The news this week that the Tribune Company is filing for bankruptcy has sent me into an elegiac mood. The New York Times mortgaging their buildings to meet expenses doesn’t exactly alleviate the gray skies either. Yes, I know newspapers will last for a while longer, sputtering and gasping, but the writing, as it were, is clearly on the wall-to-wall (even the jokes now are Net-based).

As a kid, my family got home delivery of the White Plains Reporter Dispatch and I read the comics every day. With dull scissors I would cut out the daily Dennis the Menace – a single cartoon, not a strip – and tape it to my bedroom door. Newspapers seemed eternal at the time. Although I shoveled snow off people’s front paths during the endless suburban, pre-global warming winters, my first real job where adults expected me to show up at the same time each day and perform a specific set of duties, was in the news business: I was a paperboy for the same outfit that brought me Dennis the Menace. Each day I would pick up a stack of fifty papers on a pre-arranged corner, load them into the basket of my bike and speed off. I think I made about twelve dollars a week.

My grandfather had been in the newspaper distribution business (he had kept many of his relatives employed during the Depression) and one of my most vivid memories of his visits to our house was the day he took me out in his car and drove me on my paper route. Since this is Jewcy, I will report that he was kvelling.

As a collector of headlines back then, I can assure you MEN WALK ON MOON or NIXON RESIGNS resonate far more in large boldface. This belief must be genetic, since my son took the OBAMA WINS headline from the Los Angeles Times the day after the election and taped it to his door.

As an undergraduate, I was co-editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, a weekly. I was in the thrall of Hunter S. Thompson (whose career had begun in newspapers) at the time and could think of few cooler things than a career in print journalism. I covered a campaign visit of Jimmy Carter to the Electric Boat plant in Groton, Connecticut, and wrote a screed for the paper in the style of my gonzo hero. Absent the Wild Turkey and the mescaline that fuelled Thompson’s rants, it did not measure up to his standards, but as a senior in college I knew I had nothing but time to get there.

When I graduated, I managed to get hired as a copy boy at the New York Daily News. This was right before the advent of computers, a time when reporters would rip pages out of their typewriters and actually yell "Copy!" at which point one of our ranks would run to the bellowing reporter, grab the pages and convey them to the editing desk. Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill and Liz Smith were all working there at the time. I got coffee, ran copy, and drove editors home to the suburbs. Once I got to sit next to the bench at a Knick game so I could run the photographer’s film back to the office.

The tabloid life was not for me, however, and I began to write for the SoHo Weekly News, a paper for readers who viewed the Village Voice as too mainstream. I had a simpatico editor name Peter Ochiogrosso and, perhaps because they paid thirty-five dollars an article, he let me write about more or less whatever or whomever I chose. I did pieces on Tom Waits, Richard Belzer, and Fran Lebowitz. There was one about street musicians, and another about scenic views from the New York City subway system.  During this period I read the New York Times every day, and the Post for the sports section. Every Wednesday I would buy the Voice.

My career took another turn shortly thereafter and it was a long time before I wrote for newspapers again. I had been living in Southern California for several years when I was approached by an editor for the Los Angeles Times and asked if I wanted to contribute something. They were asking me? Where had this guy been when I was in my twenties and wanted to be Clark Kent? I was happy to comply. I thought this would be a good way to clear the throat, branch out and reach new readers. And I would be able to do it as a sideline for the rest of my career because newspapers would always be there.  This was four years ago. I suspect papers in some form will survive.  Interestingly, they are thriving in India where there is an influx of people into the educated classes but no money for computers. America is another story.

I love the Internet for its easy access, its endless content, its continually updated information. But newspapers have a tactile element, something having to do with the feel of actual paper between your fingers, that pixels and bytes can’t replicate.  When you’re eating your morning cereal and you want to see who won last night’s game, turning a screen on just doesn’t provide the same Proustian frisson as holding a broadsheet and seeing the results in inky print.

Seth Greenland, author of Shining City, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy.  This is his parting post. Want more? Buy his book! 

The post The End of Print appeared first on Jewcy.

So what does a satirist do when the Republican Party puts Sarah Palin on the ticket? Bear with me. I know this is old news and Governor Palin, other than a brief trip back to the spotlight to pardon a Thanksgiving turkey while a poultry holocaust was occurring right behind her, is now lurking somewhere on the tundra eagerly awaiting an opening so she can re-insert her particular brand of dangerous comedy into the national conversation. But she is Exhibit A in my point, which is this: American culture has long had a carnival aspect. How else to explain the ascendancy of Paris Hilton and her fellow celebritards, or the career of Flavor Flav? But until recently, these people and their antics had been a diversion, something to be glanced at in a dog-eared magazine at the dentist’s office, or to be glimpsed on a teenager’s laptop. Not anymore. With the advent of the Palin Family – the abstinence only parents with a pregnant teenaged daughter, the reluctant son-in-law-to-be who announced on his MySpace page he didn’t want a child, the special needs baby that functioned as a piece of campaign paraphernalia ("How much Benedryl did they give that kid?" my wife would always ask, whenever we saw the preternaturally quiescent little fellow on television), the hunky First Dude who raced "snow machines," and the son who, rumor had it, was given a choice of jail or the army – reality took a turn that must make all practitioners of satire quake in our boots. If this is what truth offers, our audience would do well to ask, then who needs comedy?

How to compete in a world where Jon Stewart can read Wolf Blitzer’s script, lift an eyebrow, and get a laugh without changing a word? Frankly, I don’t know the answer. I hope when Bush leaves Washington the level of pitch black comedy will come down a bit. I am thinking particularly of the tape he made in the Oval Office for a black-tie Washington dinner a few years ago. The Decider (again, how do you compete with that?) was crawling around the office on his hands and knees looking for WMDs. The level of moral depravity that his "gag" suggested was off-the-charts, yet the media, for the most part, didn’t blink. They did, however, laugh. Alas, it was the wrong kind of laughter – forced, congealed, complicit. If the President is a buffoon whose policies have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the pampered White House press plays along with his "comedy" at a fancy dinner, how does one mock this? It is so utterly Strangelovian the only response is silence.

The financial services industry is being propped up. Detroit is getting a massive infusion of cash. I want to be the first to ask this of President-elect Obama: The satire business is in free-fall, sir. Where is our bailout?

Seth Greenland, author of Shining City, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post When the Going Gets Tough, Satire Gets Going appeared first on Jewcy.

Although I have been relatively lucky in life – if you don’t count a series of bad relationships prior to marriage, and cancer  (I’m fine now, thanks) – I have developed a somewhat pessimistic outlook. Perhaps this has something to do with having worked as a screenwriter for the past twenty years. An agent once told me, "The movie business is designed to make you cry." I can attest that this is true. So I developed a negative gene, one that protects me from damage. If you can anticipate the insult, it can be deflected. An open heart is one that will bleed to death.

But that, my three readers, is show business. Not life.

I don’t feel like I have the luxury of pessimism any more. The country is in dire shape, the problems seem insurmountable, the leaders of the past eight years dangerous buffoons who will pay no price for their epic malfeasance. The auto industry is tanking, newspapers are going bankrupt, and Wall Street is fleecing us again with the bailout. Truly, things are awful.

And yet.

Here is Barack Obama. I am not one of the people who think he walks on water. He is human and will make his share of mistakes, of bad calls. He will do things I don’t like. But he is a supremely intelligent grown-up, and someone I am willing to trust. Perhaps he won’t be able to disarm Iran, or provide universal health care, or eliminate the drum machine from pop music, but his being in charge makes me hopeful.

Pessimism is too easy right now. The public education system is an abject failure, we are in an S&M relationship with China, and our economy is in free-fall. But to be pessimistic is to give in to the obvious. The hope thing, so in evidence throughout the Obama campaign, always struck me as a loser. I would see the famous poster of Obama and it reminded me of the classic one of Che Guevara that adorned dorm room walls back in the 70s, and was so-often observed through a haze of bong smoke and Joni Mitchell music. It was a killer in graphic terms, but it had the look of a loser. Che had ended up riddled with bullets in a South American jungle. What did he have to show for all of his revolutionary fire? The dictatorship of Fidel Castro’s Cuba? And please, don’t tell me about how everyone there has free medical care.

In my previously pessimistic state, I assumed Obama would follow Che’s path to irrelevancy. The Obama posters, like those of Che would be an aching memory of a candle that burned just brightly enough to tickle everyone’s expectations, before being blown out in a foul gust of McCain-Palin. How great it is to be wrong.  Clearly, anything can happen.

People will continue to do bad things to each other. They will be greedy, slothful, consumed by lust, and insensitive in the extreme.  Some might be pessimistic about their chances in such a difficult world. Borders is failing, major publishers are contracting, and the market for fiction by someone who isn’t Stephanie Meyer is shrinking. So I am optimistic right now. Given all the awfulness, why should that be? It’s no secret that the most resonant art comes from pain.  I suspect we are in for an unusually creative period.

Seth Greenland, author of Shining City, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post The Recession Made Me an Optimist appeared first on Jewcy.

One of the more vexing decisions a novelist makes today is how aggressively to promote a new book. Time was you sold it, then moved to Paris, ran with the bulls in Pamplona, or danced in Plaza fountain after a night of drunken carousing, while the publishing house did all the work.  Alas, those days have gone the way of the fifty-cent paperback. For example: to blog or not to blog? You can see how I answered that one.    

Publishing houses, which are at a loss for how to sell books (not to pick on them – no one seems able to do this anymore), expect their authors to have web sites. A few years ago, I barely knew how to check my e-mail.  Frankly, I can barely do more than that today. I do, however, have a web site, a book video, and a slightly conflicted attitude about it all. When I imagined the life of a novelist back in college, it did not include a position in sales. And that is not a value judgment. I respect the salespeople of the world; I just did not intend to join their ranks. It is not enough today that an author exhibits the psychological insights of a Dostoevsky or the prose skills of a Henry James. He must now be able to take those elements and skillfully blend them into a persona that takes as much from P.T. Barnum as it does from Nabokov or Martin Amis.

There are those who find this untoward or vulgar, who hold this new world as if in tweezers, examining it, repulsed, before depositing it on the ash heap. They do this at their peril. Newspapers and bookstores are vanishing and along with them the more traditional ways of getting the word out. Promotion is something anyone who wants readers and is not named Thomas Pynchon must embrace. I have been a professional writer for twenty-five years. If no one reads my books, my kids will starve. Okay, they won’t actually starve-starve, but it will limit the things I can do for them. And they’re good, hard-working kids. They deserve better. They actually deserve a father who is a hedge-fund manager, but they’re stuck with me. So I swallow hard, and make like Willy Loman.

Shining City is a comic novel about a middle class dad who finds himself, through a series of circumstances, working as a proprietor of a high-class escort service (I love the idea of "high-class" in this context).  I have worked in Hollywood, so prostitution is a concept I know a little about. And pimping is such a resonant metaphor. Is it prostitution to go out and try and draw attention to your work? Is it something that can be done with a modicum of dignity? Personally, I am happy to shill for something I believe in.

There’s a series of popular books about teenage vampires out now. My daughter, a high school senior who is an authority on this sort of thing, assures me they have no literary merit. But this has not stopped the author from a doing a promotional blitzkrieg that has taken up an extraordinary amount of media oxygen. Here is the world of fiction publishing now: teenaged vampires, shopaholics, and Janet Evanovich, whose books, incidentally, can be found next to the frozen pizza in my neighborhood supermarket. 

Seth Greenland, author of Shining City, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post Publishing 2.0 appeared first on Jewcy.

In the year of my daughter’s bat mitzvah she attended at least thirty others besides her own. While the services tended to have a certain sameness to them – whose idea was it that the parents givespeeches? – the celebrations ranged from the modest and down home to the garish and absurd. Each week I would pick her up from another party and perform a debriefing. For pure excess, my favorite of her stories was the Winter Olympic-themed bat mitzvah of the girl whose father owned the patent to a Velcro-like substance that, I promise you, is somewhere in your home right now.This dad had rented a ballroom at the Four Seasons, flooded it, froze the water to make a rink, and gave everyone ice skates. It was a long way from Anatevka.

But the most piquant detail from my daughter’s B’Nai Mitzvah Tour circa 2005 was observed at – where else – a country club. It occurred during the cocktail hour, somewhere between the canapés and the cocktail wieners, when the bar mitzvah boy made his entrance. The lights dimmed, a spotlight hit a pair of gilded doors on a balcony above a sweeping staircase.  The music kicked in: P.I.M.P. by 50 Cent. If the bubbes and zaydes present were aware of or concerned with the lyric content (No Cadillacs, no perms that you can’t see,that I’m a  motherfuckin’ P.I.M.P.)  they gave no evidence of it.  The doors burst open and there was this most recent addition to the rolls of Jewish manhood, all five feet three inches of him in his shiny shoes and bar mitzvah suit, flanked by a pair of motivational dancers – professional let’s-get-this-party-started girls hired to move the more funk impaired guests toward the dance floor – in spandex and spiked heels. The three of them gyrated down the staircase to the primal thump of the hip-hop and into the roiling maw of the celebration. 

No further comment is necessary.

At the time my daughter related this, I had been cogitating on the assault the idea of the pimp had recently made on mainstream culture. Snoop Dogg was selling a cuddly version. MTV had a show called Pimp My Ride. There was a cartoon on television called L’il Pimp. The pimp, previously a gamy, night world kind of meme – even the word pimp was not something said in polite conversation –  had clearly moved from the margins toward the white hot center. Know this: if something is happening at a bar mitzvah, it has reached its cultural apogee.

Around the same time, while reading the Los Angeles Times one Saturday morning,I noticed an article about a local couple. Both of them had moved to the west coast to pursue the show business grail and, as is so often the case, it had not worked out for them. In the meantime, they had had two children who needed food, clothing and the other accoutrements of childhood, all while the economy was beginning to sputter. What to do? Being enterprising sorts, they started an escort service (!) out of their home (!!). That caught my eye. I pictured Mom picking up a kid at pre-school, while on her cell phone arranging an assignation between "Brianna" and "Stu from Tarzana" in the shadow of a wall festooned with finger paintings. According to the article, it was working out nicely for the couple until the inevitable happened and then it wasn’t. They were arrested,tried, convicted and sentenced.

The economic news became worse. Jobs were moving to China and Mexico. How were Americans going to survive the downturn?If the parents down the sideline at the soccer field could be pimps, did that not make for a compelling answer? Jean Valjean, the hero of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, steals a loaf of bread to feed his family. Marcus Ripps, the main character of Shining City would be his literary descendant. I only hope that no one tries to turn it into a musical while I am still alive.

Pimp my book? Not me.

See the video here.

Seth Greenland, author of Shining City, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The post A Hero for Our Times appeared first on Jewcy.