumped. I still think of love as a pretty fuzzy word routinely debased by pop stars and infomercials but as a writer I've come to see love in more precise terms as an act of sustained attention implying eventual mercy. There is nothing more disheartening to me than a story in which the writer expresses contempt

for his characters. It's the one failure I can't abide because it amounts to a conscious decision to shit on art whose first and final mission is the transmission of love. That's what's happening by the way when you read any great piece of literature the love transmitted from the author to her characters is being transmitted to you the reader which is why I continually exhort students to love their characters at all times. I don't mean by this that you should protect them. On the contrary it is your sworn duty to send your characters barreling into the danger of their own desires. Nor do I mean to endorse some bland form of moral absolution. I mean something much more like what the authors of the New Testament ascribed to Jesus Christ. That you love people not for their strength and nobility but on the contrary for their weakness and iniquity. Your job is not to burnish the saint but to redeem the sinner with your help. Your characters will hurl themselves into all manner of trouble. They will behave despicably. It is at this point that your mettle as a

writer and a What the hell a human being will be tested. Will you turn away from them in their time of need. OK this could be a couple more of these. It's just a painful moment for all of us. The single guy who's like yeah I feel you Aman because you're kind of an. All right. All right so this was called excessive emotional involvement is the whole point. Because really you didn't decide to become a writer for the money or the health insurance plan did you. It wasn't to make your parents proud. And if you turned to prose in the hopes of becoming famous well then Brother Sister you deserve more pity than contempt so why then here's my guess. Certain volatile feelings went unexpressed in your family of origin and seeped into the groundwater and you are now hoping to articulate the most

shameful of them via the wonders of fictive disguise. I am not discounting your urgent devotion to language nor your bulging imagination but I am speaking now of motives not aptitudes the problem of course is that every family enforces its own codes of silence and every writer in this sense is violating some kind of America. Here's where that internal conflict I mentioned earlier rears up to shut you down. The question is what stronger your compulsion to tell the truth about the things that matter to you the most deeply or your fear of the consequences. And one more just right at the end and then we'll just do questions and talk. The last the last little essay and it's untitled this is just my bullshit. You can and should find an exception to everything I've just said. Only a fool speaks with assurance about something as subjective as artistic creation. So take what you can from this volume and leave the rest behind. But a few reminders before I

head back to the cave. Every decision you make matters. It matters that you use the word anxious when you meant eager. It matters that you chose a comma and not a semi-colon to separate those independent clauses. It matters that you jump ship with your heroine on the brink of ruin. The reader brings her patient heart to your work. She arrives ready to dream your dream. But if you betray her enough times if you make a habit of lazy self-regarding decisions if you fail to grant your characters the love they deserve she will find another dream. We are living in an era of screen addiction and capitalist pornography as a species we are squandering the exalted gifts of consciousness losing our capacity to pay attention to imagine the suffering of others. You are a part of all this. It involves you. This is the hard labor we're trying to perform. Convincing strangers to translate our specs of NK into stories capable of generating rescue I mentioned

before. Or maybe I didn't. The ancient feeling I get when I read a beautiful story. It's as if I'm a little kid again and something very sad is happened and it's winter and the night has blackened the branches above. I'm very stirred up close to tears actually because I can see I've been made to see the sorrow that everyone is lugging around and the cruel things this sorrow makes them do. And still I want to forgive them. I want to forgive every last sorry bastard god I love that feeling OK. Ooh. So that being said that's all I'm going to read from the book. But I would love to talk about sort of making a book in this way and putting it into the world in this way so if you will after a few moments of awkward silence if you have questions about that I'd love to answer them.

I get good awkward silence. So the question was could I tell you the process. It's a broad question. But yeah I guess that would that will save us all time. So I've been putting books into the world you know for five or six years. Short stories and nonfiction and through the traditional channel the traditional channel is find a big New York publisher and get them to buy into your thing and put it out in the bookstores and hope people come and buy it. I found that model to be quite frustrating in a number of ways not that I am not delighted and indebted to the people the publishers who publish the book. But you really lose a lot of control over what you're trying to do. And I can tell you the exact moment that I knew I wanted to put this book into the world and it was sitting in an office in New York sort of high up in the literary lap of luxury big publishing house and trying to explain to a senior editor there. That I wanted to make this

book of short shorts because I love that form. That's what I love. I love writing them nobody ever wants to publish them and I wanted to write these short little essays as well. A kind of sort of Letters to a Young Poet for fiction writers I guess. And so I'm describing this thing and saying Look man this is going to be a way to reach a new audience to turn people on to literature in a way that feels a little bit more approachable and I'm doing my whole rap. And I just look up in the midst of it and her eyes who just have that film over them like a dead fish like that I'm not going to be able to sell more than four of these and you're wasting my fucking time. You know I got Sarah Palin on the other line. And I really realized that this was not a book that was going to make sense as a commercial product and in fact I was tired and remain tired of putting books into the world as commodities. It feels to me answer theoretical to what their true purpose is in the world which is that they're artifacts that commemorate what we still feel as a

species diminished as that might be. And so I got the idea that I should i should try to do this myself but then as with all my projects I just sat around my ass wasting time for another couple of years and it was really only in the last five or six months I talk with my wife a lot about the way in which technology seemed to be changing. I had conversations with live with Yves Rydberg about you know we were talking about publishing is changing and the top down approach doesn't work anymore. It's been pushed to the margins and in some ways that might be a tragedy but in other ways it's an opportunity to try to think about literature coming from the bottom up rather than from the top down. And so we had that discussion and then I started work and then I did a reading with where Sue Williams and his status here to you know we did this reading for this book of short shorts. And there was like 80 people there. It's very hard to get 80 people to come out to reading I thought wow you know this isn't such a foolish notion something is happening with this form.

In a world that is absolutely overrun by marketing people need empathy and they need quick hard bursts of it and that's what short shorts offer. That's why it offers the urgency of poetry the kind of lyric urgencies So I got very psyched up about that. And then I try to figure out well how am I going to make it happen. And I basically just finally decided to get off my ass once I finished galley you know sort of the copy editing for the big book that's coming out in spring by which I mean that you know published by a real publishing house book. I just said why not do this. Why am I putting around and sent the text to Brian Stauffer. Thanks Brian. And he came up with those covers and once he came up with this cover I was like holy shit I better really make a very good book to justify that. I've already written many of these stories and rewritten them so many of the stories were already although I wrote some new ones and then I I've been saying these things in these lectures are these you know little essays for 10 years

I've been banging on my students heads saying don't make the same mistakes I made. Here's what I can tell you very quickly about how to get better. You know it isn't some mystical pursuit. And so that those came relatively quickly and then the final piece of it was I was trying to figure out how am I going to get this thing published and I was at a reading and I you know was talking with Jim Huggins who everybody knows in Boston circles and he's like I was saying I don't know how to get this little thing that I have made publish and he said want to use that new machine at the Harvard bookstore. And I was like Danine what machine. You know. And just as background so I have like two small children so like all I'm thinking about is are they pooping. What's the look like that's all I'm thinking about. So so I then got in touch with Bronwyn and sent her the PDAF and literally four or five days later watched a midwife to the birthing of the book. I mean you will see if you go to get one of these things mate it's just astonishing thing right. The book comes out of the machine it's still wet it's still you know

you have to weigh it in get its app Gar I mean it's amazing. So that's that's sort of from soup to nuts. There's no ISBN. Yeah. So the. All right so you if you have these practical questions do you have a copyright. My wife has to get to get copyright Do you have an ISBN. Well I haven't gotten copyrighted. If somebody wants to say that this is their work great. I'm psyched. They liked it enough let's both put it out there. You know if Hollywood says I think this is going to make a great film but you need a happier ending. To lose teeth but they're funny. So I don't have an ISBN. Now ISBN is the number by which a book is tracked and it's part of a big mercantile system a commodity system so that they know where it is because the way the books move into the world is totally counter-intuitive. Do you guys know how books move into the world. They order like 10000 copies of your book. I speak from painful experience. They send him out to the bookstores a thousand of them if you're lucky get bought. And

the other 9000 are shipped with lots of petrol. Back to the warehouse to sit around moldering for a while until they go onto a remainder table. Or if you're like a dumb shit like me you buy out the remainders and then they sit in your garage while your long suffering wife says why are there so many fuck em. It's in our garage. It's a completely. It makes no sense at all. No business should operate like this the way a business should operate is I would like a copy of that book. Oh well we have the means to production to produce it blank. There it is. Yeah everybody's happy. It would be less wasteful of resources and we don't hit peak oil. This model is going to be wiped off the face of the earth and that's great. It should be. I'm not suggesting that we should have libraries we should have bookstores but I love the idea that you could go to a bookstore and say I would like this book. Here's the PDA and they produce it for you right there. That's really all I provided just the art. Yeah I know what you're saying and yeah I don't mean to give you a hard time but people are

preoccupied with issues of copyright Niaspan and that's fine. But those are those are commercial questions. All I was trying to do is to figure out a way to get the little thing I had to say out into the world and the miracle of the modern era is that's now possible without all the bibble of you know having to run it up the big mighty tree of capitalism. You can do it very low today. Well I mean I should say is a cautionary tale like I don't recommend that you just run out and start printing your books get really good as a writer. Find readers because you've gotten good you know your decisions are good. But I absolutely exhort you to consider all the options that are out there. I'm not deluding myself into thinking that if I didn't have a little readership you know anybody would buy this book. But I also know that on there is only going to be you know how many people are like marking their calendars I hope Steve Aman's books coming out. I mean you know you got to know where you are and I'm really at the edge I like where I am because everybody there is super smart and deeply feeling. But there's not a lot of us. Like we all kind of fit into this room.

So why not just say here's the book and why even bother pretending that the New York Times Book Review is going to say all men's voice rings through the ages and then it will all be on Oprah or something like that. That works for one one thousandth of the books out there realistically. So maybe actually one one millionth is more accurate. Are there are there other questions you guys have. It is true because publishers are putting out lots of books and there is a they act as gatekeepers and they make sure that there is that the author has done their work of getting good with the language and knowing how to tell a story or you know write it whatever sort of book it is that they're writing. And there is a team in place who helps try to put that book into the world in a bigger way. Now what I've done here is put the book into the world in a very small way you can't get this book other than at this reading you could buy it I guess from the Harvard Book Store that's fine they want to sell it cool. But I wanted to

put a book into the world where it just was sold at readings because it struck me about three or four years ago that nobody other than the people who come to my readings are fucking buying my books. And that's cool I'm actually kind of OK with that. You know you can choose to move a lot of people a little bit or a few people in a deeper way and that's a very gratifying thing to realize. So I'm not concerned about getting into Barnes and Noble. Then it becomes something else it becomes a different thing and. I start to feel like I have to sell sell sell and I don't like feeling like that because I want to just be in my fucked up brighter space. Worrying about you know what I worry about what we should all worry about. So you know these questions it's true that there's a bias against self-publishing but it's also true that the whole paradigm is changing. It's all changing brick and mortar shops I mean Harvard bookstore will survive because they're bad ass. They know what they're doing and they know they like Tim knew like anybody who runs a good bookstore knows that it's about building a community around literature and

the feelings that literature traffics in. That's what it's about. It's not about catching the latest buzz hot author David they'll be gone next week. But the thing that endures is that people still need to gather close together that's why we're there still going to Fenway and feel the things they need to feel. So I'm not concerned really about Barnes and Noble or get you know getting in there and so forth. And I do think that it's really. Very dramatically and quickly changing the way that books move into the world. Many publishing small publishers are now saying why don't we make it where we'll give you a little advance because the advance system is ridiculous. I mean the same thing happen in music. What we're seeing in publishing is just exactly what happened in music 10 years ago. The means of production have become accessible to the artists and wouldn't be a glorious thing if when you go to see a great concert they can make a CD of that concert and you can bring it home and fucking rock out. Well good. Good musicians do that they figured out that the equity resides in the performance and the shared experience. Well when I go out to do

readings of like the Conti freak letters I'm going to print up a little book that says letters from people who hate me and it will have her some money that will be a long book. But you know if I go out and read that I will be able to sell a few copies of that to people who want the thing that I just read. What a beautiful organic way to do it. Other questions I want to brag a little bit on our Talk a little bit about Brian but I did a little bit of playwriting but wasn't very good at it. I do some mine but you know I don't want to show off. Now you know I'm interested in all those forms. Sometimes people say you know screen. Are you interested in screenwriting and the problem is screenwriting is I mean it's a it's impossible the means of production for film although this too is changing. It's really tough to try to write a smart depth the as my editor in El Paso would say a depth the screenplay and get it made.

She said I like it because you're glitzy but you also get the. Great. So you know what I love about fiction writing in short stories is that a lot of what you're not able to do in a play you know description of the landscape the objective career elative you know people's internal landscapes what they're thinking and feeling you know only great playwrights I think O'Neill or whoever it is can get to that stuff. So I find it very instructive to read plays but I don't think I would be good enough it would be an insult to you know serious playwrights if I if I tried that and I should say that many of these stories began as poems. Where's Dave Blair Where's my pal the Dave Blair ascension days. The best book of poetry published in the last five years. The author is right back there but I hear he'll recognize some of this work because they were all shitty poems. And I realized that it was an insult to real legitimate practicing poets. For me to try to call these very compressed little

stories you know David say I like your work it's kind of narrative. Yeah because I want to storyteller you know that's kind of the mode I work in. But for years we traded work and it made my prose so much better too. But you know it made my prose better. My poems remain deeply deeply shitty. Let me talk just for a second about again just about the cover and the artwork because I think one thing that is also true that when you agreed to publish a book with a publisher you lose a lot of control and one of the things you lose control of is what your book is going to look like. So this book has gone through four or five different iterations already. What you what you guys will buy hopefully. I think we can. I think this Sarah Pailin numbers like if you each buy 7000 copies each. So let's settle to conservative estimate. But when you get on what you'll see is a bunch of stuff that wasn't in the previous version. This new version has a list of recommended reading and recommended music right in the middle. And it

has a section on books. My other books are potentially truthful statements regarding my other books both published and unpublished. Those things didn't exist in the first edition. Then there was that edition in the middle I think the third edition that was big. And the kind of cheap one to bring it down then we did one that was way too small and it's really been interesting to see the book rather than a sort of a static thing. There it is in its final form as an evolving form. I keep telling people well when you read this book if you think I've fucked something up or you want to hear more about a particular topic then just tell me because I can change it and I would love for the book to get better with feedback I don't mean it's a Madlib or anything. But if enough people say you know I really wish you would address this issue or I have trouble rectifying these two things that you're telling us about writing. I would like to know that so that I can change it. I'm constantly picking up when I read from a quote unquote published book. You know reading it and realizing how many bad decisions I made that somehow made it past the editing process. So

let me just talk briefly about Brian's involvement. So when you have exhibits so when I first made my life in heavy metal which is my first book of stories got accepted. We went through the process of trying to find a cover with grove and I searched literally for 14 hours trying to find the original mockups that grove had sent me which remember the early generation Max like the earliest generation Max where people were just figuring out how to do graphics it was like a big deal to get some fucked up font on top of a blurry photo. That's what it looked like I was like I know. They were so bad that my editor brought them he wouldn't email them to me he brought them up in like a satchel. Radioactive satchel and showed him to me and I just they were so sad they were so terrible. So I had him up for years on my wall and then I lost them.

But they settled on this cover which is if you can see that's two that's two that's a male bullfrog and a female bullfrog apparently in the coital act. OK. This was their idea of a sexy hot cover. OK. Now I had been pals with Brian since we worked together in Miami and I really wanted him. I want as an artist I wanted to work with him. This was the cover that he came up with. Now if you look great. I was probably going to get reworked. OK. The one thing I said to him the only kibitz was like nobody's likely. So for but you could see one coming and I thought the image itself looked like a Modigliani or de guerre gun is just an absolutely beautiful looking cover. And there were other you know they would probably be able to cover over the nipples as they've done with the version that you can buy here. But I just thought this image was so remarkable I thought what a publisher in their right mind would say no to this.

Well. And I only do that not to embarrass Crowe because I'm delighted that they took a chance and publish the book and they were wonderful to me. But it's by way of saying part of the exciting thing about putting a book into the world in this way is you get to work with another artist a visual artist and he's a smart guy who read the stories and essays and was thinking not in a literal way but an associate of way how do I find the proper image to convey the mood and beyond of the of this work. And that was that's been incredibly exciting I just wait at my computer for you know when he's going to send the next cover. And that's really just been a dream come true for me so I'm probably going to ask some of you with my little camera to pose with the book covers so I can send him some photos because he's down in Miami and I'm really indebted to him. And like I say he did it for free and this is a guy who gets paid a lot of money to do what he does because he's super good. I just feel very lucky to have him as a

friend so. All right. Are there any other questions or you know comments or anything. Well you know one thing Tim and I years ago we realized that there that the literary the scene around a reading can oftentimes be very stuffy and very intimidating very off putting and that there are ways to. Very clearly to make clear that it's a human event that is supposed to be a lot of fun. And so we were you know combining music with you know with literature the problem with that of course is that once a musician is played it's really hard to be like OK I'm going to read let me too not here I want to you know you just blow Yeah the water. But you know it's and this new book that's coming out in the spring I hope to take advantage of that it's called rock n roll would save your life and the whole idea that I have for those events that I want music playing in the background I want to be like a party not a straightforward reading because I think that again people really want to.

There isn't that much of a space for him at the moment for an experience that isn't a reading but also isn't a rock concert or a play or some you know that somewhere. Capturing both of those audiences at once. So that's what I hope to do with this music book. That's what's going to be one of the if I can make it work that will be one of the cool things is to have music as a permanent part of that. And I would love for instance to you know do do readings where it's possible for if if if Brian is there it's possible for him to figure out what he's going to you know what kind of cover you want to design as I'm doing the reading. I don't know if you can work that quickly but something like that holds great appeal to me. Yeah I mean what I liked about it is when I went out I had an early edition I went to Moscow Idaho which I can see from my porch. And I I'm sorry to tease there but it's how did how

you just cosmically look up and go really where they're all right. And it was really neat to say to that audience well here's this thing I've been working on I made like of you know half dozen copies and here they are. And to see their response oh this addition that you all will buy. It's going to change the next one is going to be different. So you're the first edition was probably 10 versions of it and the next one will be where it was maybe 14 or whatever. I really like the idea of the book as an artifact of the communal experience not as a commodity. And so this is the you know international debut but it really by the time the next event rolls around I'll have changed the book they'll be something new in it. I might take other things out depending on you know what people have to say. I like that idea too it's it's part of what I was writing about weirdly enough and can't be free that we have a law that everything is homogenized late model capitalism has made us all buy the same burger and the same beer and the same shirt from the

same place and we kind of forgotten that we're individuals. So that's going to be much more difficult in an odd way librarians will now face this challenge and the same thing is true with the digital world of kind of when is a book really done. Well what if it's never done what if it's an evolving organism. But you know I'll take that trade off. I just like that. And that's part of the reason I wanted the book to be little and it's always $10 just like it. Saturn you know there's no haggling. That's what it costs wherever you go. It cost me you know five or so bucks to make and it cost 10 bucks to buy. Partly because I'm interested in the book and this is part of the way it's written in the way it's written in that it's short. I am consciously interested in making sure that younger people keep reading because of a fairly deep seated view that we will that our species will perish if we stop reading if we stop that kind of moral imagining. You know we're

sunk. So part of the reason I wanted to put this kind of book in the world is because I know that you know a college kid doesn't have 22 bucks to buy a hardback book even if they like the source of their going to the library which is fantastic. But I why I like the idea of putting a book out into the world that is cheap and easy to get. It seems to me like fast food they found a way to poison us quickly. Well literature should be adapting in a certain way and in the same same way that's why I like the idea of you know if. Harvard Book Store does a reading for somebody and they read a new piece of work immediately. Having the author make that into a little book for people that would be an exciting thing. I went down to Virginia oddly enough and read a bunch of responses to some letters from people who hated me. Other people not the kind of people a whole new set of people and a bunch of people said hey where can I get that I said I you know I just wrote it for this thing. But if I you know if it had been a few months later I would've printed up some copies and maybe gotten Brian to mock up a little cover and there it is in the world in its own little

freaky way. You know the answer is that I don't do as much writing as I did but also that I think I've become more efficient and part of the reason I've become more efficient is because I figured out how to avoid the dumb mistakes that's why I wrote the book in part the essays or whatever they were going to call in these little bursts of self-righteous declamation are all about getting aspiring writers to not make the same mistakes that I made that caused me to take ten years to get to the point where I was actually writing publishable work. So I think I'm a bit more efficient now. And also I just have an extraordinary and patient wife and you know. You just find you to find the time but I I didn't find as I'm not finding as much time and so probably being realistic if you want to be a good whatever you are parents are in a relationship. Whatever it is your responsibility to your folks. You've got emotional responsibilities in your life and those matter those matter more than the work in the end. You can be like Saul Bellow and

say the work is the only thing that matters but you'll have I think squandered your life in a certain way because you're the most important role you can play is to the people around you so you know I'm just not writing as much and I'm okay with that and I'm able to do projects like this where it's not a novel. You know that's part of the reason also that this made sense to do this at this time because I am really literally writing between diapers sometimes and oftentimes filling diapers.