the Scott Stein

As if there weren't reason enough to be sickened by both major political parties, we have George Allen, a Republican from Virginia, and Jim Webb, his Democratic challenger. The stupidity of the Allen-Webb Senate race has escalated in recent days beyond the merely stupid. Beyond even the supremely stupid. It now officially qualifies as astronomically moronic.

During the campaign, Allen was accused of having said "nigger" a couple of decades ago, or something.

Then "Allen's campaign accused Webb, a former Navy secretary of 'demeaning women' and 'dehumanizing women, men and even children' through his fiction writings." Yes, a novel is being used as evidence against the character of the politician who wrote it.

In response, "[t]he Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee sent out a news release listing sexual passages in books by [Lynne] Cheney and other GOP conservatives, including Dick Cheney's former chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich [...] The DSCC said Cheney's books featured brothels and attempted rape."

The good news is that each side can say that the other side started it. Just like five-year-olds.


Source: CNN. If you read the article, you'll see that, instead of drawing a clear distinction between the demands of a work of fiction and the views of its writer, Webb takes the road we'd expect a politician to take.

Note: There should be a comma after "Navy secretary" in the CNN quote in paragraph two above. Just saying.

There are several interesting pieces about the publishing business and literature posted on the Opinion page at ENC Press (the publisher of my forthcoming novel Mean Martin Manning). I'll link here to two in particular:

WHAT IS A PUBLISHER? FOR THAT MATTER, WHAT IS A BOOK?
Gregory Alexander
The book of the future could be made out of artichokes and underwear — or summoned out of thin air by a wave of the hand. But as long as it’s edited, it’s still a book.

A FEW LESSONS LEARNED FROM PUBLISHING IN AMERICA
Olga Gardner Galvin
[Mainstream publishers] are hoping for the next John Grisham or the next J. K. Rowling, not the first you.

Frank Wilson's Books, Inq. led me to HowManyOfMe.com, which supposedly tells you how many people share your name. It says that there are 115 Scott Steins in the United States. I believe that there are far more than that, since I know of several other Scott Steins. My doctor has another patient named Scott Stein, and I don't exactly live in a huge city. Not that I have any evidence, but I doubt 115 is correct. There might be that many just in the New York area. That is, after all, why I named this blog "the Scott Stein" and used the tagline, "There are lots of Scott Steins out there, but this is the Scott Stein, the one you're looking for." Or 115 could be correct. Maybe I overestimate the size of the Jewish population.

Anyway, back in 2000 when my first novel Lost was coming out and I was promoting it like crazy, the preponderance of Scott Steins and a writer's ego compelled me to write an essay called "I'm Number One," which originally appeared on my webzine When Falls the Coliseum. I am happy to report that after an absence from the top spot for a couple of years, I am once again number one where it counts (with my personal Drexel home page). Currently, my main competition includes another writer, a singer-songwriter, and some other people unfortunate enough to share my name. Here's the original essay:

I'm Number One!

I had a Twilight Zone experience the other day. My inbox contained a message from Scott Stein. I didn’t remember sending myself an e-mail, but it wouldn’t have been the first time, so I wasn’t frightened. Then I read the message. It said, “Hello. I am also Scott Stein.” It was signed, “Scott Stein, another author.”

A writer’s needy ego aside, I had even before this no delusions of the uniqueness of my name. There are a lot of us. I don’t envy people trying to find me in a phone book. And since you can’t throw a stone in most major cities without hitting a Jewish writer (not that you should be throwing stones at Jews or writers), it should not have been a shock that someone out there also pursuing the literary arts had my name. The other Scott Stein, it turns out, is primarily a playwright, and received a nice review in the San Diego Tribune for a recent effort. We exchanged cyber-pleasantries and both acknowledged that it was weird to find someone with the same name, then got on with our lives.

Now, if we were circus clowns, you might say that having the same name is professionally meaningless. Who knows their names anyway? Name recognition is important in other fields, but even professional athletes have it easier than writers do. There’s a young basketball player named Michael Jordan. Unfortunately for his bank account, no one is confusing him with the original. Pretty much everyone in the world knows what the MJ looks like. But we two Scott Steins are writers. Readers on the Web or in bookstores, not knowing much about us or what we look like, generally search for our name. Someone recommends a writer by saying, “You’d like Scott Stein’s new book … what is it called? Oh, well, just ask for his new book. They’ll find it for you.”

Great. You go into a store or search on amazon.com because a trusted friend told you how much fun Scott Stein’s writing is, and end up buying the new book by some other Scott Stein, the one about gardening. This does my own career very little good. Plus, you don’t have a garden. No one wins.

As the animated banner shouts to the world at the top of this page, my first novel is now available. In case you couldn’t tell, I have put lots of energy into building name recognition and an audience for Scott Stein. Not the other Scott Steins, but this one. This isn’t vain posturing or existential crisis (oh, poor me, I am not unique). This is real. If there are other Scott Steins out there feeding from the trough I am working each week to fill (don’t ask where that metaphor came from), it could cause problems. The kind of problems that could lead to headaches. No one likes headaches.

After a swig of Tylenol, I bravely ventured back on the computer. There were a lot of Scott Steins, it was true. Was a pen name necessary? I needed to know where I ranked. Trembling-with-fear fingers typed S-c-o-t-t S-t-e-i-n into google.com’s search. As had been the case a few months ago, I was expecting famous author Gertrude Stein and game show host Ben Stein to top the listing, even though they each only shared half my name. I was hoping for page two, or three.

I was number one! According to google, my new favorite search engine, Scott Stein, this one, is first. This was better than a Grammy. They give those to practically anyone. But google is serious business. And I was number one. Flush with my initial success, I checked other search engines. A toiletries marketing vice president somewhere had me beat on altavista.com, but I was a respectable number five, with no other writers ahead. Excite.com, on the other hand, did not list me for several pages. I think their programming is faulty.

This is a tale with a feel-good ending and a lesson. What I learned from all this is that it doesn’t matter what your name is, as long as you’re not the other Michael Jordan. Or Albert Einstein, Jr. Or, poor soul, some Neil Armstrong who not only didn’t walk on the moon but doesn’t have cable. Sharing names isn’t too bad, as long as the Scott Stein people are looking for is me. That is what I learned. That, and google.com is a marvel of technology unrivaled on the planet Earth.

In an insightful post today about a stage production of Crime and Punishment, Frank Wilson writes:

Why do people in the arts think something has to be relevant to, of all things, the day's headlines? Dostoyevksy isn't relevant. He's perennial. As the play itself notes, human nature hasn't changed, doesn't change, isn't about to change.

Advice to artists: Turn off the news. Cancel your subscription to the newspaper. Relish human character for its own sake in all its myriad variety.

In a separate post yesterday, Wilson linked to Terry Treachout's review of Alan Rickman's "My Name Is Rachel Corrie." Treachout's head and subhead sum it up nicely: "Bulldozed by Naiveté: Terror advocate dies in accident. Atrocious drama ensues."

I haven't seen the Rickman play and don't plan to, but I generally agree with Wilson and Treachout that politics makes for bad art. Wilson's words excerpted above are particularly on target. I've been telling students of fiction writing the same thing for years. Dramatic art is about story, and character, and human nature. Steven Pinker has some interesting things to say about this in his book The Blank Slate, which refers to a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer as an example of literature showing us the truth of human behavior. Crime and Punishment is perennial because of its exploration of human nature that is irrelevant to a particular era, not because it attempted to be relevant to its own time, even if it is full of culturally specific references.

This presents a challenge to writers, like me, whose work is largely satirical. If you read older satire and comedy, even if it was the most highly regarded humor writing of its time, you find that it is rarely perennial. To me, Shakespeare's comedies clearly do not hold up as well as the tragedies. Even work from only 40 years ago often does not hold up. Part of the problem is that humor--satire in particular--is connected to time and place. When the writer Ha Jin came to speak at Drexel, a colleague introducing us told him that I write satire. Ha Jin said that he wasn't comfortable enough with American culture--though he'd been here for many years--to write satire. He thought that writing satire required a keen understanding of your own culture. To the extent that Ha Jin is correct about this, satire is less likely to translate well to other times and places and cultures, less likely to be perennial. Memes in humor might have a harder time surviving than memes in drama and straight fiction, just as straight fiction that depends on current events or political winds is not likely to last as long as Crime and Punishment. Jokes, in general, depend to some degree on surprise and audience expectations and have short shelf lives.

If the satire is aimed at human nature and behavior, it might have more chance of lasting. Satire is always making a comment, sometimes political or ideological, and that comment may be relevant to some place or time in a way that limits the satire's survival. Go back and watch old comedies, stand-up routines, even episodes of The Simpsons or South Park from only a decade ago, and you will see how much of the content depends on time and place and specific knowledge. What are the chances that an episode of South Park will be funny a hundred years from now? Will people even understand it?

To the extent that satire uses that time and place as a device for getting at something permanent--human nature, power's corrupting influence--it might have some chance of lasting. For example, "Harrison Bergeron," a short satirical story by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., exaggerates to make a point. It clearly is making a comment, a rather specific one, with political ramifications and relevant to its times. But the comment is also intimately connected with human nature, with large questions that go beyond the political moment. Whether this will help it survive is anyone's guess.

In an Entertainment Weekly interview, actor George Clooney said that he wasn't running for office, but that if he did rule the world, "...we'd put more value on vacation, travel, cultural diversity, and education." More value on cultural diversity? More. Wow. That would be a lot, I guess. And of course, what we really need are political leaders concerning themselves with our vacation and travel plans, since they are so good at handling all of their other duties. Okay, maybe he doesn't mean that he'd be in charge of making the hotel reservations. What Clooney probably means here is that he would feel free to interfere with the economy and make business regulations as he and his experts saw fit, to give us all more vacation days and make it easier to travel, somehow. It's a good thing that lofty ideas like these and politicians messing with the economy and business never lead to unintended consequences. What a shame that you're sticking to that movie career, George, instead of ruling the world. Because I could not only use more vacation time, but a sailboat, and maybe an airplane. It's a Hollywood fantasy concept, "ruling the world." If Clooney ruled the world--if anyone did, or could, no matter how qualified they might be, how good their intentions were, whether your choice or mine--what a mess we'd be in.

It's been a couple of weeks since I've posted anything at all, let alone anything of substance. Where the hell have I been, you ask? Just dealing with the challenge that many bloggers face--time.

I started this blog because I thought it would be fun and because I wanted an outlet for my writing that didn't fit a form that could be submitted for more formal publication. And I wanted to rebuild an audience for my writing--for several years, before nearly anyone was using the word "blog," I ran the (now resting peacefully) online magazine When Falls the Coliseum: a journal of American culture (or lack thereof), which I founded and which at its peak had more than 25 regular writers from across the nation and thousands of readers (one highlight included being profiled by New York magazine's Surf Report). Though we didn't have blog technology, we posted reader responses and arguments following articles much as blogs do today.

Editing the articles, writing my own pieces, operating the site, posting all of the material, and participating in the arguments with readers all demanded lots of time. A few years ago, I realized that if I devoted the time to running an online magazine and advancing in my teaching career, I'd have no hope of writing novels. Writing novels was more important to me than arguing with strangers online all day. Something had to give. So When Falls... had to go (though before it did, we managed to put together a "best of" book). I started this blog, the Scott Stein, this past summer, as I said above, because in part I missed the outlet that When Falls... had given me. I named this blog after myself to avoid all temptation to turn it into a journal that would make me an unpaid full-time editor again. I had no ambitions for the blog beyond my own scribblings.

Part of the problem, though, is that I am a writer, and I decided that mine was not to be primarily a list-and-link blog. I really enjoy Frank Wilson's Books, Inq. and visit many other such blogs, like Instapundit.com, and I do sometimes post a one-liner with a link to something interesting. But I am a writer, and I want to write. I want readers who enjoy reading my writing, not who visit me to see if I found anything interesting that someone else wrote. (And I learned that finding interesting stuff all day long--a service I value highly--is hard work, and I couldn't keep up.) I don't just--can't, really--dash off most of my blog entries. I revise them several times and make corrections even after they're posted.

I started posting almost every day, or at least a few times a week, because it was summer and I'm a college professor and wasn't teaching in the summer. Then I slowed down to one post a week, or two, with the idea that each would have substance and be worth reading. But now the academic year is in full swing. I just collected 60 freshman papers that require reading and grading. And I have lectures to prepare. And Powerpoint slideshows to create for my department. On top of this, I have a new novel, Mean Martin Manning, coming out in February, and I'm designing four separate Web sites to promote the book. Two of the book's characters will have their own blogs and will be "visiting" other people's blogs to leave comments. I'll be posting about it on the Scott Stein to give you all the details, but I think it's unlike any other book promotion effort out there. Obviously, blogging as fictional characters will compete with the time to blog as myself. All of this is in addition to other writer-blogger conflicts, like whether I should use an idea I have for a blog entry, or whether I should develop it as an essay and try to get it published elsewhere. And, of course, whenever I start writing a new novel, everything else on the priority list slips one position.

Take heart, though. This blog isn't going anywhere--I will continue to write for the Scott Stein regularly, with the goal of one real entry each week. Still, if a couple of weeks go by without substantial new content, now you'll know that it isn't because I've given up on it or that I'm on a bender in a motel somewhere. More likely, I've just got papers to grade or fictional characters whose blogs demand attention.

There's probably a really good quote about time that would end this piece perfectly, but I don't have the time to look it up.