Crazy Stable

Not one but two book proposals lurk on my computer, waiting to be tweaked and submitted to an (as-yet-to-be-identified) agent. Both books will rock, I believe. But today, leafing through The New York Review of Books, I had a ghastly crisis of confidence--prompted, not by their high-end reviews, but by those numbingly awful vanity press ads. You've seen them: cheesy two-page spreads from Vantage or XLibris "publicizing" their "authors" with blurbs so execrable they call to mind H.L. Mencken's description of the prose of Warren G. Harding:

It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.

These books, created at their unloved authors' expense, hew to a few recurring themes: Blowhard autobiographies. Manuals for saving the world. Religious conversion stories. Heartwarming tales of a hero cat/dog/ferret who saved the author or his child from the abyss. Romans à clef by angry survivors of modern-day conflicts. Bizarre historical novels, usually with a sci-fi or fantasy twist. It's an ocean of quirky, cranky bilge. Amusing myself, I am suddenly horror-struck: One of my ideas is explicitly Christian, the other is a historical novel.

Oh God! What if my book proposals sound like one of these pitiful vanity blurbs?

Now I can't be stopped; I torment myself with visions of a desperate future self, rejected countless times, convinced that digital really has made self-publishing a whole different world now, and blowing the Child's college savings. Intellectuals leafing through The New York Review of Books will pause, between lapping up a post-mortem appreciation of Christopher Hitchens and sighing over a roundup of tomes on post-Obama America, to guffaw at my opus; I will rot in obscurity, with the cranks, the ferret-biographers, the semi-literate zealots, all the poor sods who had a dollar and a dream.

I had to snap out of it, before I opened folders and trashed the beginnings of one hell of a good novel and an intriguing spiritual memoir. Put anything in the XLibris template, I realized, and it sounds like insane crap. To give this theory a whirl, here are three potential "best-sellers" from XLibris, where you can "write your own success."

The tragically unique story of Stingo and Yetta's big pink house. Who is the mysterious Sophie and what is her secret? How will she make her Choice? Deep in the chasms of history lie the answers, where love and danger are common-place and haunt the lovers of today. You will never forget the psychologicle tension of this unforgettable masterpiece.

 A manifesto for eaters! Find the truth behind the ugly rumors and learn how to eat real food, mostly plants, not too much, for health forever! You will find the way to absorb nutrients for a more enlightened era of health and human enlightenment with this scientific revelation of nutritionism gone wild.

Can young Irishman Steven go to encounter for about the one-millionth time the reality of experience, and can he forge within his soul the uncreated consciousness of his race? This very brilliant fictional story will supply the answer, or at least asks the questions.

ORDER NOW!

Top: Edward Gorey, The Unstrung Harp

Howard Carter and team break open the tomb of TuthankhamenThings have been too deep for blogging lately.

On September 2, we "celebrated" the twenty-fifth anniversary of closing on the Crazy Stable. Things are not, alas, much advanced beyond the last big anniversary.  The next landmark looms on October 1: A quarter-century of living under this roof. (Well, okay, under the roof we had torn off and replaced with this roof.)

Overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, I chose my time-honored head-clearer: Throwing stuff out. And what stuff! I have lately cracked open several Rubbermaid storage bins that lay virtually untouched since my mother moved in circa 1987. The trigger was getting a big Ikea cabinet in the pantry--a job we'd postponed for, um, 25 years.

Brooklyn Museum, Luce Center for American ArtSomehow, the interior dimensions of this cabinet had expanded in my mind. Like a Tardis, it was vastly bigger on the inside. Like the Luce Center at the Brooklyn Museum, it would hold and display the accumulated petty-bourgeois treasures of two lifetimes, mine and my mother's. The cut glass, the silver, the ceramics that would be unearthed from their attic exile and displayed!

Instead, the longed-for cabinet filled up instantly with a few big pieces and a lot of pseudo-Tupperware. (I spent weeks rearranging the canned goods, however.) This left tons of stuff with no home except our already tchotchke-crammed surfaces. Frankly, much of the stuff was Mommy's taste, not mine, and bags of it will be on sale this Saturday for the World's Craziest Porch Sale here. Mom's been gone a decade now--it's time.

But other stuff...ah, ouch, agony of decision. Help me out here. What do I do with:

* The glass strawberry we bought on one of our rainy-day gift shop excursions in the Poconos when I was little?

* Two antique crucifixes, both broken beyond repair? (Note to crucifix-makers: The arms are clearly a weak spot.)

* An assortment of silver serving pieces, when I hate to polish silver--and hear my mom's harsh judgment about my polishing neglect every time I take them out of storage?

* Several pickle dishes, when we never really serve pickles? (They do, however, work for Mallomars.)

* Half-a-dozen demitasse cups, when we don't drink espresso?

Except for the Mallomar dish and the strawberry (which brings back the smell of deerskin moccasins and cedar trinket boxes), all of the above may be available on Saturday at shockingly low prices. But I'm especially conflicted about this Belleek sugar-creamer set. 

Not only do we have 3 other sugar-creamer sets...this one brings back Irish Mother Belleek-o-phobia. That's a syndrome triggered by seeing the feather-light, translucent, pricey porcelain, marked by trembling, flushing, and barking loudly, "WATCH OUT for the Belleek! Do you know how delicate that is? That belonged to your grandmother, don't you be the one to break it!" I love this set, really; but if I screech at my family about breaking Belleek, it will have turned into the Horcrux and I into Voldemom.

Maybe I will put it back into its bubble-wrap and just take it out for St. Paddy's Day, with soda bread and Irish tea. Maybe I will toss it, Zorba-like, in a declaration of independence from maternal/material things. Maybe you can pick it up on Saturday...carefully, dammit!