Uh oh

A short, scary note about royalties for you writers who (a) receive them, or (b) dream of someday doing so:

Standard publishing contracts have an audit clause. It allows an author, or an author’s representative to audit the books once a year.

If you suspect chicanery or erroneous reporting, drop me an email. There is a company here in New York that specializes in royalty review. If she finds a mistake, she gets a percentage. If she doesn’t it’s free. She makes her living doing this. That tells you something.

From Miss Snark, your one-stop shop on all matters literary or literary-agenty.

The words that count

Ernest Hemingway once composed a story in only six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Supposedly, he considered it the best thing he ever wrote.

Wired magazine recently asked a passel of writers to replicate Hemingway’s feat. Wired being Wired, the list of authors is fantasy/SF/horror intensive, but don’t let that worry you. As it turns out, I think top honors go to Margaret Atwood, who bats at least two right out of the ballpark:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.

and

Corpse parts missing. Doctor buys yacht.

All I want to know is, if Hemingway valued concision so highly, why did he write such godawful blowsy novels?   

Still messianic after all these years

Patti Smith, writing in the New York Times on the occasion of her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

On the eve of this event I asked myself many questions. Should an artist working within the revolutionary landscape of rock accept laurels from an institution? Should laurels be offered? Am I a worthy recipient?

I have wrestled with these questions and my conscience leads me back to Fred and those like him — the maverick souls who may never be afforded such honors. Thus in his name I will accept with gratitude. Fred Sonic Smith was of the people, and I am none but him: one who has loved rock ’n’ roll and crawled from the ranks to the stage, to salute history and plant seeds for the erratic magic landscape of the new guard.

Because its members will be the guardians of our cultural voice. The Internet is their CBGB. Their territory is global. They will dictate how they want to create and disseminate their work. They will, in time, make breathless changes in our political process. They have the technology to unite and create a new party, to be vigilant in their choice of candidates, unfettered by corporate pressure. Their potential power to form and reform is unprecedented.

Human history abounds with idealistic movements that rise, then fall in disarray. The children of light. The journey to the East. The summer of love. The season of grunge. But just as we seem to repeat our follies, we also abide.

Van Halen as revolutionaries? Certainly Eddie V. revolutionized rock guitarmanship, but I dunno — I’d love to hear David Lee Roth start riffing on that one. Worrying about whether it’s seemly to “institutionalize” rock music is as pointless as crying that your idealist dreams have been shattered because Bob Dylan did a Victoria’s Secret commercial. (Getting paid to go to Venice and hang out with beautiful underwear models? Dude, if that phone call ever comes to me, you better not be standing between me and the door.) I prefer Keith Richards’s wonderfully angst-free response when some interviewer wanted to know why the Rolling Stones allowed “Satisfaction” to be used in a commercial for Snickers bars. Richards recalled that at one time the song was being cited as a harbinger of the collapse of Westeren civilization; now it’s being used to sell candy bars, and the Stones make money either way. What’s not to laugh about?

The revolutionary Patti Smith came in 1975 when Horses was released. Visionary, self-indulgent, outrageous, classic, all that and more. A record that demolished idols and rebuilt them with strands of Patti’s poetic DNA wound into their cores. Three decades on and it sounds as fresh as the day I took it out of the shrink wrap. My only complaint about the CD reissue is that it grafts Patti’s version of “My Generation” onto the end — the kind of irritating “bonus track” thinking that marred the entrail-gnawing misery of John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band with a couple of Lennon’s crassest agitprop songs. A record that creates it own environment as completely and brilliantly as Horses deserves to stand on its own.

Now that’s laconic

I have absolutely no interest in seeing 300, which sounds like am oversized video game pretending to be a film about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.E. But it gives me a chance to play William Safire and talk about the origin of one of my favorite words, so I won’t slag it too harshly.

As you know, Thermopylae was the battle in which a relative handful of Spartans led by King Leonidas held off a vastly larger force of Persian warriors under the command of King Xerxes, who was continuing the war of conquest launched by his father, Darius, who had dreamt of adding the quarrelsome city-states of Greece to the Persian Empire. Though the Spartan force (bolstered with a few hundred Thespians) was ultimately wiped out, the Persians sustained heavy losses and were delayed long enough to permit the Athenians to rally their defenses, and the Persian force was subsequently wiped out at the Battle of Salamis.

The warrior-state of Sparta occupied the center of a plain called Laconia, in the oddly shaped southern peninsula called the Peloponesse. (The name continues to this day as the prefecture of Lakonia.) The Spartans were reputed to be people of few words, with a taste for dour witticisms. Thus, when a Spartan warrior learned from a scout that the Persians had enough spears to darken the sun, he remarked: “Good, we’ll be able to fight in the shade.” You would have to search through literature to the early 1300s and Grettir’s Saga to find a man of action with a bleaker sense of humor.

In honor of the Spartan style, the word laconic remains in the English language to describe someone with a terse way of speaking. Terse, and with a sense of humor that can be scarier than chest-thumping bluster. Think of Dirty Harry snarling “Go ahead, make my day,” and you’ll realize just how durable that style can be.

Unknown legends

How about that — The Roches have a new record coming out. Their first release in a decade. Their classic 1979 debut disc remains the best introduction to their sound: three women with wonderful, gravity-defying voices singing quirky, ruefully funny songs. On their later records, the sisters sometimes tipped over into the terminally twee; on the debut, the cuteness was held in check by the spartan arrangements and bright sound engineered by the producer, Robert Fripp.

Eric Alterman, also a fan of the group, ran this note from Suzzy Roche in his blog Altercation. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to snort at this:

When we made our debut record, Robert Fripp, its producer, said, “You’ll never make a cent, but you will influence people.” Looking back, I understand what he meant, and I feel that Moonswept goes farther in that direction. A funny thing about doing this kind of work is that as insignificant as something feels, the opposite is also true.

Fripp can talk — he just has to regroup King Crimson whenever he needs to pay off his credit card balance. Still, on the debut disc and on the third Roches album, Keep On Doing, he showed an understanding of the group that no other producer could match.

Of course, the Roches themselves always seemed aware that obscurity was just around the corner. In fact, they made that awareness a cornerstone for some of their best songs. To this day, whenever I suffer a career or creative reversal, I think of ”Mr. Sellack,” a song about trying to get your old job back after crashing and burning in your grand ambitions:

O Mr Sellack
Can I have my job back?
I’ve run out of money again.
Last time I saw ya
I was singing Hallelujah
I’m so glad to be leavin’ this restaurant.

Now the only thing I want
Is to have my old job back again.
I’ll clean the tables;
I’ll do the creams;
I’ll get down on my knees and scrub
behind the steam table.

O Mr. Sellack
I didn’t think I’d be back.
I worked here last year
Remember?
I came when Annie
Was going on vacation
And I stayed on almost till December.

Now the only thing I want
Is to have my old job back again.
I won’t be nasty to customers no more.
When they send their burger back I’ll tell them that
I’m sorry.

Waiting tables ain’t that bad.
Since I’ve seen you last, I’ve waited
for some things that you would not believe
To come true.

Give me a broom and I’ll sweep my way to heaven.
Give me a job;
You name it.
Let the other forty-million three-hundred and seven
People who want to get famous.

Now the only thing I want
Is to have that old job back again.
I’ll clean the tables;
I’ll do the creams;
I’ll get down on my knees and scrub
behind the steam table.

Fripp’s line about being influential reminds me of the old saw about the Velvet Underground: Very few people bought their records, but the ones who did all started bands. I don’t know how influential the Roches turned out to be. I know that in 2007, the idea of three women recording an album of virtually unaccompanied singing doesn’t sound nearly as novel and daring as it did in 1979.

That was always the glory of The Roches: after trying to glitz up their sound as per music industry formula, they pulled back and realized that even if they were never going to be more than a niche act, they would fill their own niche. That DIY spirit now suffuses the music scene as the recording industry does its best to choke off challenging and unexpected music.

It’s taken more than a quarter of a century, but the world has caught up with the Roches. Maybe that example is their biggest influence on music. Not a bad legacy, when you think about it. But the music is pretty great, too, and I look forward to renewing the acquaintance.             

The ants go marching one by one

So, what does it take to freak out a soon-to-be nine-year-old? In the case of Dances With Mermaids, it isn’t armies of rampaging orcs. Firebreathing dragons she takes in stride. Man-eating sharks? Feh.

No, if you want to freak out Dances With Mermaids you need — a few ants. And a father who talks too much about the stories he liked when he was nine years old. Maybe that’s where the real trouble started.

You see, Dances With Mermaids got an ant farm for Christmas. Ant farms have gotten a lot spiffier in the last few decades. The one I had Back In The Day was a rather cheesy thing full of white sand, with a green plastic frame. It looked ready to shatter if somebody dropped it. Even if you didn’t drop it, a stray elbow or a tiny jostle would shake the sand and make the ant tunnels collapse.

What Dances With Mermaids got was a thick plastic thing sturdy enough to withstand an assault by a careless little sister. (I’m not naming any names here.) The great part was that instead of sand, it was full of this nutritious blue gel that fed the ants even as they tunneled through it. According to the instructions, the gel was developed for a space shuttle experiment. So the next time somebody scoffs at the space shuttle program and asks what’s the point of the whole thing, you’ll be ready with an answer.

One thing hasn’t changed — you have to order the ants by mail. And they take a loooong time to arrive. This order took so long, we started joking that the ants were marching across the country from Utah.

When they arrived in their little plastic container, they were transferred to the blue gel environment in short order. That’s another technological improvement for modern ant farms. You can take the whole top off and simply tap the ants into it. My old green plastic ant farm had a narrow inch-long hole in the top for the ants. You know the proverb about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven? That goes double for ants and an old-school ant farm. The old way seemed designed to ensure that you would spend quite some time on your knees, picking ants off your floor. The newfangled ant farm took care of that. And the lid, once shoved back into place, was hard to remove. Those ants weren’t going anywhere.

Unfortunately, while we waited for the container of ants to arrive, some well-meaning but not terribly observant dad (I’m not naming any names here) reminisced about “Leiningen Versus the Ants,” a 1947 short story about a plantation owner in Brazil whose coffee crop is threatened by an immense swarm of army ants devouring everything in its path. The story (it was made into a 1954 Charlton Heston flick called The Naked Jungle) is an extended battle of wits between an all-conquering white man and an all-consuming mass of insects, with Leiningen defending his land with a series of moats and the ants, sometimes seeming to act with spooky intelligence, defeating his measures one by one. It was made into a radio broadcast narrated by William Conrad that’s one of the classics of radio storytelling — right up there with Vincent Price narrating “Three Skeleton Key,” which is high praise indeed from a nine-year-old boy.

Well, I guess thoughts of being picked apart by a mile-wide colony of voracious ants must have stayed with her, because two nights after the ants arrived, Dances With Mermaids dreamed that they had escaped from the ant farm and were swarming across the rug. (The Woman Warrior later admitted that she too had an ant dream that night.) Too bad. The ants had quickly gotten their bearings and were tunneling away. The sides of the tunnels sparkled nicely in the blue gel. But the women had me outnumbered, and a new home was found for the ants.

Hey, you think I should spring “Three Skeleton Key” on her?