Literary Weirdness
If Baltimore’s art tradition leans to the strange and experimental, much of the same can be said of its literary scene. Maybe Edgar Allen Poe left some sort of secret curse? Baltimore’s beloved H.L. Mencken himself said in a 1948 interview that Baltimore “…delights in ugliness for its own sake.” So how is it that a city actually celebrates the bizarre, even the grotesque? The answer is they have fun making weird the perfect excuse to party. Baltimore likes to think of its literary scene as the equivalent of a bunch of drunks sitting around a bar swapping stories. Everything is fair game and the more seedy and lurid the details the better. Just take some of the article titles from Baltimore’s award winning zine Smile, hon. You’re in Baltimore. Their most recent issue features such stories as “Three Cheerleaders Take Out the Trash” and “Banana Gone Mad.” As mentioned in a 2009 article in Utne Reader, Baltimore has become a magnet of the wonderfully weird. Writer Danielle Maestretti says in her article that, “In fact, the area’s thriving independent literary scene should serve as an inspiration to anyone, in any city, who feels the creative slump of the economic recession and fears there’s little room for imagination or innovation.” And in recent years Baltimore’s imagination has spawned such literary notables as Anne Tyler, Russell Baker and Laura Lippman, but its underground scene continues to be where the magic is. Bookstores such as Atomic Books attract fantasy writers like the smell of pot attracted hippies to Haight and Ashbury. Poetry readings are standing room only. New organizations and events like the Citylit Project, the Baltimore Book Festival and Artscape host crowds more on par with a drum ‘n’ bass rave than the refined cattle lines at BookExpo America. For ongoing information about Baltimore’s art and literary events, contact the editors at Baltimore’s City Paper or check out the “Art-Full Life.” blog at CharmCityCurrent.com.
Advertisments
Feature
Waiting for my Publishing Godot (Part Two)…“Attack of the Chair Man”
Nothing in publishing follows a predictable path, so why should my unraveling be any different? My unraveling…yes, where should I start? I think with these sensitive words that a dear friend recently told me. He said, and I quote, “You’re like a boxer who’s getting beaten to hell and just when the bell rings, a disgruntled fan smashes him over the head with a chair — ha ha ha!” Friends can be so comforting.But, don’t let the Corona-induced words of my flip collared, trust-a-farian friend fool you. This is an optimistic article…really, you’ll see. But for now it’s perfectly fine to read it like driving by a guy in a suit who’s trying to change a tire in the rain. You feel for him and kind of wish you had the guts to stop. But deep inside, you’re thankful you just bought new tires. So read this and feel good about your balanced books and your flawless IT backup system. I’m okay with that. I just want you to know that even in the worst of publishing’s misguided events, good things happen.
Okay, so after my last article (which you can link to here, for anyone who’d like to track back) I continued on my lamenting ways. I’d lie in my bed mulling over the last twenty years. There were the sweaty, arduous book fair hangovers sitting in front of my stack of three paperbacks; and my arm-flailing rush in the 1990s to build content for the Rocket eBook, and then my wild-eyed embracing of CD-ROMs as the obvious vehicle for content delivery. Don’t even ask me about the B&N Espresso bookmaking machine that’ll be in every shopping mall and Airport Detention Center in America. I could whole-heartedly brag about being energetic throughout the whole of my career, but I guess the same could be said of a squirrel that’s about to be squashed by a speeding car.
Aside from energy, what I did have in abundance was bullheaded tenacity backed by an unwavering determination to adapt. Optimism and flexibility always ruled the day, as it should for any independent publisher. I was going to get myself out of my financial mess and figure out how to transition from straight publishing to a mix of services. I wanted to find areas of services where there were predictable outcomes, because as we all know, in publishing there looms that mythical guy with a chair — that strange, mutational beast that probably evolved from moldy yeast somewhere in the champagne region around Milwaukee where Miller beer is brewed. He’d be waiting patiently for me, carefully plotting his time. I dreamed of him running at me…a dreadful, chair-wielding Sasquatch with a NASCAR hat.
So, on with the story of my latest attack. After my night of lamenting, the sun came out and I awoke to my birthday. It was a beautiful blue-skied day and I put all thoughts of evil Chair Man far behind me. Like most of us on our birthdays, we blend our self-indulgent hours switching back and forth between emails and Facebook. We tally up the head-count as the day meanders on…43 “Happy b-day, bro!” messages and counting. Not too shabby for a dude of 49. All in all, I was on top of the world. There was the possibility that one of my books would be picked up by Penguin. Writing assignments and developmental jobs swam around me like so many guppies. It was just a matter of time, I thought — just a matter of having the right kind of net.
And then it happened. The chair! The dreadful beast! Just as I finished the last word on an article due to my editor that day, my computer exploded. I mean it literally exploded. It sounded like a firecracker. Pop! Then pop! Pop! The other three computers in my office flamed and sat smoking like the French and Spanish fleet at Trafalgar. The air smelled electrical. My wife ran in, then a subcontractor working in the other office. We all three huddled in the center of the office yelling with wild, panicked eyes; like the eyes you’d see in a fellow passenger as your plane turns upside down in mid-flight — a mixture of ”Holy crap, we’re going to die!” and “Look at all those beer nuts rolling around with the flight attendant down there!”
I ran for the main cutoff switch like I actually knew where the main cutoff switch was. This ended an ever-expanding string of vulgar expletives, but didn’t solve the problem. I hit every switch I could see then fell back against the IT room floor. I needed a drink — strong drink like whiskey because that’s what publishers drink when the Chair Man strikes…80-proof rye whiskey straight up. When the smoke cleared, it was told to me by an intimidatingly tall, jack-booted gas and electric worker that a massive surge had hit my office. He mumbled something about a downed neutral line. Everything had been fried — from the computers to the scanners to my grandfather’s 1970s radio 8-track player that I used for listening to Orioles games. Even the little red light on the coffee machine blinked, sputtered and faded to black.
For the next three weeks I was shipwrecked with a make-shift office in my in-laws’ art studio. I was a castaway in a pool of white boxes somewhere in the deep mazes of suburban Baltimore, caught in the dreamy haze of two wonderful 83-year old intellectuals. From this dream I drifted in out between rebuilding my business and dodging jokes with reference to Greek mythology or Joyce’s Ulysses; jokes that — of course — any worthwhile English major should know. I shielded myself with the banner of being a “Modernist” now. What would Hunter S. Thompson have to say of Ulysses? — probably a lot more than I could come up with. The days rolled along in a swirl of introspection and brainstorming; some ideas were like sails on a horizon and others — like the possibility of my specializing in the descriptive prose of wine bottle labels or organic shredded wheat, fell like so many self-deprecating bricks on my already sunburned feet. In reality, I loved my little island with the in-laws. It’s there that I found my bearing again.
What is it about total upheaval that removes us from our bodies? We’re not really in control any more. Something else, bigger and beyond us settles in. It leads its own course; half driven by circumstances and half by our own personalities. How we react to these events determines the type of beach we wash up on. We can wake up from our shipwrecked haze with a fist to the gods, or we can find that serene place where there’s a benign openness to a new reality. Business is not a steady course; it’s a journey with storms and deserted beaches. It’s those shipwrecked beaches where we get the biggest strides. There in the solitude of hitting bottom, looking blindly up at the sun, we close our eyes and think; the sun god is not an angry god…it’s just there to wake us up.
So, I transformed my whole business in the bright light of that studio in suburban Baltimore. Through the help of family and a brilliantly IT-adept brother-in-law, I was able to redirect towards producing online training software and establishing an India partnership. And moving ahead, I’ve made a commitment to keep it all in perspective. My business coach Susan Katz told me I can’t be so attached to the outcomes of things, and she’s right…she’s always right. This is something all small publishers should master. Basically, it’s just a wild ride and you know what, I’m not stopping any time soon. Chair Man may chase me, or I may chase Chair Man from the back alleys of Baltimore to the North Atlantic ice flows. But I’m not stopping. I’m not even slowing down.
* * * * *
Emerson John Probst is a freelance writer and publisher in Baltimore, Maryland. He founded G.W. Zouck Publishing and his blog “Expressions from a pure stream” gives weekly inspiration to struggling artists. Emerson is currently writing a collection of humorous stories about creatives trying to survive in the real world titled “Stop Calling Me Dagwood!” He’s hoping to be picked up by any publisher other than himself!
Links – blog: http://gwzouck.com/blog4/
Website: http://gwzouck.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/GW-Zouck-Publishing/116288088417637