You'd better go in disguise

Back when I had That Other Blog, in that other lifetime, I tried and tried to find this version of Teddy Bears' Picnic, an excerpt from the superb 1986 British miniseries The Singing Detective. (I've ordered a DVD copy and will probably be commenting on it later.)

But the thing is. . . I wasn't looking for this one at all, not this time. I was looking for the one I stumbled on when looking for this one before.  It was a chorus of what sounded like English people, old hippies with long grey hair and floral crowns and jerkins and that sort of thing (whatever a jerkin is). They sang it delightfully, buoyantly, but I didn't keep the link, or if I did, I'll be damned if I know where it is.

There's a movie version of The Singing Detective, but don't bother with it. The '86 series is pure surrealism. Its hero is a tortured writer of crime novels,  his skin rotting away from psoriatic arthritis (the same soul-rot afflicting my afflicted sister). It has almost been forgotten, but not by me. This little taste will give you. . . a little taste. Now 'scuse me while I hunt for that other one.

Thanks for the Memory

This clip is nothing less than a piece of film history: Bob Hope and Shirley Ross singing "Thanks for the Memory" (NOT "memories!") in a movie called The Big Broadcast of 1938.

I first saw this movie while sleeping in the den (a special privilege granted only on a non-school night) in about 1964. The pullout bed was excruciating, but that was all part of the experience: I'd watch a Cleveland creature-feature show called Hoolihan and Big Chuck (and, incredibly, the same Big Chuck still hosts that show after all these years), re-re-re-reruns of shows like Topper and Love That Bob, and, sometimes, a gem like this one.

There was something of a W. C. Fields revival going on at that time. Before I'd even seen one of his movies, my Dad would boom on and on in his gusty, Bushmills-inspired way about Fields, and even quote from some of his monologues: the "Ethiopian in the fuel supply," "where will you be at noon tonight?" and "I cut a path through a solid wall of human flesh" (from another Fields gem, Mississipi, with a startlingly young, almost effeminate Bing Crosby).

I can't say as we really believed what my Dad was saying until this Fields festival began. We saw Mississipi, The Bank Dick, You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, and My Little Chickadee (where Fields and Mae West basically cancelled each other out).

But then came The Big Broadcast, probably at about 2 a.m. At some point my older brother stumbled in from a dance, likely tanked, and we began to record the sound track of the movie on an old Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder with a fan-shaped microphone that weighed 47 pounds.

The movie was about a race between two ocean liners, the Colossal and the Gigantic. Fields is supposed to be in charge but ends up on the wrong boat (after his golf cart becomes airborne and lands on the deck), wreaking havoc throughout. To see him perform both his golf routine and his pool routine in one movie makes it worth the price of admission.

But the movie is also pretty excruciating. Bob Hope is the emcee (with the running gag that he can't get a laugh from the audience)for a dreary assortment of yesterday's performers: Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm Orchestra (a kind of clumsy forerunner of Lawrence Welk), the very gay-looking Latin lover Tito Guizarre, and (shudder) the infamous Nazi sympathizer Kirsten Flagstad, who sings Brunhilde's Battle Cry from (Lohengrin? Whatever.)

Then comes this song, fairly near the end. Obviously, the two of them have had a tempestuous marriage that finally blew apart. But watch Shirley Ross as she registers each tart, tender line (Hope basically just sits there, his eyes like the dots on dice). There are many extra verses here that you will never find if you look up the lyrics anywhere. The song is evocative and never corny. It took me forever to figure out the subtle code of these lines:

"Letters with sweet little secrets
That couldn't be put in a daywire
Too bad it all had to go haywire
That's life, I guess
I love. . . your dress."

The song ends with the haunting lines:

"Strictly entre-nous, darling, how are you
And how are all those little dreams that never did come true. . . "

"Little dreams." "Sweet little secrets." In spite of trying, they never did have a child. He went on to get married three or four more times. He's a cad, and she knows it. He has a sort of surface charm, a slickness. But he's a great straight man for Ross' brilliance, and he does not try to out-react or out-shine her. Perhaps he made the right decision after all.

The song stuck to him for the rest of his life (well over 100 years), always misquoted as "Thanks for the Memories". But here is where it started, and, as far as I am concerned, ended too.

I DON'T love boobies: or, why I refuse to buy pink TicTacs

Postmedia News Oct 14, 2011 – 9:21 AM ET | Last Updated: Oct 14, 2011 10:55 AM ET

By John Colebourn
KELOWNA, B.C. — Students at a Kelowna middle school have been told to leave some “edgy” breast-cancer bracelets at home.
Springvalley Middle School has banned students from wearing the breast cancer awareness wristbands because they say the bracelets are offensive.
The bracelets, which have the slogan ‘I [love] boobies!’ printed on them, are part of a youth-oriented breast cancer awareness campaign by Keep A Breast Canada.
The wristbands were banned last month, when it was determined the language is not suitable for teenagers, said School District 23 superintendent Hugh Gloster.
Gloster said they were first made aware of the controversy by a number of parents who complained. From there they felt the bracelets violate the school’s code of conduct.
“Our code of conduct says if you are wearing something offensive to people then you’ll have to cover it up or remove it,” said Gloster.
Gloster said the Keep A Breast campaign is very different from other cancer drives.
“There’s an edgy nature to the marketing,” he said. “In some cases it has caused distraction and some people feel it is offensive.”
Keep A Breast executive director Michelle Murray has said the bracelets are for a younger demographic to heighten awareness about breast cancer.
Gloster said the school will still be active in other health-related campaigns.
“We certainly recognize the need for awareness for breast cancer,” he said.
Vancouver Province

(And I quote.)

This little story, which I first heard on the evening news (and, incredibly, the news anchor did not say what the slogan was!) sums up much of what I've been feeling in the past few years about a certain cancer awareness campaign.


It's enough already. It's enough with the tits up, or tits down, or tits hanging out. Enough boobs, boobies, tee-hee-hee, aren't we daring, aren't we modern! And most especially, it's enough with the flood of marketing, the tasteless line of every kind of goods imaginable from sweaters to mugs to pens to notebooks to knitting wool (it's all PINK, folks - why on earth would you want to knit in any other colour?). Edible goods have been creeping in, too, but I was especially offended when I went to buy some shampoo at the drug store and the clerk aggressively pitched a prominent display of grapefruit-flavoured pink TicTacs.

Why am I offended? Because if you really buy what this campaign is pitching, you will sooner or later come to believe certain things:

(a) Breast cancer is the #l killer of women in North America (if not the world).

(b) Selling lots and lots of pink things will cure it.

(c) The money from these pink things all goes to breast cancer research.

(d) Other forms of female cancer just aren't as important.  So we don't need a campaign for them. They'll sort of take care of themselves.

All these assumptions are completely false, but why would we know that? Steadily bombarded by the pink machine, we are slowly and unwittingly becoming mesmerized into believing what they are telling us. Or what they want us to believe.

I don't know how this pink avalanche got started, but it has reached the point of nausea for me. School children wearing "I love boobies" bracelets? Just the fact that women's breasts are now glibly being called boobies makes me shake my head.

I have breasts. They have been useful to me: in fact, I used them for the function for which they were designed, and it was a wonderful experience. Now they're more of a hindrance, harder to fit with a bra, in need of mammograms and intense poking and feeling by doctors. But they're there.

I don't think I'm a stick-in-the-mud, but I don't want anyone, not even my life partner, calling them "boobies" because it is a juvenile, vulgar term that only takes away from the dignity of the cause: or does it? Everything these people do, no matter how tasteless, is eagerly swept up and embraced by beaming women running around in pink track suits.

It's a known fact that testicular cancer is one of the leading causes of death in men over a certain age. So why is there no "I love balls" campaign, with pictures of. . . oh never mind.  Rectal cancer? It might be misconstrued if we claimed to "love" assholes (for surely that term is no more vulgar than "boobies"). And how can you love ovaries? I love what they DO, mind you - they're miraculous little organs. But a cancerous ovary is a ticking time bomb, not a bouncy little thing you put on a bracelet.

But unfortunately, pink is not the only colour. This morning when I took my coffee into the living room, I noticed a 3" stack of greeting cards on the coffee table.

I asked my husband, "Where the hell did these come from?"

"Oh. Charities."

"Which ones?"

"I don't know, I get them all confused now."

The "stuff", the junk they force on us (tacky "holiday" cards with teddy bears on them, pens we really don't need, and - most recently - one of those environmental tote bags, an awful one made out of thin paper), is meant to strong-arm us into donating to the disease or cause of the week.

Through guilt. No other reason. We don't ask for this stuff, we don't want it. But it's impossible to get rid of it, to get ourselves off the mailing list. So it just keeps coming, and it's hard to throw it away. It stares back at us, accusing. What sort of skinflint won't give to a charity that is sweet and caring enough to send you a gift?

Maybe they think this works, and maybe it does. As with the pink juggernaut, these charities must hire some pretty obnoxious ad-men (and women) to design aggressive campaigns to make everyone feel lousy about themselves if they don't do what they tell us we "should".  In my case, it makes me so angry I won't even consider donating to their lousy cause (and statistically, only a fraction of our hard-earned dollars ever makes it to the research foundations or pink bra-makers or whatever-it-is we think we're supporting through our financial contributions).

There's something even worse, and that's what is happening at checkout counters in stores everywhere: "Would you like to donate $2 to the Send a Quadriplegic Little Girl with Terminal Cancer to the Circus Foundation?" Things like that. There are so many of them now that they all sort of blur together. Who knows how many of them are bogus. Some people give to all of them, all the time, because they just feel so bad if they don't.

By the way, it used to be ONE dollar. Somewhere along the line there was a 100% increase, and not only did nobody say anything, everybody just ponied up.

This kind of adds up. If you went on a shopping trip and went to five stores, well, I don't have to do the math, do I? If you went shopping one day a week for a year, it adds up to. . . but we don't add it up, that's the problem. That's how they get us. Nobody will mind tacking on a couple of bucks to save a sick pony or whatever it is.

One more thing. These bona fide charities are the thin edge of the wedge, allowing scammers to move in like an infection and penetrate the crack in our hearts. The other day when I was walking down Granville Street in Vancouver, I saw a scruffy-looking young couple with hand-made signs around their necks that said, "Save the Children". They were good talkers, and there were lots of takers (or should I say givers).  But then, they had already been softened up. As P. T. Barnum put it, there's one born every minute.

I realize charities are up against it, but so are we. There has to be a better way than squeezing us like this. The breast cancer campaign is an example of some very highly-paid PR person creating a monster with grasping tentacles reaching everywhere. It has completely mowed down public awareness of other forms of cancer that are infinitely more deadly. A big bucket of pink paint has been splashed on everything, and nobody says anything because it's like stomping on a bunch of baby chicks. You simply can't.

I'll make a deal with these people. The day they launch their new "I Love Colons" campaign (with everything in brown, of course), I'll wear their wretched booby bracelet with a wink and a smile.

(Post-script. I know someone will accuse me of being a skinflint who doesn't care. I'm not saying "don't give", just "be selective", not to mention careful. I'm not against breast cancer research, but those people will NEVER get a donation from me because I find them so offensive in their tactics. Over several decades I have donated regularly to UNICEF, particularly during natural disasters. They focus on the plight of children worldwide, have done it for a very long time, and I have never heard about a scandal connected with them. More recently, I give to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation: my little granddaughter Lauren has Type 1, so I often donate in lieu of a gift at Christmas and birthdays. I know my husband gives to a couple more, his own personal choices: kidney and a women's shelter, Covenant House, I think. That's quite a lot of giving. But NO PINK, please.)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1896300693/qid%3D1064537730/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr_11_1/103-6792065-9634225

http://www.amazon.com/Mallory-Margaret-Gunning/dp/0888013116/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319992815&sr=1-1

Heave-ho, heave-ho, it's not to work I go

 

When I first read this article (below) - actually, I don't even think it was this article, but something like it - I was appalled. The lack of humanity, the utter lack of honesty and straightforwardness made me dizzy. I haven't worked in an office for some time. It seems as if you have to grow very long antennae to try to figure out what is actually going on, or soon you'll be spinning around on your ass on black ice. Outside.

When did this happen, or has it always been that way? It sure vindicates my post of yesterday when I said that even one mistake can cost you your job. Not only that: they won't even TELL you it has cost you your job. More than one person has told me they never found out they were fired until they saw their position posted on an internet employment site.

I weep for humanity. I weep for people who have families to support who are canned for no good reason except that the boss seems to be tired of them. People who are subtly pushed away and kept out of the loop, and thus CAN'T perform up to their potential because they do not know what the hell is going on.

It seems we have a whole new set of rules here, so you'd better not listen to all those chirpy Tony Robbins-type motivational speakers who tell you to make tons of mistakes in order to "learn". Don't make mistakes, people! Don't make any. You won't "learn". You'll be canned, and it won't look very good on your resume.

Signs You're About to Get Fired

Rusty Rueff, On Friday March 4, 2011, 12:35 pm EST

Too many times after someone gets fired, they say, "I should have seen it coming." But most of us don't see the signs because we don't want to see them. They're there, sometimes right in front of us.

Here are some cautionary signs your last day may be coming sooner than you think:

There's been a "change" in your boss' behavior towards you. This isn't always a fatal sign, but you should be sensitive to it. If you sense your boss isn't being as friendly or open as usual, something bad might be brewing. If she no longer acts in a way that makes you feel secure and comfortable in your job and relationship with her, like dropping by the cubicle unannounced to sit and shoot the breeze or seeking your advice, it could be a sign of trouble.

One-on-ones are consistently canceled. Beyond your boss' attitude or changing behavior, if he starts canceling every one-on-one meeting you've scheduled, or you have trouble getting his time and attention, then he could be feeling guilt about what's coming next. He could be avoiding you.

The boss has a new attention to detail. In the past, you were always left alone to perform, without much attention or coaching, but all of a sudden your boss is all over you. Maybe she's asking too many questions, setting deadlines, and following up on small tasks that once never mattered. It could be that she's building her performance case and getting her ducks in order.

No more talks about planning and the future. If by this time last year you were planning ahead for the annual conference or future budgets, yet now you aren't getting information or invites to meetings, then it's probably because you aren't considered as someone who will be here for the future.

The "insider" stops talking to you. Every team has someone we know is the boss' insider. This is the person who your boss talks to more than anyone else, who she asks for advice and counsel. If you were the insider and all of a sudden the flow of information slows, that says it all. Or if someone you know is the boss' insider stops talking to you or begins avoiding you, then it could be that he knows more than you do and is reacting to an uncomfortable bit of knowledge.

HR doesn't have time for you. This is assuming that HR used to have time for you. HR employees are like anyone else in that they'll avoid uncomfortable situations for fear of saying the wrong thing or setting the wrong expectations. Take note if they're "unavailable" or not hanging around with you like they used to do.

Your complaints get answered with, "You're right." In the past, you may have had conversations about how your job wasn't challenging enough, and your boss would try to convince you otherwise. But if recently she starts agreeing and sending signals almost encouraging you to go find another job, don't miss that sign.

Before you panic and think you're going to lose your job tomorrow morning, recognize that this is much like a horoscope--we can see enough of it in any given day that it looks like it's true and written just for us. See these changes as what they are, warning signs, and nothing more. If any of these are happening to you right now, set up time to speak with your boss to ask what you can do to improve. Do this before it's too late, and you'll avoid getting blindsided.

Rusty Rueff, director and career expert for jobs and career website Glassdoor.com has been a CEO, led HR in global companies and is co-author of Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business.

Margaret's Links:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1896300693/qid%3D1064537730/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr_11_1/103-6792065-9634225

http://www.amazon.com/Mallory-Margaret-Gunning/dp/0888013116/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319992815&sr=1-1

Money is the root of all. . . good

I like to deal with certain common statements in my blog, “conventional wisdom” I guess, which I don’t think is wisdom at all. These are things I've heard over and over again (like "everything happens for a reason": I think I've put that one through the macerator already) and "God doesn't give us more than we can handle."

There's one I hear over and over again,  and it kind of makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck: “It’s good to make mistakes! Go ahead, make lots and lots of them. It’s the way you learn.”

There's only one problem with that one. With the current atmosphere in the workplace, which I hear is pretty poisonous and competitive, most bosses won't allow much more than one big mistake (or a few minor ones) before dropping the other shoe.

One mistake, in the wrong place, can be a disaster. It can even cost human lives. Or it just puts people out, or alienates clients who form the backbone or glue of a corporation. It' s just not a good thing. 

A person can pay for one mistake for the rest of their lives.

ONE mistake can cost you your job, not to mention your whole career. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. This is why workers become unhappy, because they really should be free to make mistakes and learn from them. I'm not saying the homily/truism is a lie, just that it doesn't pan out in the "real world".

Another one: “Success/money doesn’t make people happy." Oh yes it does. Poverty isn’t such a lark, is it? Being underemployed; is that so much fun? With the exception of a few neurotic Hollywood starlets who seem to throw their good fortune away with both hands, I think success is good for people.

I think of the "successful" people I know (meaning: financially stable; happy and accomplished in their work; satisfied in their personal lives) and they seem to possess a stability, not to mention a solid self-esteem, that I don’t see in “failures” (people who seem, no matter how hard they try, unable to fulfill themselves).

Money? If you have plenty of it, you don't need to worry about it. It’s still seen as evil, wicked and dirty in our culture, not to mention indispensable. Everyone wants more – look at the lottery! – but no one wants to admit that what they have isn’t enough. We're a consuming culture, and if you get caught up in it you'll never be happy at all. But if you always need, always chase, always scrape and scratch and sink in debt, how happy is it possible to be?

OK then, before I wrap this up. . . I often hear this one, usually said to young people just starting out, and I think it's the most destructive thing I have ever heard.

"You can do absolutely anything you want to in life, if you just want it badly enough."

It sounds great, but it just doesn't pan out. If a person with an IQ of 100 wants to be a doctor, it isn't going to happen. If a person has no aptitude for medicine, it will be the same (or law, or landscaping). Yes, there are always people who rise to "the top", whatever that is (like oil on a slick, maybe?). But they have boosts along the way, often financial. Or they are raised to have a high and very sturdy sense of self-esteem.

Once in a while we hear a wonder-story about a kid from the ghetto or some other harsh, limiting circumstance who goes on to achieve dazzling deeds. It's rare as hen's teeth, but it does happen, and generally leads to talk show appearances and a book deal, if not a movie of the week.

For the rest of us, well, life hands us limitations. If I have ALS, I may not be able to run a marathon. If I'm a writer, unless my work is super-extraordinary, I won't win the Nobel Prize.

To my mind, it would be more realistic to say, "Life will hand you limitations. It's absolutely inevitable. But what you do to deal with those limitations is crucial. If you are realistic about them and find ways to make them work for you, you can achieve things you never dreamed of."

That takes up too much space, I suppose. But wouldn't it make a great commencement speech?

Little mermaids

When two little blonde mermaids scamper out into the living room, when two sisters put on their tap shoes and pound the floor until it shakes, what can you do but give thanks?

Thanks.

Nancy and Kate. . . are they really the same person???

(Also known as Sort Out the Cloned Brunettes). Half of these photos are of Kate Middleton, and the other half of Paul McCartney's new 51-year-old-but-looks-30 heiress bride, Nancy Shevell.

Can you tell whom is whom, which is which, and (most importantly) why is why? I think I've lost track, myself.

(Confused? Me too. Does Kate have a twin?)

Oh. NOW I know. . .

The Edmonton Journal: the one that walks the dog

I've been at this forever. Writing, I mean. Writing for print/the public or whatever you want to call it. More than 25 years ago, I lived in a small hamlet (actually, more of a teeny-tiny town) called Hinton, Alberta, in the foothills of the Rockies. There wasn't much to do there, so I wrote. Wrote feverishly, tried to write novels, fell short. My letters to the editor were ubiquitous. Then I had this idea:

What if, instead of being sandwiched in with all the other tirades from Hintonites upset about the smell of the pulp mill (wet garbage and horse manure) , I had my very own column? You know. Something with my picture on it, and all that.

I sent in some ideas to the local paper, and waited. Nothing. Months later, one of my columns actually ran, but with no name on  it.

I got on the phone.

It took a while to straighten things out. The column, called Between the Lines, mostly consisted of domestic comedy, with now and again something more weighty.

I had this gig for a year before somebody said to me, "Gee, I like your column. How much do they pay you for that?"

PAY??

I did a little digging and found out that all the other columnists were paid ten dollars a week. Not a princely sum, but still. So I sent them a friendly letter, and I got this (paraphrased) message.

"Since you signed on to do it for nothing, you will continue to do it for nothing. The other columnists signed on to do it for money, so they will continue to do it for money."

"Signed on"? No one signed anything in that place!

Alrighty then.

I guess I kind of went off the deep end, starting a campaign to make the bloody ten dollars like everybody else. Embarrasses me now, and the paper cut me off forever, but meanwhile somebody I knew in the actual news business said something like, Your stuff is good enough to be paid for, but not at the Hinton rag. Try a real newspaper.

I thought of the one we read every day. So I tried the Edmonton Journal.

How could I have known then that I would form a sort of marriage with the Edmonton Journal, that it would weave in and out of my writerly life like love's old sweet song? 

I think my first piece was an editorial about AIDS, which was then new and a very hot topic. Don Braid was the editor of a new section called the Eye Opener, which ran stuff that was on the edge of subversive. I was in! and extremely excited, but as with everything I have ever done in my life, momentum died and I had to start all over again. All my subsequent attempts at editorials bombed, but meantime I was writing to columnists and asking "how do you do this?"

This isn't supposed to happen - in fact, it has only happened once in 28 years or so - but somebody gave me a break. Somebody said, "Will you review my book?", and handed it to me.

Thus I reviewed Judy Schultz's toothsome collection of food stories, Nibbles and Feasts. An enjoyable book, and fairly easy to review, though I did nitpick about a few things, thinking, what have I got to lose?

I was astounded when the reviews kept coming. Kept coming, that is, until I left Hinton in 1988, and it all stopped. I had to start all over again, building a column in the Tri-City News which ran on and off for six or seven years (and this time they paid me, because I asked for it, though I still didn't sign anything). I trudged around, mentally speaking, and eventually placed book reviews in other papers: the Montreal Gazette (for whom I was briefly - don't laugh, now - science editor!), the Vancouver Sun (who initially told me, after one review, that they would never use me again), and even the much-vaunted Globe and Mail.

But eventually, perhaps with the advent of computers and the ability to send things by a method other than snail-mail, the Journal re-entered my life. Not sure when or how, but suddenly I was on again (with a different editor - this is another amazing thing, because inevitably a change of editor means you're toast). My cheques came on the button, there were never any problems, and for the most part (incredibly - this is really rare) my pieces ran unedited.

Fast-forward to my first novel coming out - oh Jesus, the lifelong dream fulfilment, and then the horrific letdown when it was in the stores for about six weeks! And the on-line magazine I was working for (for free - I must have been desperate) telling me, "We can't run a review of your novel because it would be nepotism." I accepted this, and it didn't hit me until years later that all the other publications I had ever written for didn't feel that way at all. The Montreal Gazette ran a slightly dotty but overall favorable piece, the Vancouver Sun likewise, and the
Journal. . .

I can't tell you how good this made me feel, especially in light of the record poor sales that sank my book (and I still don't know why it didn't generate that mysterious "buzz" that makes it all happen). When Better than Life came out in 2003, the Journal decided to go all-out for its longtime contributor. I got a full-page spread, a rapturous review, and was named one of the Top Ten books of the Year. This was a bandaid on the wound, or at least until I learned the reality of publishing in Canada.

The reality being: we are all part of a vast pyramid, with the huge majority at the bottom. There's not much room at the top (the "top" meaning that somebody reads your book). Books DO disappear, regularly. Authors disappear. I don't know, maybe they commit suicide or something (or no - that's poets). But you don't hear from them again. Publishers considering your next book glance at at the glowing reviews and rich promotion from your last book and say, "Nope, it didn't sell".

I can't fault them for that, because they are in the business of selling books. Hey, I want my book to sell too, even more badly than they do. But when the second one suffered a similar fate, well then. . .

My local column went belly-up when the editor left. After six or seven years, I was not allowed to write a farewell column. So, battlescarred, I took whatever work I could find. I couldn't write another novel, not yet anyway. It was like dating after a divorce. But still there was a thread, something holding the whole thing together. Though there would sometimes be gaps as long as two years, eventually I'd end up back with the Edmonton Journal. Incredibly, they actually seemed to want me.

Sounds a little sad, doesn't it - sounds Sally Fields-ish: "They like me, they really really like me!" But do you know how rare it is to receive that kind of treatment in this business? I sometimes think shabby treatment is the norm (either that, or being ignored). Writers are almost non-entities, except when they miss their deadlines, and then they get hell for it.

I had a low spot with "a" paper - I won't mention the name, even though I am sure they've forgotten me by now - in which my deadline was March 25 or something, so I emailed it in at 4 p.m. on March 25 and received a shrill call saying, "You missed your deadline."

"No, I didn't. It was March 25. Today is March 25."

"But I wanted it first thing in the morning so I could edit it and go home by noon."

She then went on to tell me everything that was wrong with the piece, which was why she was going to "kill" it (no kidding, that's the term - and way back then, though not now, you got something called a "kill fee"). I managed to place the review elsewhere and somehow, just, well, incidentally, let the author of the book know about it, and he wrote back and gratefully acknowledged it as one of the better pieces he had seen.

Then I , oh-oh. This is what I shouldn't do, like campaigning to the Hinton paper for $10. It just made me look bad, and the editor sounded like one of those squirrels flapping its tail and chattering up a tree. I sent a copy of his letter to her. It was a sort of nyah-nyah. I was so sick of being trampled on, and being expected to just take it all with a smile.

I don't know if any of this is interesting or not. I had a hiatus from reviewing, frankly sick of the whole enterprise (including hearing from one editor, a honcho from one of the Big Papers, after I pitched a book they'd already covered. He said, "Not paying much attention, are you?" Writers are not allowed to make even one mistake.)

But somehow, I guess I needed to come home. I contacted my alma mater, with a new (to me) books editor, Richard Helm. And the answer was yes. And now they offer books to me, so I don't have to jump, and jump, and jump. And I can even turn books away!

In my long long long long long career as a reviewer, approaching 30 years now, I have covered something like 400 titles, a total which I used to be proud of but now makes me groan. People don't take it well. They look at me as if I've said, I used to work in the Barnum and Bailey Circus as a fire-eater. It's weird. It's too much. Why do I want to do this so badly, anyway?

I want to tell them: OK, let's do the math. If I do 2 reviews a month, which for a long time was my normal output, that's 26 reviews a year. Times ten, it's. . . times twenty, it's. . . You see, it all adds up.

Columns, well, I wrote literally thousands. Some paid, many not. I kept them all and they molder, yellow and gross, in binders downstairs. I was afraid of disappearing, and still am.


What is wrong with me? I have a disease. I can't help it. I have big ambitions and they are never fulfilled. I get treated badly and just swallow it, and if I hit back at all, I am immediately yanked up short. Or so it seems. But one paper has been like the best bud who always shows up during the worst times (like when somebody dies), not with a casserole but with rolled-up sleeves to do the dishes and walk the dog.

It's like someone is saying, not "go away" (the usual response I get to everything), but "More, please."

More???

What with ever-shrinking books sections and more and more canned reviews, this gig will eventually end, but what a ride it's been, especially during the many rotten times I've lived through bashing my head on cinderblock walls.

To all the snarlers and grouches, I'd like to say this. It IS possible to treat writers well. It IS desirable to be respectful and even polite, and it doesn't cost you anything. See, there's one paper that's been doing it for years and years.The rest of you: come on, guys! Get with it.