Anyone Can Write: Be a Lion! Be a Pirate!

 

Write like this.

If you have kids or grandchildren, you have probably encountered the animated Pixar movie, Ratatouille, about a French rat whose dream is to cook his filthy little heart out. The film’s mantra, expressed by a legendary chef who is deceased through much of the story, is “Anyone can cook.” Chef Auguste Gusteau’s egalitarian dictum drives the plot of the film, and inspires and ultimately uplifts our rodent star, Remy.

Gusteau’s words pop into my head every time I re-read Brenda Ueland’s charming book, If You Want to Write. I don’t re-read many books, especially books about writing, but I do find myself turning to Ueland every year and I get something out of it each time. For many years I kept a few extra copies in the office to share with friends.

This time I picked it up because I had re-read a short story I’d written a few years ago that I now felt certain was, as long as we are on a French theme, merde.

I can’t believe I sent this to an editor!

What was I thinking?

No wonder they rejected it!

And like that.

That’s when I knew it was time to dig out Brenda and dip into her wisdom. Her book first saw the light of day in 1938. Ueland was born to Norwegian Americans who settled the American midwest. A judge for a father, a suffragette for a mother. Ueland lived and worked in New York City in the early teens of that century, counting among her friends radical writers such as John Reed and Louise Bryant, and the playwright Eugene O’Neill. (Watch Warren Beatty’s film Reds, to get up to speed.)

I can’t tell you much about Ueland’s literary output. She wrote for the major magazines of her days such as Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, in addition to newspapers and radio shows. She married three times and had many lovers. Some of her short pieces have been published in collections. She walked nine miles a day on her best days, and treasured that time because it’s when she did her best thinking.

When she returned home to Minneapolis after Greenwich Village, she wrote a column for the Minneapolis Times, and—lucky for all writers everywhere—began teaching writing classes in 1934. Not at Iowa. Not at Harvard. Not at Yaddo. Her pulpit was the YMCA in the Twin Cities.

Her students were men and women, rich and poor, sales clerks and housewives, hopeful magazine writers, self-important men of business, and people on the edge. Many of them had grown up in farm country, and carried memories of that life. They came each night to listen and learn and try their hand at something they had always dreamed of.

It is clear that Ueland learned as much from them as her students learned from her. After giving a speech at a local writers’ conference one year, she received so many comments from admirers that she finally compiled her observations and lessons into a slim volume that lifts me every time I turn to it.

How could you not be cheered by the very first chapter, which echoes Chef Gusteau, entitled: “Everybody is talented, original and has something important to say”?

The book is eighteen chapters and only 179 pages long. She’s a fan of William Blake and quotes or references him 45 times. She has consumed all of Van Gogh’s letters, and quotes or discusses him 17 times. There are asides on de Musset, Plotinus, Mozart, Tolstoy, Kreisler, Saint-Beuve, Ibsen, Inge, and an interesting scene featuring Sandburg, about the time he visited her in Minnesota and they took a chilly stroll around her beloved Lake Calhoun.

In other words, as she warns us early on, her book is technically about writing, but she is really speaking about anything you long to do. Her true subject is the creative life, for creation, she reminds us, is at the heart of what it means to be human.

Her thesis: As children we learn to tell stories and we’re fantastic confabulists. We intuitively know how to shape a tale with a beginning, middle, and end. Then we get older and freeze up when we sit down to write. Why? By then legions of teachers have made writing seem far too serious. If we dare to set a pencil to paper, we have been schooled, we must follow rules or...we will fail.

Ueland taught her students to set down their words as plainly as possible. If they learned to get out of their own way, they would get to the heart of their stories. “Art is infection,” she says. (Another chapter title.) If the writer feels passionate about what they commit to the page, the reader cannot help to feel it too.

Her favorite Van Gogh story: At first he did not know he wanted to be a painter. He lived in London, studying to be a preacher. Sitting in his dingy flat, he peeked out his window at the rainy night. A lamppost, a star—that was all. In the midst of writing a letter to his brother, he stopped and wrote, “It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And he proceeded to draw on the page of his letter what he saw in front of him. Ueuland writes:

(T)he moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

Why don’t we all do as Von Gogh did? she asks.

“(B)because we have been discouraged into thinking what we feel about the sky is not important.”

She did not critique her students’ work. No. In chapter eight, when she begins to share samples of their writing with us, she explains her process. Congratulate them. Celebrate their wins. Then, ask them questions:

I am blessed with a fascinated, inexhaustible interest in all my pupils—their thoughts, adventures, failures, rages, villainies and nobilities. “Tell me more. Tell me exactly what you feel when you tried to kill the man.”…“You say ‘his muscles rippled through his shoulders.’ Did they really ripple? Did you really see that?” Then the young novelist’s excited defense: “Yes, they did! His muscles were so big they seemed to burst the seams of his coat!” Myself: “Well say that! Hurrah! Put it that way. That’s alive, great!”

In another section, she shares the work of a young Irish woman who works in a stultifying sub-basement as a department store stenographer. The lass writes a simple essay about a trip she has taken to Wayzata, Minnesota. It’s so rich, your heart breaks reading it. Van Gogh could not have rendered Wayzata more beautifully.

Ueland then quotes passages from flashy magazine stories of her day. She singles out sections she feels have fallen short because the writers did not adhere to her first rule: be true to yourself. They got caught up in writing what they thought would sound literary, and she can sense it.

No, she says. Write from the heart. Write simply. Write what you feel or know to be true. Only that will connect with readers.

Now, look, I did not say that this was a book about how to write fiction. Yes, she does touch on the topic, and even proudly quotes a fun passage by a student who has written a mystery. But to me, every time I read the book I come away feeling that her true gift was helping students overcome their fear and craft fine personal essays.

If I were teaching a group of new writers, this would be the text I’d read to inspire myself, and them. I read Ueland to more fully understand my compulsion to embark on this insane career. If someone were just starting out and asked me for advice, I’d hand them this book, and have.

Just reading the titles of her chapters fills the room with light:

Chapter 2: “Imagination is the Divine Body in every Man”—William Blake 

Yes, that is the title of the freaking chapter.

Chapter 7: Be careless, reckless! Be a lion, be a pirate, when you write 

Chapter 14: Keep a slovenly, headlong, impulsive, honest diary

Chapter 18: “He whose face gives no light shall never become a star”—William Blake

I will warn you that she was also a writer of her time. When she celebrates Columbus in a footnote, calling his discovery the gift of imagination, Tonstant Reader nearly frowed up. And I may be wrong, but none of the luminaries she cites in her examples are women. She does, however, celebrate the work of her female students.

She supported herself and her daughter on her writing after her first marriage ended. She knew the life of a single mother, but she urged her female students to make time for their writing, believing that committing to one’s dreams set a fine example for one’s kids.

“If you would shut the door against your children for an hour a day and say: ‘Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!’ you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.”

She describes a funny scene in which she poses for some young girls for three days while they paint her portrait. She remarks how quiet the children were while they were “playing”—and how interesting the final, unschooled works of art were.

(Sidenote: What adults can learn about art from children is the theme of a new book—Don't Call it Art, by Austin Kleon, that I've been hearing about all week. Funny that I should re-encounter this anecdote by Ueland around the same time.)

Ueland set a swimming record in her eighties. She was 93 when she died in 1985. By then, she’d been knighted by the King of Norway and written some six million words. That figure awed me once. It still does, but I now see it as a reasonable allotment for someone who supported herself her whole life by her pen. Yet I cannot help thinking that her true worth was measured by how she enriched the lives of her students and helped them to see that their voices mattered.

Judging from the number of different versions of this book found online, I surmise that it is now in the public domain. If you do seek it out, choose the editions published by Graywolf Press, the nonprofit publisher in Minnesota that has been entrusted by the Ueland estate to keep this work in print since the 1980s. You don’t want to go wrong; the book is filled with delicious footnotes that poor publishers can easily screw up. If You Want to Write is Graywolf’s bestselling book, for good reason.

My copy.

The current Graywolf edition.

* * * 

BSP: My wife's new book arrives next Tuesday. I hope you check it out.

See the video on YouTube.

Learn more at Denise's website.

Check it out on Bookshop.org, not the place run by the billionaire.

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

I Am Graduating Still

 

It’s the season of Dads and grads. My phone has blown up recently with pictures of young people in caps and gowns, sent by their proud parents. On a rainy weekday early this month I found myself in an auditorium watching a member of our family receive her hood for a PhD she’d been working on since the pandemic.

It had been a long time since I’d attended such a ceremony, so I was surprised to find myself become emotional. That’s something you’d expect to do at weddings and funerals. I forgot that education—the yearning to strive, learn, get better—is a powerful trigger for me.

In this case, I was struck with a memory from my past.

Freshman year of journalism school. I’m sitting in the seminar portion of my larger COM107 class—the first course every journalism student takes—when the professor makes a bold statement.

He says that journalism as we know it, as we’ve practiced it since the turn of the century, is on the ropes. Thought leaders now say that a person who enters the profession can expect to make seven significant career pivots in their lifetime.

We were kids. We knew nothing. His statement went right over our heads.

Then he broke it down.

I am not saying that you will have seven jobs in your lifetime. Doing the same thing seven times in a row. No.

Oh—I thought. That’s exactly what my baby brain thought you meant.

In the course of your lifetime, he went on, you will shift to radically different careers. Maybe you start out as a reporter for a newspaper, but eventually you will write press releases for an electric company, you will run marketing for a huge bookstore chain like Barnes & Noble, you will start your own public relations firm, and by the time you retire you’ll be running the fundraising arm for your local theatre company. That’s what I mean.

This happened in a classroom in the early 1980s, which meant that even Prof. Babcock—who was then and remained for decades after, a towering figure in communications research—could not foresee the impact the Internet would have on journalism. Newspapers began their death spirals when Craigslist arrived in 1995. Suddenly people had a free or free-ish place to take their classified ads, which newspapers had monopolized and charged through the nose for since the dawn of print. The loss of that revenue, and the revenue from display ads, cost newspapers dearly.

Back in 2026, as I waited for the graduation ceremony to start, I ticked off the jobs I’d had. I’d gone to school for magazine journalism. I knew I couldn’t hack daily journalism. I was a features writer at heart. I would write for the glossies, thought I.

If you squint at my resume, you would see a career that probably defied Professor Babcock’s thesis.

I wrote for children’s magazines for my first two jobs, then I jumped to a dot-com (undreamt-of in Babcock’s philosophy), then went freelance and wrote for a string of magazines before segueing to books and ghostwriting. Aside from the blip represented by that website, my career did not at all conform to a seven-career shift.

At heart I am still a writer and editor.

Babcock’s prediction came true only in the new skills I was forced to master. By the time I had books to promote and clients to woo, the practice of typing up a resume and dropping it off at the neighborhood printer to be—ha!—expensively typeset and run off on fancy paper was laughable.

The early 2000s I had to learn how to design a website. By 2009, when my wife and I published a book on the signers of the Declaration of Independence, we were designing t-shirts. (One for every signer! Collect all 56! Geez, was that a crazy idea).

Social media meant learning how to shoot photos, add text to them, and send them out into the world, often with appended music.

You know—to do the job most publishers had stopped doing.

When publishers ran a quick 'n' dirty ebook sale of one of our titles, we dropped everything and designed a promo ad to distribute on social media, the way an advertising director might do.

We learned how to pitch our books to bookstores and non-stores, landing new accounts the way sales reps would.

We learned to approach radio stations and book reviewers, the way publicists would.

Today, if you look at the website of the school I attended, they announce with some puffery that they are preparing students for careers in digital journalism. They have stopped the charade that they are teaching for a one-track career. Graduates, they say, must be ready to tell stories across multiple platforms.

Every year, when I do our taxes, I am amazed by the sheer number of software programs our household subscribes to. And I’m sure you, my fellow 21st Century scribes, are in a somewhat similar situation. Some more than others, no doubt.

It is only when I step back and recall that I entered my freshman dorm toting an electric typewriter…

It is only when I recall that the journalism school taught us to set type by hand, just to give us a feel for the origins of that quaintly ancient technology…

It is only when I recall that the journalism school later ditched that very same type lab—sold off all those wooden trays of backwards lead letters to the art school across the street, retired the elderly pressman who ran the hand-cranked press…and filled the lab space with gleaming IBM personal computers in my senior year…

It is only then that I can appreciate the shift in time.

This came to me in a flash, all at the start of that graduate school ceremony, and I could not shake the grateful thought that I am graduating still.

A while back, I decided to build an online store for our books and stories. Many writers have done this, and it felt like a good, long-term goal. If nothing else, it would be a place to refer all those people who ask, “What’s the best place to buy your books?” (They say this as if they haven’t wandered into a bookstore in ages, which—sigh—they probably haven’t.)

It took me two years, but the store is finally live. It took that long because I needed to learn or relearn a lot of new skills. Guess what? (The Declaration Signer t-shirts are back!) Next up: I am teaching myself to record my short stories. I have bolted the microphone to the dining room table.

Why would anyone want to stop learning?

A person my wife interviewed for her first narrative nonfiction book arrived in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 1940s to work as a lab chemist on the Manhattan Project. Few employees in the Secret City knew what they were working on, but Virginia, a trained scientist, surmised the truth. How could she not?

I miss Virginia. I enjoyed getting to know her during the writing of that book. She was kind enough to let us live at her home while Denise conducted her research so we didn’t have to keep shelling out for hotels.

By then Virginia was in her late eighties, walked with two canes, was partially blind, and wore two hearing aids. Each morning she headed to her office to wake her Mac. She had her screen zoomed to the highest setting so she could read the news in 120-point type. She prized her e-reader because the technology allowed her to do the same with books.

On one of those visits, she told us that she had enrolled in an exciting new class for the coming semester at the senior center. The instructor was a young physicist from the national lab.

“What’s the course?” we asked.

“The history of transuranic elements,” she replied.

God willing, I will be like her someday: Approaching my ninth decade and still learning. The only way to be, as far as I am concerned.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

A Library of One's Own

 

Books I have not read.

In the beginning they were all library books, and they were manageable. At the library across the street from the public school, a kid could borrow up to five books, max, which was good, because those early selections were short picture books that I breezed through quickly, often in the car on the way home. Typically, I chose books our teacher had read to us in class. Now I wanted to turn the pages myself and take as much time as possible to digest them.

After I absorbed the story, I’d start over again, this time studying every single image and imagining how the illustrators had done their work. Think about the crosshatching in books by Maurice Sendak. You could get lost in those lines.

One of the books from those days—Stupid Marco by Jay Williams, about a moronic prince who cannot tell his right hand from his left—was beautifully illustrated by a Dutch illustrator named Friso Henstra. Scritchy-scratchy lines galore. Can you imagine anyone permitting a kid to read a book today whose protagonist is labeled stupid on the front cover?

Eventually, I’d bring the books back and get a whole new stack. I could do this as many times as I wanted, and no one ever gave me guff about it. It cost nothing, and in the end the books went back where they belonged.

Neat. Tidy.

When I started buying paperbacks at the local bookstore, I bought to fill in the gaps in the library’s collection. But I still followed the same logical process: buy, read, buy another.

Neat. Tidy.

In other words, books were borrowed or purchased in order to be read now. They never came home and stayed untouched. This was the greatest of all rules. I read what I bought, and I read what I borrowed.

There was no such thing as unread books.

I continued this practice well into college and slightly beyond. Then, for some reason, the Neat-Tidy system broke down. Books entered my apartment and stayed unread for a good long time. They stacked up on the bookshelf. Or in piles near the couch. On my bedside table. On my desk. I rationalized their acquisition because I knew I would get to them in time, because I always had.

Soon books entered the dwelling unread and stayed that way for years. For some reason, I was okay with this. I did what anyone in my position would do: I blamed Otto Penzler.

When I was fresh out of college, somehow I learned of the Crime Collector’s Club (CCC) that Penzler operated out of his Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, the location with the charming spiral staircase. You signed up, you sent him money, and every month he mailed you a new hardcover book.

These were special. They were autographed by the author. I had never heard of such a thing. It was the most marvelous thing ever. When I finally got around to reading the book, it didn’t matter that there were no pictures; I could ogle the writer’s handwriting on the title page as I read. Wow.

Sometimes you could opt for a second book on Otto’s monthly offer! Holy smokes. More books to paw over and stack up for future reading.

Thank you, authors. Thank you, publishers. Thank you, Otto.

A friend once asked about Otto’s CCC and marveled that I was willing to spend a princely $17.95 a month on hardcover books. “That’s expensive!” she spluttered. She was right. We were journalists living on crappy incomes. In my defense, I wasn’t yet married, nor did I have the mouths of babes to feed. What was I going to do with my meager earnings anyway? Eat? Pay rent?

The Japanese have a word for this bookish behavior: tsundoku. It means piling up reading materials that go unread. Apparently no judgment is implied when a case of tsundoku is diagnosed. The situation just is.

I have developed coping mechanisms over the years. I had to. I am not an animal. Pound for pound, unless you have taken up a side hobby like blacksmithing, welding, or the letterpress arts, books are apt to be the heaviest things you will ever own. A single move will impart a critical lesson: you are, in effect, paying twice for all the books you have and haven’t read. From time to time, I painfully pick my way through the stacks and decide: Am I ever really going to read this? If the answer is no, out the door it goes.

I have given away books, lent them, donated them. The piles still grow. Nowadays, when I pick them up, they come with stories their makers never intended. This copy of Irish short stories is the one I bought for my Irish lit class in college. I remember how charming the professor was when he read Yeats aloud in a pleasing Irish brogue. By chance is he still alive, I wonder? Here, also, are countless copies of signed books by friends. Looking back, I should not have been so impressed by the signed books Mr. Penzler sold. If you write, in time you amass friends who also write. You amass their books as well. Now, fully a third of my living room bookshelves are devoted to signed copies. And yes, I have to admit, many of those are unread too.

Once, while walking the dog, I happened upon one of those Little Free Libraries, and discovered a first edition of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and nearly wept. Ages ago, while living in Hoboken, I once had my own first of that book. I’d bought it when it first came out. (Tom and I go way back. In journalism school, we were taught that he was a god, and for a while I subscribed to this notion.) I had enjoyed the book the first time around, but I had donated it after some years and always regretted it. Here it was, in North Carolina, in a perfectly fine dust jacket. What was I supposed to do, not take it home and stick it on a pile?

For a while there, my wife and I eagerly consumed Marie Kondo’s classic, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and dutifully followed its prescribed steps. We decluttered our kitchen! We decluttered our clothing closets, our garage, the outdoor shed. Kondo’s system was brilliant. Pick up an item and ask yourself, “Does this spark joy?” If the answer is no, you know what to do.

She instructed you to carefully purge your way from objects of little sentimental value to the most. (Family heirlooms and photographs are the last thing you purge.) We never applied her principle to books. My wife refused to. She insisted that Kondo, a Japanese author who had once worked at a shinto shrine before becoming a professional organizer, didn’t actually understand books. It seemed as if tsundoku, in her personal cosmology, came loaded with judgment. At that stage in our process, we donated Kondo’s book and never looked back.

I have learned over time to not gratuitously add to the pile. I feel a helpful wave of shame when I attend bookstore events. Such lovely authors! (But I simply cannot buy another book, can I? No! You have too many! More than you will ever read in the time remaining!) Then comes the other voice: You can’t support another writer? What kind of writer are you?

I used to be appalled when I saw how many people departed bookstores, empty-handed, after a reading. Now I understand.

In 2022, when my father died in California, my brother asked if I wanted Dad’s multi-volume set of Popular Mechanics guides for the practical handyman. If I Venmoed him some money, my brother would pack all sixteen volumes in a box—

“Absolutely not!” I shouted into the phone.

I was outvoted by my wife, who thought it might be hilarious to have such books.

Great. I squeezed them in among the cookbooks in the den, and flip through them when I need to repair a faucet or refurbish a crappy cabinet, as I did last weekend. Why would I use the internet to research how to remove decrepit hardware, and to sand, buff and carefully pound in finishing nails when I had a perfectly good book on my shelf—which predated the internet and possibly the invention of television—that demonstrated the precise steps necessary to turn another inherited piece of crap into an exquisite, eye-catching piece upon which to store more piles of unread books?

There is a moment in many of those country house mysteries where the inspector interviews an insomniac suspect who says he came downstairs in his bathrobe at 3 a.m. to get a book out of his host’s library, and encountered another suspect who was descending the servant’s staircase to fetch a sandwich.

Bull, I used to think, when I encountered such characters. Who wakes up at 3 a.m.? And who goes into someone else’s private library to borrow a book? And while we’re at it, Inspector, do you not find it at all odd that Lord Squidgecombe packed a bathrobe to visit someone’s country house for the weekend? How convenient! Almost as if he were expecting to need an alibi!

But you know what? Decades later, I get it. Not the bathrobe part, but the reading of new, enticing, strange books in the middle of the night. It certainly beats tossing and turning. If you have a sandwich handy, so much the better.

Five decades after I entered my first library, the one across the street from the public school, I have built my own. Amid the occasional duds and tripe, it’s filled with wonders, most of them forgotten or unappreciated by me. When I happen upon one of these, I’m a kid again and feel as if I’ve just picked out another gem. Please say you understand.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Case of the Silent Fan

My young nephew recently landed the job of his dreams after a two-year stint in the NBC Page program. The job seems perfect for him. As long I can remember, he’s been obsessed with movies and screenwriting. Now he’s working in the industry. Hearing his dad talk about his son’s new gig reminded me of one of my first job interviews, which unwittingly touched upon our beloved genre.

Not my nephew.

Cue dream sequence music and SFX.

Doodly-do, doodly-do…

I am fresh out of college, living back at my parents’ home in New Jersey, and scouring want ads in the New York Times.

Oh—here’s one! A major publisher is looking for editorial assistants. This is not a surprise to me. I have a degree in journalism, but I am deeply uninterested in writing for newspapers. (Newflash: this is the 1980s, folks. Newspapers still exist.) In the fields of magazine journalism and book publishing, being someone’s editorial assistant is how one breaks into these two specialized fields. I am prepared to editorially assist the heck out of anyone who will have me.

I phone the number in the newspaper. Somewhere in the Big Town, the phone rings. The person asks a few questions, and instructs me to bring my résumé and my sunny disposition to 175 Fifth Avenue on the appointed day and hour.

Wowza! I have a job interview!

I ride the bus from the Jersey side to the Port Authority bus terminal. I walk 20 blocks south because I know nothing of city buses or subways. It’s summer, so my button-down shirt and blazer are probably soaked by the time I get there. But this is a dream sequence, so I arrive looking pristine. Even my résumé is perspiration-free.

Reasonable facsimile of Joe upon arrival
at job interview.

I am standing in front of the famous Flatiron Building. I may have heard of it in my reading but this is the first time I have ever been there. The human resources person chats me up, asks about my majors in school, and then tells me she would like to introduce me to the book editor who will be needing an editorial assistant very, very shortly.

She mentions the editor’s name, but I am a) nervous/anxious/self-conscious beyond belief, and b) hearing impaired, and wear gigantic hearing aids that I am sure astronauts can spot from space. It is quite possible I did not wear the hearing aids today because, well, see a) above.

The editor’s name goes in one ear and out the other. Vaguely, the name sounds like Jon-Kon, which may have been a character in the Star Wars franchise. The human resources woman and I ride the steam-driven elevator to another floor, while she tells me that this particular editor is quite special.
Because she has her own imprint.

I am a twenty-one-year-old college graduate and I am an idiot, which the remainder of this discussion will fail to disprove. I don’t know from imprints. I don’t know what they are or why I need to know this word.

For 15 of the last 21 years I have been busy doing homework, sleeping, watching TV, and reading. Books, baby, books! That’s me. I don’t know from stinkin’ imprints.

Minutes later, I am sitting in the tiny office of a small woman with short-cropped hair and wide, smiley eyes.

“Editing is the easy part,” she tells me after a bit. “If you were an English major, this will come easy. But contracts? That’s where the young people go wrong. Can you add and subtract?”

Yes, absolutely, I tell her.

“Can you type a sentence word-for-word that is right there in front of you on the desk?”

Yes, of course, I tell her.

“See? That’s all that’s necessary. Now...authors. Most are very nice. Very interesting. But a few are... difficult. Here are some of the books we edit here…”

She went rooting on the shelf behind her. One by one, she passed the books to me. I glanced, I boggled, and I placed them on a stack on the desk in front of me.

Nervously.

Because, you see, they were all, every one of them, mysteries.

As it happened, I read mysteries. Lots. In fact, you might say that sitting on my duff reading mysteries was the only skill I had acquired in my young life.

The editor was glad to make my acquaintance. She wanted me to meet the young person who was leaving her post, so that I could understand what the job entailed. If I got the job, I would be reading slush piles, recommending books I liked to Jon-Kon, dealing with her correspondence, typing up contracts, seeing that packages got from her to literary agents and vice versa.

And once in a while, if I had the aptitude for it and the desire, I might be permitted to acquire the books I liked and carry them from manuscript to finished book. With Jon-Kon’s assistance and supervision, of course.

The outgoing editorial assistant repeated much of what her employer had said. And yes, she said, she had in fact acquired and edited some books on her own. It wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t really her cup of tea.

“Why are you leaving?” I asked.

“Oh—I got another job,” she said. “Across the street. See that bank down there? Right there. It pays better.”

(The editorial assistant salary was $12,000, about $36,000 today.)

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This woman, who was only a few years older than me, was leaving what I imagined was a dream job to work at a bank rather than acquire and edit the work of mystery writers? What the living heck?

I had so much more to learn about the world.

The editorial assistant asked if I had any other questions. I didn’t. I bid her and Jon-Kon goodbye.
That was it. I went downstairs and told the human resources person that this truly seemed like a dream job. I said little more.

She said she would be in touch.

Of course, she was not. Not ever.

What do they tell kids fresh out of college? They have to be persistent. They must be go-getters! Two things no one would ever say of me. And yet, for several days in a row, I phoned their office and tried to persist and go-get as best I could, to no avail. With each call, I must have seemed more desperate. 

Because by then I had glanced at some of the hardcover books in my meager collection and spotted a curious thing printed at the bottom of those spines or else on the back.

A Joan Kahn Book.

Depending on who is relating the history, Ms. Kahn may have been the first editor to have her own imprint. Her name on the cover of the books she edited—by Dick Francis, Tony Hillerman, Patricia Highsmith, and so on—signaled to readers who had never heard of this particular author that they were nevertheless in for a good time.

In her remarkable career, which stretched from 1946 to 1989, Ms. Kahn collected two awards from the Mystery Writers of America, the Ellery Queen Award for editing, and upon retirement a special Edgar to recognize her incredible contribution to the genre. She died in 1994 at age 80.

In my memory, she lives on as the person who asked so brightly on the day of my greatest mistake if I could add and subtract.

What was my mistake, you ask?

Perhaps you have guessed it.

I’ll give you a moment to mull it over. You have all the facts. I have laid them before you as best I could, omitting nothing. A foolish kid walks into a job interview, realizes that this represents his fondest wish—to work in the world of mystery fiction—and what does he say?

To the human resources woman? To the outgoing editorial assistant? To the great Jon-Kon herself?

Does he utter a single thing about his interest, nay, obsession with mysteries? Does he mention his favorite authors? Does he reference his subscriptions to the digest magazines? His growing stack of Armchair Detectives? The beat-up first edition of a Philo Vance hardcover that he found at a flea market that still has an intact oh-so-cool foldout map of the murder scene?

Nope.

Not a peep. Not a word. I entered their offices as a complete zero and exited shortly after without raising that number a whit.

That’s why, strangely, at this time of year, when students are about to collect their parchments in droves and head out into the world to seek their fortunes, my only real advice for them is drawn from a movie I watch every Christmas, The Family Stone.

In it, Luke Wilson consoles his brother’s uptight girlfriend, played by Sarah Jessica Parker. He wishes she would learn to make peace with her quirky self and not try to be so perfect, so appropriate, all the time.

“Here’s the thing, Meredith,” he tells her. “You have a freak flag. You just don’t fly it.”

Even if you’re young, you’ve earned that flag. Most of us have. It’s the thing that makes you you. Flying it is letting the world know who you are.

And yeah, I know that a job interview is probably one of the last places to let one’s fandom leak out. But geez, when a stranger announces to you that their greatest delight in the world is digging into a nice, juicy murder, read the room and unfurl the colors, you sweet, beautiful nerd.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

What do NBC Pages actually do? Watch Joe’s nephew and find out.

Tales from the Jungle

I don’t recall how I first heard of Frank Gruber’s 1967 book, The Pulp Jungle. It’s one of those books that, once you’ve heard about it, you start seeing references everywhere in the writing community. For me, the hype, if you can call it that, always seemed to touch upon three points:

1. If you want to know what it was like to write during the heyday of the pulps, this is the book to read.

2. The book is out of print, and you’ll pay through the nose to snag a copy.

3. Nearly every review I’ve read shares Gruber’s famous lunchtime soup ritual, which neatly encapsulates just how impoverished he was while trying to break into New York City publishing in the 1930s.

I won’t keep you waiting on these points, since I am obliged by the Pulp Jungle code of ethics to disclose them all:

1. Yes, this is the book to read to get a sense of the pulp fiction lifestyle as practiced by writers in the 1930s and 40s, and slightly beyond.

2. Yes, finding an original copy of the book is costly, with prices starting around $50 and quickly shooting into the hundreds. One rare book dealer has for sale a copy of the MS once owned by the author for about $1,300. But now, thanks to Fiction House Press, you can buy a paperback copy for $15.

3. I’ll save the soup story for later. I promise.

Not gonna lie: It’s a weird little book. Gruber tells us in the opener that in 1960 he took a call from a professor at UCLA. Was he THE Frank Gruber who had penned classics of the pulp era? You see, the university was about to launch a Black Mask exhibit…

The call triggers a wave of nostalgia, and Gruber realizes that it has been two decades since he’d written his last story for Black Mask, twenty-seven by the time he got around to writing this brisk, 189-page memoir. Pulp Jungle feels strangely incomplete. For one thing, it ends abruptly in an odd place, and some of the chapters feel rushed as well, almost as if its creator could not be bothered to give it a thorough editing before sharing it with the world. If that does not embody the spirit of the pulp era, I don’t know what does.

Gruber estimates that between 1934 and 1941 he wrote between 600,000 and 800,000 words a year, the equivalent of seven to 10 modern novels a year. In his lifetime, he wrote about 400 short stories, 60 novels, and 200 screenplays for television and the movies (most for projects that were never filmed). He wrote detective stories, adventure stories, love stories, westerns, spy novels, and “spicy” stories (which I take to mean erotica). By the way, I think he grossly undercounts his short story output. In one year alone in the 1930s, he wrote 176 stories. But let's go with 400. It's his book.

Born in Minnesota, he’d longed to write as a boy, after reading a slew of Horatio Alger stories. After a stint in the U.S. Army, he sold his first short story at age 23 for $3.50. In 1927, he landed his first job editing an agricultural newspaper, and eventually moved to a publisher in Iowa, where he edited as many as five of those agri-rags. In between, he wrote and sent rounds of stories to the pulps in New York City.

Just as we do today, as soon as a story was rejected, he sent it in the mail to another editor, using the barely one-decade-old Writer’s Digest as his guide. Between 1932 and 1934, he reports, he wrote about 620,000 words of fiction but never earned a living wage. His dream of becoming a writer plays havoc with his family budget, for in the early decades of the twentieth century, ceaseless rounds of postage cost a fortune.

If he were actually on the ground in New York City, he theorizes, he’d save money on stamps, deliver each manuscript by hand, and meet a ton of editors in the process. In 1934, when the agri-papers tank as a result of the Depression, Gruber sees his chance. He sends his young wife to live with her parents, and boards a train to the Big Apple lugging a suitcase, a typewriter, and $60.

Times are tough. Rent in New York City is exorbitant compared to rent back home. (Upon arrival, he shells out $10.50 for a week’s rent at a hotel.) Over the next seven months, he shares hotel rooms and apartments with other writers. When he gets locked out of one apartment for being late with the rent, he rides the subway all night, trying to keep from nodding off. But golly, at least he wasn’t paying for those damn stamps.

To make ends meet, Gruber patronizes Automats, squirts hot water into a bowl, squeezes in several packets of ketchup, sprinkles crushed soup crackers over the liquid, and slurps it up with a spoon. Instant tomato soup! Cost: $0. He did this for days at a time to stave off hunger.

He estimates that there were about 150 pulp magazines headquartered in New York City, which boggles the mind when you think of the paucity of story markets today. He asserts that 300 writers lived in the New York area who had cracked those markets, with thousands more living in the hinterland wanting in on the action.

The magazines hit the stands with lovely names like Ace Detective, Ace Sports, Ace Western, Ten Detective Aces, Adventure, Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective, Dime Western, Double Action Western, Love Story, Weird Tales, Western Story, and Western Trails. The “kings” were Doc Savage and The Shadow, published by Street & Smith, and of course, Black Mask.

What surprised me was how often Gruber phoned editors to ask if he could stop by to introduce himself and pitch his work. Many blew him off, erecting walls between themselves and the legions of writers who craved access to their offices. Gruber speaks about sneaking past secretaries and assistant editors to find his marks. In some cases, the editors said yes! Off he confidently went to shake hands, talk about his work, the places he’d written, and lob ideas. Sometimes the editors would bite; often they kindly sent him on his way.

It took me a long time to finish this fairly short book because I was frequently pausing mid-sentence to research the names he drops. Many of the editors and writers were unknown to me. In some cases, the big-name editors struck me as different versions of the editors I knew in New York publishing: Highly educated people who had attended upscale universities but who, for whatever reason or lack thereof, had pursued career paths that led straight into the ink-stained trenches.

Joseph Shaw, for example, attended Bowdoin, won an Olympic medal for fencing, served his country in WWI—and eventually edited Black Mask, filling its pages with the work of Hammett, Chandler, and Gardner. Gruber tried many times to crack Shaw’s market. With each rejection, Shaw graciously dissected the pieces to explain why he had declined them, warmly encouraging Gruber to submit something else.

Black Mask nevertheless struggled to survive, and when “Captain” or “Cap” Shaw wouldn’t take a pay cut, he was dismissed and replaced by Fanny Ellsworth, the daughter of a New York banker, and a Barnard graduate who would later in life earn a doctorate in Turkish Studies. Among the writers Ellsworth lured to her pages was Cornell Woolrich.

We watch Gruber struggle to sell his work, and cringe as he dodges landlords, hotel clerks, and bill collectors. When he has missed a series of meals, he fondly recalls an incident in 1932, while he still lived in the midwest. A magazine for salesmen had mistakenly mailed him duplicate payments for a pair of stories, and Gruber had mailed the extra check back with a note explaining the error. 

Now, in 1934, Gruber answers his hotel door one Sunday afternoon, half expecting to be berated by his current hotelier. But no, standing in the hall is a well-dressed giant of a man, who enters and studies Gruber’s digs. “I always wanted to see how a starving writer lived,” says Aron M. Mathieu, who is the owner and editor of the sales magazine whose check Gruber returned two years ago. By chance, Mathieu is also the editor of Writer’s Digest. For two years Mathieu has been curious to meet the writer who returned that check:

“He swore roundly even then that I was the only downright honest writer he had ever heard of. He insisted that no writer on earth, especially one who was as close to the howling wolves as my letter had indicated, would have done such a thing. So that was why he was now visiting me.”

Would Mr. Gruber care to join him for lunch? Mathieu’s treat, of course. Gruber was so hungry that he was out the door like a dog whose ears perk up at the sound of the word treat. Over lunch at Schrafft’s and for three hours later, Mathieu expounded on his new concept: an annual publication that listed market opportunities, in detail, for writers. It would be called…Writer’s Market. If Gruber would consent to collect the data and send it to Cincinnati, Mathieu would pay a munificent $90, with a $40 advance. Gruber leaves Mathieu’s hotel with two beautiful twenties in his wallet.

Cha-ching!

Next, out of the ether, after six months and a raft of rejections, an editor phones on a Friday. His magazine is going to press Saturday, and he needs to fill a gaping hole. Could Gruber write a 5,500-word story overnight? Why, sure, he could! He delivers the story, and scurries back to his digs to wait for news of its acceptance. He never hears a peep. Only when he stops by the magazine days later does the editor tell him, oh, we pay on Fridays. The editor had forgotten to phone.

“It was already on the press. Good story. Do me another next month.”

Double cha-ching!

After that, Gruber’s luck changes. He summons his wife from the midwest, and they set up house in the Big Town. In 1935, he earns $10,000, which amounts to $238,000 in 2026. Soon he is comparing his income to that of doctors and lawyers. But that does not mean his output decreases. No. If anything, he’s maintaining the same number of words, just shaking it up with new opportunities in Hollywood.

His list of friends, editors, and acquaintances grows. He meets Lester Dent and befriends Carroll John Daly—who most credit as the creator of the first series private eye, Race Williams. One night, Gruber and his writer pal Steve Fisher go out on the town with the introverted mama’s boy, Cornell Woolrich, and prank him by grossly inflating their Black Mask earnings. The next day, editor Fanny Ellsworth phones and chastise Gruber for messing with poor, sensitive Woolrich’s head:

“He came tearing in here this morning yelling that I was paying Gruber, Fisher and Torrey four cents a word and he was getting only one and a half cents and he was never going to write for the magazine again!”

In another anecdote that I’ve seen shared in many reviews, Gruber attends a party at the Brooklyn apartment of a writer named George Bruce. Thirty or so guests pack the place, having a blast until about 10 pm, when Bruce suddenly remembers that he promised to deliver a 12,000-word story to an editor tomorrow. His guests offer to clear out, but Bruce won’t hear of it. While the party rages on, he sits at his electric typewriter and dutifully pounds out his story. Four hours later, the manuscript is completed, and Bruce rejoins the party and celebrates by knocking back a dollop of gin. Do the math. That is 3,000 publishable words an hour.

On a drive out west, Gruber stops at the home of Erle Stanley Gardner, who seems like a good egg, and, in those days when communication was far from instantaneous, Gardner happily informs our memoirist that an editor back east wants to buy a western novel that Gruber has written.

Gruber is less charmed by other writers he meets. He nearly comes to blows with Raymond Chandler, who badmouths Fisher, one of Gruber’s oldest writer friends, over a screenwriting dispute. (Chandler would never look Gruber in the eye again, but Gruber insists that that never stopped him from enjoying Chandler’s writing.) A mutual friend, Fred MacIsaac, introduces him to Thomas Wolfe, who bores Gruber to tears speaking all night of his own greatness.

Some time later, Gruber tells us, MacIsaac commits suicide. After years of success in the pulps, he has been unable to sell a story for six months. That’s when it hits you. These people mastered the craft not for awards or acclaim or for personal fulfillment. They did it to put food on the table, to support themselves and their families. If their words did not earn bread, then what good were they? It’s easy to see how a writer might have extended that equation to their own self-worth.

In Hollywood, Gruber meets Frederick Schiller Faust, who wrote under countless pen names but was probably best known as Max Brand, the creator of Dr. Kildare. Gruber describes him as a six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound man who did not so much write scripts as he did conceive stories that were later scripted by other writers. Faust showed up for work at the studio every day with a thermos of whiskey. When he drained the booze by 1 p.m., Faust snuck out for a liquid lunch, followed by a few drinks in the afternoon at a local watering hole.

Drink stoked his courage. He had grown tired of merely writing adventure stories. He craved adventure itself. He longed to live it! By now, it’s the 1940s, and a second World War is raging in Europe. In a bungalow on the Warner Brothers lot, a booze-stoked Faust shares with Gruber and Fisher the news that a military friend has fixed it so Faust can travel as an embedded reporter with infantry fighting in Italy. Off goes the great Max Brand, to launch a new career for himself as a war correspondent for Harper’s Magazine. Six weeks later, he’s dead at age 51.

By contrast, Gruber lives to witness the passing of an era that enriched writers and delighted readers. I get the sense that he’s melancholy about the death of the pulps, but he never admits as much.

Somewhere, before this book launches itself off a cliff, Gruber comes close to offering the secrets of his success. He enumerates, for instance, The Seven Basic Western Plots. And he spells out his “foolproof,” eleven-point method for writing the perfect mystery. Since we are all about mysteries, allow me to share with you the secret. Are you ready?

Colorful hero.

Theme.

Villain.

Background.

Murder method.

Motive.

Clue.

Trick.

Action.

Climax.

Emotion.

Ta-da! I bet you’re trembling with excitement. Now you can go forth and write your own mystery!

Yes, Gruber does give us a tiny bit more. He devotes exactly one paragraph to each point. Just one. Because why waste time dragging it out longer than necessary?

Perhaps that’s how he felt about his memoir. He had said all he had to say, so stopped he writing and sent it off to an editor. The end. He lived only two years more, but somehow managed to write eight or nine books before departing for his next great adventure.

* * * 

You can also read parts of Gruber's book via the Internet Archive.

Thanks for reading! See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

My Master Plan to Defeat the Bots

I am told that the ancient Romans scraped their tongues using a dull, metallic blade that could be inserted in the mouth, and raked along the surface of that organ with two fingers guiding the way. A fully appointed ancient Roman hygiene kit would have dangled on a chain with other essential items like a toothpick, a nail cleaner, and an earwax scoop.

Oh—I’m sorry. Do you find the history of human scraping disgusting? Oh, come now, it’s hardly unusual. As long as there have been humans, we have loved to qopchedy qokedydy qokoloky qokeedy qokedy shedy our filthy bits.

That is to say, humans are just that way. An earwax scoop, a nose-picking device, all the better to qopchedy qom‑lith.

Excuse me. I can’t help spewing gibberish these days. See what I’ve become? And all because I just know they’re watching every word I write.

I am talking about my scrapers. They hang on my every word, and I have learned that you cannot be too careful.

Qokoloky kav‑elthri!

I pay a company a princely sum of kolokys every year to host my website. They offer a handy app that allows me to log in from my phone so I can edit blog posts and webpages on the fly. One feature of that app is the ability to peruse my website analytics. About a year ago, I noticed that my monthly website visits had shot through the roof, especially on days when I posted something new on my blog. Prior to this, I maybe got 25 visitors a day.

Now, on a day when I drop some hot juicy content, such as my post entitled, “My Book on the Signers of the Declaration of Independence is $2.99 This Weekend!” or “Here is a Photo of Some Blueberries I Just Picked Off a Shrub in My Yard. No, Really!” I’ll log 400 visits in a 24-hour period.

Four hundred visits, from four hundred different IP addresses.

Let me cut to the chase here with a statement that may strike my SleuthSayers audience—you folks, who absolutely love me to pieces—as nutty, batty, and possibly dotty: I, Joe D’Agnese, am not that interesting.

Scrapey, scrapey, scrape, says the little red flag.

I mean, seriously. What the qokedydy is going on here?

There is no reason 400 individual, breathing humans on the planet would be interested in my publisher’s $2.99 weekend ebook sale or my sweet, juicy berries. Or, for that matter, photos of my dog wearing a bowtie, or my occasional announcements of articles appearing here on SleuthSayers.

Then I noticed that many of these visits were coming from one place in the world: China. Some days, my only visitors are from China. Currently, China is my No. 1 visiting nation with 1,778 visits in the last month. The USA, where I was born and am a citizen, is No. 2, with 615 visits. No way to sugar coat this: I am kind of a big deal in China.

I briefly thought about installing a service such as Cloudflare that allow website owners to block traffic on a nation-by-nation basis. What if malicious actors were trying to steal personal information from my website? Yikes! After all, I often do write wacky stories about my forebears.

Then, I did a Zoom chat with that friend of mine who runs an up-and-coming book review site. Relax, he told me, those are just bots scraping your content to train AI on your text.

Whether performed by bots or ancient humans, scraping is disgusting. Compared to this, training AI on pirated works downloaded off crappy free-book websites comes off as the genteel way to steal.

“Here,” my friend said, “lemme show you something.”

He shared his screen and proceeded to show me his Cloudflare. (Not a euphemism, I assure you.) Judging from the line graph I ogled, sometime in 2024, the number of visitors to his site quadrupled, quintupled, sextupled. When he installed Cloudflare and blocked Russia, China, and a bunch of other nations, guess what? The numbers kept climbing. Only this time, the visitors were coming from nations such as Canada, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

Problem fixed? I innocently opined.

“Nah,” he said, “they’re just using VPNs that make it look like they’re coming from ‘safe’ countries.”

My friend chuckles about this these days. He’s resigned to the fact that the more he shares excellent English prose in the form of book reviews, the more it will be greedily scraped by legions of bots who are feeding an insatiable desire to build machines that will replace us all and wreak havoc around the planet.

A contact at a national lab tells me that due to U.S. budget cuts, he and his superiors have had to lay off tons of older scientists studying the mitigation of climate change. In their place, they have hired newer, younger, less expensive engineers who know (something) about halting the influx of AI-inserted malicious code that they are discovering in their critical government systems.

Everyday, my engineer friend says he is pulling his hair out, muttering to the heavens, “Okytarl zexirami šol‑drih!”

Because he has never seen anything so terrifying. His last job was a cakewalk compared to this. And he led a medical supply firm during COVID.

I have begun to think that AI is a thing no one asked for (except cheapskates) and a growing problem no one knows how to solve. Pick your metaphor: A genie let out of a bottle. A new Pandora’s box.

I read a special AI issue of Wired magazine cover-to-cover. One thing I learned in those pages has stuck with me:

Wildlife biologists had trained an AI to mimic sounds uttered by marine mammals. They were quite certain the AI was communicating with said cetaceans but the program was incapable of explaining to humans what they were all gabbing about.

Dolphin: If I eat another minnow, I am, like, totally going to barf.

Bot: Have you considered human flesh?

That magazine hit newsstands in 2023, so far back in time that Sam Altman actually acquiesced to a cover photo shoot. Since then, I have read a metric shedy-ton more, as I am sure you have. When the “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton left his job at Google in order to warn the world of the dangers of AI, I was appalled that no journalist had bothered to ask him the critical question: “Why are you so qokedy scared?”

I finally found the answer in a MIT Technology Review article:

As their name suggests, large language models are made from massive neural networks with vast numbers of connections. But they are tiny compared with the brain. “Our brains have 100 trillion connections,” says Hinton. “Large language models have up to half a trillion, a trillion at most. Yet GPT-4 knows hundreds of times more than any one person does. So maybe it’s actually got a much better learning algorithm than us.”

Oh, you might be tempted to say, so it just works fast. I knew that already, bro

But that too was back in 2023, when Hinton could be written off as an academic who didn’t quite fit the Silicon Valley mold. That was the year one of my British software developer friends wrote me a delightful screed in which he posited that Hinton was, ahem, “a bit of a dick.”

Then Hinton went and won the Nobel Prize, which meant more people wanted to talk to him. In podcast interview after podcast interview (here and here) Hinton reiterated that AI intelligence may cause harm in two different ways: humans will exploit it to bad ends (that’s already happening) or AI will grow so intelligent it will pursue its own goals and ignore the fact that it is unwittingly annihilating us. Other thinkers such as Eliezer Yudkowsky have made the same assertion.

To show you what a quozexirami I am, I listened to all three of these interviews twice, and for weeks after I hid under the covers. Then, by chance, I re-read an old post by writer Josh Stallings over at the 7 Criminal Minds blog.

You guys know Josh? He’s a good egg, or so his prose leads me to believe. He’s also smart. We don’t need no stinking robots to come kill us, he says in this post. We’re doing a good job of killing ourselves—and each other—on our own.

Despite this wisdom, Hinton’s words haunted me for a long time. In one of those three podcasts I linked to above—I think it’s the one with Jon Stewart—Hinton opined that the U.S. was currently ahead in the realm of AI but malicious actors on the world stage would eventually gain the upper hand.

Why? Stewart asked.

Well, Hinton said, what else can you expect if you defund scientific research?

Yes! Yes! I screamed into my phone. And don’t forget all those malicious international bots being exquisitely trained on my muscular, lean, deathless prose!

One day I visited a website that I use to distribute some of my stories. You know how this works, don’t you? Your story is picked as a finalist for some award. You make the story available free online so readers who are likely to vote can read it for free. Over the years I have shared all my Derringer finalists this way, typically using a service called BookFunnel, which distributes PDFs and ebooks. Imagine my surprise when I learn that years after I offered these stories on my blog, on LinkedIn, or on this very website, those stories were being downloaded, sometimes to the tune of 30 or 40 a month. I got suspicious. I immediately searched all the posts and articles—on my site and elsewhere where I’d made these offers, and deleted the links. I also deleted the original file from BF’s library. (I should have done this when the offer period ended, but I was busy crafting exquisitely deathless prose, see above.)

Guess what?

After I deleted the links, and deleted the file, one of those stories is still being downloaded, despite the fact that the site’s friendly customer service reps insist that this isn’t possible.

Word to the wise: If you are about to share a finalist short story in this fashion, my current advice is to delete that pdf or ePub file when the awards are announced. Hopefully this will happen in so quick a timeframe that they won’t have found it.

I dunno, maybe we should stop caring who scrapes our work? At least the machines are feasting on a banquet of excellence. Admitting this means that we have now reached the “It Is Futile to Resist” stage. As science fiction writer Hugh Howey wrote ages ago, any writing you protect during your lifetime will inevitably train the bots when it enters the public domain. So why fight?

Howey is an interesting thinker. He says he believes that AI does indeed promise great things for humanity. Advances in science and education. Hinton believes the same. But...

In one of his recent posts, Howey explains reasons why AI will not reach its potential. After years of rapid development, the pace of stellar gains is slowing. Investors are wary. And it all is beginning to feel like a giant bubble after all. (Before I get sangfroid all over myself, I recommend you read the post for yourself, and watch the video he shares if you have the time.) I worry that am misquoting him.

Moreover, he adds, it does not matter how many excellent ideas our AI agents dream up…for world peace, for a cancer-free world, for the ethnical advancement of technology, or superb ways to reverse climate disaster. The programs will spell out exactly what we should do, but we will ignore it. We will still manage to botch the qokeedy out of it.

The fault, dear BrutusX10, is not in the bots, but in ourselves.

It’s enough to make me splutter and…qopchedy qokedydy qokoloky qokeedy qokedy shedy…

Oh. About that: Back in 1912, a book dealer “bought” a mysterious book from an Italian library written in a supposed secret code. Known today as the Voynich Manuscript, it resides at the Beinecke Library at Yale. For more than a century codebreakers have tried to unlock its secret language, and failed. (I ghost-wrote a book with a computer scientist who was convinced the Voynich was a hoax concocted by a 15^th-century con man to bilk Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II out of a fortune. My colleague’s theory is hotly debated.)

The Voynich remains an example of a supposedly unbreakable code. If it is a real code, and we ever learn to decode it, goes the theory, we might be able to design and make super-powerful computer security passwords even more qopchedian. Possibly the most impregnable, qopchedian codes the universe has ever seen.

Voynichese apparently conforms to the stylistic structure of real language, but it is not English. And these days, I am thinking seriously of publishing a ceaseless stream of blog posts on my website written only in Voynichese. Let the machines drive themselves crazy with Renaissance nonsense. Will it stop the people and things ripping me off? No, but it will make me feel like the most qokolokydyne short story writer the world has ever known. Have a frabjous day.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

— Joe

josephdagnese.com

How Presidents Talk

My father, the Big Band man, had a record in his collection that I heard quite a bit growing up. His 1971 album featured three pieces by the composer Aaron Copland, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra: Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring, and Lincoln Portrait.

Lincoln Portrait is a fifteen-minute, music and spoken-word piece that is, as of this writing, eighty-four years old. Tradition calls for actors and other individuals of prominence to read the 400-word text. The recording I heard was performed by the actor Henry Fonda, who played the president in Young Mr. Lincoln and who subsequently ruined all other narrators for me. When I recently queued up Lincoln Portrait read by Darth Vader James Earl Jones on my phone, I expected great things. But no—Jones was too over the top. I think I caught him enunciating a comma.

Copland composed Portrait in 1942 when asked by the Russian-American composer Andre Kostelanetz to create a work that would celebrate a prominent American. World War II was on, and creative people of all types were being pressed into service to create art that would keep American minds on task. Copland suggested Whitman, but Jerome Kern had already picked Twain. Kostelanetz suggested Copland choose someone else—a statesman, not a writer. “[A]ny personality that is to be expressed with music should have some kind of humane aspect,” Copland would later tell an interviewer, “which is precisely what attracted me to Lincoln.”

As a subject, Lincoln was the perfect figure for that time, and always. Composers well before Copland had penned musical tributes to the gangly lawyer from Springfield. From the early part of the 20th century politicians of every stripe trotted him out, regardless of their persuasion. Progressives, leftists, radicals, Republicans and Democrats alike. FDR invoked him, suggesting that the Great Emancipator would have embraced the New Deal.

Copland had seen people suffer during the Depression; he was drawn to the plight of workers and the ideology of Communism, of all things, which would haunt his career after the war. But he, like others, believed Lincoln spoke for the common man (sans fanfare), the downtrodden, the masses. The words he selected from Lincoln’s writing hammered home principles that everyone who lived on the continent in that era had presumably agreed to embrace: freedom and democracy.

The historian Pauline Maier, in her book, American Scripture, discusses this at length. Lincoln’s genius was taking a forgotten document written in 1776 and linking it to a troubled moment in the mid 1800s, enshrining it as the nation’s critical founding document. The Constitution was the law of the land, but the Declaration was gospel. Lincoln had a flair for making political language sound sacrosanct.

In my thirties, I had a coach who loved smashing icons. He hated Democrats mostly, but for a born-and-bred Kentuckian he took strange aim at Lincoln. “You know,” he said once during a break in our sparring, “there is no evidence that he ever read a book.”

Bullshit, I thought then, and I stand by that today. Even before I knew about the sources he had drawn upon for his famous Cooper Union speech in 1860, it was obvious to me that Lincoln had read at least one tome: the King James Bible. Parallelism...chiasmus...he was all over it.

Copland incorporated five Lincoln texts in his Portrait. I’ve heard the piece so many times that I can practically quote them from memory. This week I went back and looked at the originals, in part to see what Copland left out.

In the selections that follow, I am bolding the lines Copland used. Copland did not preserve Lincoln’s underlines, which historians usually render as italics. The narrators of Lincoln Portrait are always given latitude to speak the lines as they see fit. The italics show which words Lincoln probably stressed.

Here’s the first, taken from the Annual Message to Congress, dated December 1, 1862, about a month before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation:

“Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”

You don’t have to go far, even in this selection, to see that its writer has wholly mastered that Biblical tone. When he uses an adverb, he makes it work. Words are not repeated unless they do double duty.

“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose…”

“In giving freedom…we assure freedom…”

He could have ended the graf with “and God must bless forever,” but then it would not so nicely echo “will forever applaud.” Ask yourself: is it a politician who has commanded our attention—or a preacher?

“fiery trial…”

“Plain, peaceful, generous, just…”

“Will light us down…”

Gotta admit, Coach: this is damn fine writing from a fellow who never cracked a book. We should all be so illiterate.

Copland’s second quote is taken from earlier in this very same message to Congress:

“The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

I love this:

“quiet past…stormy present…”

“….is new, think anew, act anew.”

I have always liked the use of the word disenthrall in this sentence, but I needed to research what historians think he was really saying. They read it as tearing ourselves away from a system that we know is no longer working.

Copland’s third textual choice comes from the final debate with Stephen Douglas (October 15, 1858), in which Lincoln framed their senate race—as so many have—as a battle between good and evil, right and wrong. His oft-quoted “a house divided cannot stand” from this speech is paraphrased from the book of Matthew. But that’s not what Copland chose to quote. He went straight for the graf that would find favor with modern listeners:

“It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

Earlier that year, Lincoln had made the same point, with similar phraseology, in another speech. Only then, instead of referring to this paradigm as "the same tyrannical principle," he dubbed it "the same old serpent."

A while back I learned that when Apple’s founder Steve Jobs was drafting a speech, for weeks he would tap out and shoot short emails to himself with a flurry of sentences and ideas that occurred to him. Lincoln did the same: he grabbed a sheet of paper and wrote short notes to himself. The three-line scrap that follows was found among his personal effects. He never inserted it into a speech, and his secretaries were unable to shed much light on their origin or intended use. Copland works it in as his third quote. And by now, coming after the tyrannical principle line above, two underlined words take on enlarged meanings. Again, these are Lincoln’s italics.

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

Copland ends with the final 71 words of the Gettysburg address. I’ll spare you the lines. You can probably hear them in your soul.

Of the people, by the people, for the people.

He spoke those words on a battlefield after a far more famous orator intoned his way through a two-hour speech. Lincoln rose, spoke for two minutes, and later confided to friends that he had utterly botched it. “It is a flat failure,” he told his bodyguard.

Well, sure: what can we expect from such a bookless wonder?

During the Portrait’s premieres in 1942, Kostelanetz observed that the piece was received differently depending on the news of the day. When newspapers were filled with news of American victories abroad, thunderous applause. When the news was somber, audiences left hushed, perhaps struck by the long road ahead and the work democracy demands of us. And for a few years after World War II, Copland endured his own fiery trials at the hands of McCarthy.

And yes, I suppose I understand what Coach was getting at…maybe. Lincoln was no saint. Go back and read some of the fourth debate with Douglas. For the first half of the speech, he’s playing African Americans for laughs, bending over backward to reassure his audience that he doesn’t really think a black person will ever be the equal of a white person. Once he gets them on his side, he hammers home that if he had his druthers, he would change this one little thing about American life. But it’s an ugly windup.

But then, at Gettysburg, he again rescued that one word, equal, from a document many of his colleagues had either forgotten, maligned, or had willfully misremembered, insisting that we regard this dirty, five-letter word as the prime directive of the American experiment. One can see why historians find it hard to disenthrall themselves from his words and actions, even today. They probably never will.

A while back, when she spoke at the Abraham Lincoln Association in Springfield, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told her audience:

“It’s not just that he was a great president, that he won the war, ended slavery, and saved the Union. It was his kindness, his sensitivity, his empathy, his willingness to let those past resentments go. I had the feeling that he had the normal human emotions of envy and anger and jealousy, but somehow he would say, ‘You have to damp them down because they’ll fester if you allow them inside. They’ll poison you.’”

She spoke those words in 2018. She was describing an imperfect human being who was, if nothing else, a well-read, mature adult. Even in 2018, the thought of a president who actively worked to shun resentment must have seemed quaint to her audience of Lincoln admirers in Springfield.

Each year around this time I am reminded that the US has bundled Lincoln and Washington's birthdays (February 12th and 22nd, respectively) into one collective Presidents' Day. I understand the reasons for this choice, but just as Copland declined to compose a piece about Washington, thinking him too stiff and formal, I am drawn still to the rail-splitter.

If nothing else, family lore compels me. On the occasion of her naturalization, I am told, my Italian-born grandmother was asked to name the 16th US President.

"Ling-a-ling," she replied in the accent that she would carry for the rest of her days.

By then, she was a married woman, a homeowner, a taxpayer, and the mother of three (young) American citizens. Her examiner granted her citizenship, or I suppose I would not be writing these words.

My fellow writers, we cannot escape history. A strangely comforting thought that one clings to in dark hours.

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See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com