PULLING DOWN THE TEMPLE

SAMPSON

This is a confused and scary time.  I mean, more than usual.  There are many theories flying around out there.  Following are the things I think about, often statements by various experts and pundits.

Trump IS the Third Party we keep trying to start.  He only used the Republican machinery as a platform, but doesn’t fit into either of our binary political philosophies because he represents a true paradigm shift, one that happened without us realizing, but which is entrenched and strong.  It is advertising/marketing based.  He simply sold us himself.  Now we have buyer’s remorse.  Especially the Republicans.

We have left the Enlightenment and entered the Marketing world.  

Trump is not a rich man.  His wealth is a fantasy based on selling his name, which is a major source of his income.  His investments depend upon wealth and leisure (casinos, luxury hotels, and golf courses) and admiration of their prestige, which somehow persists in spite of the failures of his individual businesses.  As he sinks deeper into his dementia, his name becomes more valueless.  Now we hear stories about people taking the name off buildings to avoid stigma and possibly physical attack as people become literally dis-illusioned.  He will die impoverished, because his wealth is all moonbeams.  Investigators who have penetrated his secrecy confirm this.

The core of the shift to Trumpish values is also the core of the middle class: shop-owners, importers, inventors, and manufacturers who managed to break the tyranny of those who “own” land and those who are employed to do the work of it, which is the feudal system.  Trump’s idea of how rich people live is laughably nouveau riche, unsophisticated, crass and ugly.  Victorian, African potentate, a child’s idea of palaces.

War is bad for trade.  War is avoided by making written rules, treaties, agreements, and so on.  This gives enormous importance to writing, which leads to lawyers and judges because so much writing is clumsy, impenetrable, or outmoded.  That includes our founding documents, which grew out of the founding documents of the British Empire.  Which came in part from the great importance attributed to the Holy Bible, as though it were written by a deity.  In fact, the Bible is a collection of ancient fragments, the "New" part of it curated in 325 AD by the Council of Nicaea, a committee of old men invested in institutions.  This means it is a masterpiece of ambiguity which can be used to suit the purposes of institutions.

One could say that the church led the way into mercantilism when it began to sell indulgences and flatter kings in order to acquire land.  The law preventing marriage was not about sex — it was to prevent clergy from using their power to create dynasties of descendants.  (Just as Trump is trying to do.)  The feudal system IMHO is biological, land-based, and rooted in human fertility.  (Which connects to the feverish protection of human embryos — not infants.)  It's a default.

So, to review, by moving to the middle class that thrives between national-dimension privileged power and persisting abject wage-slave peonage, we use writing to evade war because war is bad for business.  This means a lot of people need to learn to read and write, and then the majority of people need to honor documents.  (We are not meeting these needs.) When business becomes paralyzed by the kudzu of venture capitalism (interest rates, borrowing as the norm, criminalization of debts, stock market derivatives) then war of some kind becomes inevitable as a way of clearing the deck.  

The covert Third Party of the United States and most of the other European countries is simply Business.  What doesn’t sell, doesn’t matter.  All this scolding about tariffs is an attempt to restore what ecologies once provided: limits, boundaries, things that can be bought for little money in one place and then sold for a lot of money elsewhere.  All this sounds rational and sensible to most people.  If the leadership stays within the assumption, they can rule.  But demand shifts and so does supply.

The trouble with the Third Party of Mercantilism is that it is not facing the Malthusian fact that there are simply too many people.  Not just too many people in one country rather than another, which causes people to migrate, but a population beyond the carrying capacity of the planet.  It becomes a little more clear all the time that this explosion of humans is going to lead to devastation when pollution, infection, and famine of various kinds end fertility.  (It’s not just a matter of amounts of food but also foods that are loaded with molecules like sugar.)  Proportions within populations also matter.  The mass elimination of females in China means there are unmarried soldiers leaning against the wall, waiting for something to happen.  Becoming more willing to MAKE something happen.  This is not intentional but it is probably inevitable, a consequence almost mechanical.

When Steve Bannnon, Trump’s covert self, says he wants to destroy the standing order, he is saying he is willing to bring on the apocalypse because think of the spending!  Think of the money in rebuilding!  (A major part of the USA’s gross national product is always responding to catastrophes like New Orleans.)  Think of the chance to get on the Security Council and learn all the nation's vital secrets!

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump-s-top-guy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist.html

“Lenin,” he [Bannon] answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”  Sounds like Osama bin Laden to me.  Or maybe Sampson pulling down the temple.  No one pays attention.  Picture Bannon leaning on the counter by the light of neon advertising while the bartender considers whether he ought to cut him off.  It’s not hard.  We all know morose old men who feel passed by, who wear jeans to the Oval Office and don’t bother to shave — as though they were still in college.  

Most don’t find a power puppet to market.  Narcissism becomes relevant.  It’s only a concept, of course, and has somewhat drifted from the original Freudian/Greek myth of the beautiful boy who loves his water-reflected image so much that he falls in and drowns.  (That’s the state of the Democrats these days.)  When I was working on the concept in the early 2000’s, it was much simpler than it is now.  Building on the original idea of being self-centered, we’ve expanded to “grandiose narcissism”, “toxic narcissism,” “malevolent narcissism.”  I haven’t heard much about “benign narcissism”.  But there is now talk about “inverted narcissism” which is about people obsessed with having been damaged by narcissists.  Everyone is building sub-categories out of the original category named for one pretty boy.

But that’s another post.  

MARKETING WRITING

Suppose I got tired of producing written content and finally turned to the other half of what the middle-class worshipfully admires as “publishing,” which is the commercial exploitation of content.  I look at that alternative now and then, mostly when the bills mount up.

In the past, sales have been based on the idea of “quality,” dictated by experts, including institutions like the New York Times list of best-sellers (implying that the “cloud” reflex of paying customers is an indicator) or Book-of-the-Month club (without readers understanding that the choices depended as much on unseen contract negotiations as on the quality of the writing).  Today in this huge haystack of available content there are two governing indices:  one is the cult of personality that we are used to because of movies and TV; the other is sales figures, which are partly based on customer studies.

Alvina Krause

I’m using blogs several different ways: one is simply an archive and reflection about a professor of acting, Alvina Krause.  One is a repository of posts about Blackfeet matters for the Blackfeet to ponder.  (They can’t afford books but can get access to computers.)  One is an archive of materials about Bob Scriver.  These blogs are focused on a specific audience but they are not widely read.  

The students of Krause numbered maybe forty at a time, which over the years would amount to maybe 1600 potential readers of a book, many of whom are now dead or elderly.  Outside of her students there is not much prospect of sales based on her teaching.  There would be more if a writer were to focus on the fact that the School of Speech at the time was covertly gay-friendly which stirred up backlash among the righteous administration and ultimately forced out AK.  Then there would be the element of her post-retirement renaissance in Bloomsberg, PA, where her ideals support a fine repertory theatre.  The audiences of Northwestern, Eaglesmere, and Bloomsberg would be another source of sales, but only Bloomsberg is recent enough to amount to many numbers.  Raw population density is the secret of success for theatre audiences and physical book sales, though today -- through video and internet sales -- the world via google and UPS is the only real limit.  Still, people like to read about their own familiar world.  On the other hand, theatre has drastically changed from the “Method” based realism of AK to spectacles involving fire, trapezes and “flying.”

Bob Scriver

Bob Scriver’s case is a little different.  First, he is ambivalently “located” on the Blackfeet Reservation which can’t really decide whether they love him or hate him.  Second, he was on the periphery of what I call the Cowboy Art Cartel, which is based on the marketing of Remington and Russell, rigidly controlled and defending a mythic patriotic understanding of what cowboy art really is.  Third, most people would not be interested in Scriver as a person, except in terms of what makes his work worth money.  His work is ‘trading stock’ and books can increase or decrease value.  The interlocking complex of auctions and “museums” are really semi-religious institutions defending that same myth of cowboys and Indians that Bob accepted and illustrated in his work -- not in his life.  Revelations of reality will hurt sales.

available on www.lulu.com/prairiemary

The blog I call prairiemary (www.prairiemary.blogspot.com) is the closest I come to a personal writer’s platform.  But my life-path is in compartments located differently with different audiences.  Unless I could find enough readers for any one of them, or somehow combine them into a grand theme, they wouldn’t support a readership.  Two other people have tried to develop books about animal control, but were overwhelmed by the great romantic unreality of the Humane Society of the United Society which never saw an animal it didn’t want to convert into a human baby, though it is the American Humane Society that takes on both child-welfare and animal-welfare.  

Valier, MT

Small town infrastructure interests me greatly, since that's where I am, and could be developed if it were properly targeted.  A lot of people are struggling with the issues.  In fact, I think the pressure is great enough and closely enough related to Third World problems that a lot of technical breakthroughs that will change everything are in the pipeline -- not least the breaking up of grids and the most difficult the safety of the water/sewer cycle.  Doing this properly would mean a lot of research and travel.  It ought to be done by a younger, better- financed person.

The religious issues in the world consciousness are so potent and various that it would be fair to call them “fulminating.”  We are about to step away from the dogma, admit to the historical and territorial sources and expressions of religious institutions, and possibly to change the nature of the institutions themselves, finally recognizing them as variations in the theme of “nations” trying to defend and expand boundaries.  I don’t really have the chops to take on such an overwhelming paradigm shift.

My specific interest is reconciling neurological research about how the body operates to create consciousness and identity with what I know from experience as an ordained minister about creating ritual and deep experience.  Things are moving so quickly, partly in response to the chaos and damage of today’s world, that as quickly as I work, I fall behind.  Nevertheless, other people are strung out over a continuum between sorcerers to iconoclasts.  Those who could benefit from an intense spiritual retreat or a steady Sunday morning reassurance include just about everyone on the planet, but sales could only be made to a narrow span of that continuum.  Still, that could be a lot of people.

Available on Amazon

Now step over to the practicality of selling.  I’m told by publishers that they make few sales at the Montana Festival of the Book.  Placing ads in the Montana magazine of Western History produced no sales for me.  Despite a barrage of postcards I sent to them, the institutions that supposedly preserve Scriver’s work failed to realize his biography existed.  Review copies produced nothing. The blogs that monitor such things say that readings at bookstores don’t work, partly because there are too few bookstores, partly because readers cocoon.  Review sections of the major newspapers are defunct.  Magazines?  WHAT magazines?  Radio seems possible.  Both the local radio and regional newspaper are highly political.  I'm not.

Circles of people who know and promote each other are the real source of book publicity but they no longer lunch together. Recently the Missoula bell-mare went into the Bozeman range with mixed results.  Anyway, that foray was about a movie. The NY agents who used to have magic Rolodexes are gone, though a wave of dismissed editors has joined them.  Instead, the conversion of writing into actual books has migrated out to the grass roots, which haven’t existed long enough to form a thick and resilient turf, despite the efforts of a website like www.lulu.com, which represents itself as a printer with benefits, something like a friend with benefits.  (Sex is sales and replication.)  A book may require a bit of professional grooming.

Rhonda Abrams -- see what I mean about grooming?

Today’s business section in the GF Tribune includes an article by Rhonda Abrams of The Planning Shop.  http://www.planningshop.com  The topic is marketing.  If you are marketing by using a percentage of your profits, you will need to already be a major, prominent, advantage-generating entity whose simple existence IS advertising.  (Rhonda Abrams’ example is Costco.)  This is a variation on word-of-mouth.

If you are small and unknown, you will need venture capital.  The trick is to prove the product.  The third option is to create such a big controversial stink that people get to know your name and buy the book out of curiosity.  (Many will save money by reading reviews instead.)  For example, Krakauer is always writing about something sensational or purporting to reveal previously unknown and shocking facts -- regardless of consequences.  (Like, hiring big physical ghetto guys with respect-issues to be athletic stars -- and bringing them into a little white self-important town that aspires to be worldly -- will probably result in sexual boundary loss that will inflame a lot of cowboys.)  It works for the newspapers.  And lawyers.

So far, none of these options is attractive.  None of them would generate enough money to tempt me to give up the wealth I have, which is time and freedom.  I can sit here all day and write what I want to write -- immediately putting it out there for you read at no cost to either of us.  If you want print on paper, use your computer printer. Or go to www.lulu.com/prairiemary.  As for the cost to me, I prepaid with my life.

KINDS OF PEOPLE

There are two kinds of people: those who like to divide everything into two kinds and those who do not.  I belong to the latter camp.  Particularly when it comes to human characteristics, I resist doing in/out sorting.  But even so, it had not occurred to me that by creating the idea of homosexuality, the concept of heterosexuality had to be invented at the same time.  But there are many kinds of homosexuality -- some of which overlap with heterosexuality -- and there are many kinds of heterosexuality -- some of which overlap with homosexuality.  Sexuality itself can be defined in many ways by desire, identity, practice, history, boundaries, varying over time, and even null.  (None. Nun.)

In our culture every category is vulnerable to being made into a selling platform, so first we sold all the men on the idea that GI Joe was an ideal and a hero.  Then we sold them the idea of being the head of a family which meant wearing a suit, driving a fine car, and mowing the lawn.  Then Hugh Hefner sold the men the idea that they should avoid families and live in a mansion wearing silk pajamas, smoking a pipe, and pretending to fuck pretty teenaged girls who never got pregnant.  There have been lots of other platforms since.  Movies, magazines, clothing manufacturers, builders, restaurants, brands of alcohol or tobacco, are all busy trying to define these categories.  Men who wear mackinaws.  Men who operate heavy machinery.  Men who are lab scientists.  Astronauts.  SWAT teams.

Gender is one of the powerful definers of identity and identity is the way we relate to each other.  Clothing, equipment, food, music, behaviors, can all be linked to one’s identity as a sort of advertising, letting people know what the particular product has to offer and what they should be looking for.   These categories of marketing work against uniqueness because individuals don’t offer efficiency in marketing or distribution.  People who want uniqueness are hard to predict or control -- they are hunter/gatherers.  Profit can't be graphed.

Heteronormativity (and homonormativity) is a term that says “this is what you’re supposed to be like,” but it is usually so embedded in people’s assumptions that it’s invisible to them even as they act it out.  This interests me: things we assume that are unexamined, that control us without us realizing it, that are used to make us do things that are not in our best interests.  Always those practices mean consumption -- something we’re meant to buy.  (I mean, besides buying the idea.)   This applies to institutional religion as much as any other consumer categories.   They are selling a certain socio-economic style as much as any workout gymnasium or beauty salon.  But let’s stick to gender styles, which sometimes involve sex and sometimes don’t.

Hyperhomonormativity, or one rather aggressive version of it, was the female man: the slightly built man with the sharp lisping tongue, the extravagant clothes, the interest in women’s things.  The child man, soft and clinging.  But then came the reversal:  the masculine man who was tough as nails, too tough for a woman partner.  

By now all non-conforming sexual “styles” are implied membership in a group often denoted by a lengthening line of alphabet figures as "LGBTIQ?" (the "?" means questioning, used to keep from confusing it with Q for queer).  So far no one has thought to add celibacy, but the idea is multiplicity and welcoming the unique.  The marketing people have tried to cope by imitating the permutations of cola: sugarless, caffeineless, old-fashioned, canned, bottled, cherry-flavored, lemon-flavored.

Normativity of any kind is opposed to that and is a potent force for herding everything together in the religio-administrative-commercial-world of international society.   There are some hidden ideas under hetero or homo normativity.  They are hard to think about, esp. whatever has not been transformed into a selling angle yet.  One is that “sex” is a unified force in each person.  A second is that sex is always about desire and passion.  A third is that one’s sexual nature doesn’t change over time, except maybe a loss of performance due to aging.   Another is that sex is gender-dimorphic: entirely different for males than for females.  And underlying all is the idea that it is a matter of genitals, which are always either male or female, with the goal of making babies which are a wonderful selling opportunity.  All of these assumptions are just wrong.  They are reinforced by the taboo on nakedness, the suppression of information about the variety in babies, and the stigmatization of anything “different,” an instinct that goes back into the earliest human awareness when life was about family/tribe/belonging for protection.

What we call “sex” is just one nexus in the web of belonging, comfort, attachment, maturation, nurturing, and aesthetics that is ourselves and our place in the world.  Today circumstances (war, which is a kind of marketing; and peace, which is also marketing) have taught us that men can do women’s work, women can do men’s work, a sleeve is a sleeve and a button is a button.  A weapon can be fired by anyone.   Technology means that the dimorphic difference in physical prowess and baby-carrying have been replaced by differences in intelligence, education and temperament.  

As for genitals, not only do we finally admit that some babies are ambiguous almost beyond deciphering -- molecularly as well as genitally -- but also that one can be surgically and/or chemically switched from one to the other.  Or be left with two aspects or none or a unique configuration of both.  We haven’t quite achieved the molecular dexterity to change a XXY or XYY genome to either XY or XX.  (A YY chromosome will not survive because vital “information” for maintaining life is on only the X gene.  I presume that an X gene alone will also fail to support survival.)

Any kind of “normativity” is destructive when it becomes prescriptive, dictating what you have to be like, or at least give the appearance of being like.  Even worse in our society is HYPER heteronormativity -- everything conforming to but exceeding the social norms.  We celebrate someone like Arnold Schwartzegger.  Someone like Putin, who has got to have one of the most insecure jobs in the world, tries to dominate by riding a bear while bare-chested, even though he’s small, bald and squinty.  In fact, a nutcase loser like Hitler can be obsessed with the image of what he wishes he were: big, blonde, Nordic, athletic, etc. and impose it on everyone else.

We’re not very good at grouping or identifying people by their inner and therefore less accessible aspects, whether they are smart, kind, or generous.  People who want to be affiliated by their appearance will invent some kind of costume: black leather jacket, red bandana headwrap, desert boots, leather elbow patches on tweed jacket, cowboy shirts, insulated bib Carhartts, camo, tartan -- whatever.  Tattoos and piercing imply total commitment and a certain amount of pain, a price, in acquisition. 

And yet there is an element of adapting to the big picture, what's available.  We wear jeans and hoodies because they’re cheap, found everywhere, and practical.  We “hook up” with who is there and who is economically viable.  Right now low-skill uneducated men, who would formerly be employed to do raw physical labor, are connecting with young fertile women who will support them for the sake of the babies.  That's a het option.  

Such a man who connected with another man like himself, a homo option, might be more likely to slide into alcohol/drug partying.  If he were attractive enough to connect with an older, higher-income, more powerful man, that might be a route to experience and connections that would make him a better employment candidate.  But this would depend upon the emotions and morality of that older man, which will take time to discover.  A dark skin used to be a debit -- now in many circles it is a credit.

I was fascinated to hear Jack Fritscher say in a YouTube interview that he based “Drummer” magazine (homomasculine leather) on the image of the Marlboro Man -- or the cigarette company's idea of that figure, which was the tall, red-headed, Irish-descent male model of Fifties television Westerns, quite different from the reality of open range cowboys.  

The "type" has gone from the conventional but ragged suit vests and white shirts with arm garters or roping cuffs of the runty 19^th century ghetto escapee who took on the miserable boy-job of herding cows -- to the proud and moral 20^th century six-footer portrayed in slick magazines like “Cowboys and Indians” -- to the leather man forking a Harley when not boarding a jet flight to the next international city for a “scene” with equally charismatic men.  Modern men with unsuspected tragic futures -- but proud.  There’s a smashing novel in it.  Might even be a best-seller.  Don't let Annie Proulx near it. 

THE COST OF DOING PUBLISHING BUSINESS

Harking back to yesterday’s post about two kinds of readers and two kinds of writers, now I want to go to publicity as handled by publishers who see books as a way of creating a saleable commodity, an object of value. Since it costs MUCH less proportionally to produce the actual object and there is no longer a need to store them in a warehouse or pay taxes on an inventory of books (not that this sort of publisher wouldn’t quickly grind up or remainder any books that didn’t turn over fast enough), more of the investment goes into the publicity.

The pattern is NOT figuring out how to market a book everyone loves and that the publishing house thinks will change Western thought. Far from it.

The publicity starts way back with market research to see what sells. If you look at agents and publishing house access, they tell you what they want by describing categories. Not even genres, but more micro-types like “teen vampires” or “Christians with diseases.” Someone looks through the slush pile or phones some agents to see if there is anything pre-existing. If not, a manuscript is sort of summoned out of the air: ghosted imitations with long quotes or rewordings from similar books.

THEN an author has to be found. It’s more like old-fashioned movie studios creating a star than it is like Miss Anne Shirley from Avonlea entering the cave of the publisher. This is beyond ghosting a book for a movie star, more like hoaxing, except that it is the publisher who is the hoaxer. More of an imposed identity than an assumed identity.

The next trick is to start anticipation buzz in the biz while designing the look of the book -- enough like the last successful one in that genre to get the conditioned reaction, but different enough that the customer won’t think they already have it. Certain genres have certain styles. Like scholarly books tend to have matte sepia arty photos. Westerns have embossed gilt banners in olde tyme script.

When the book as object is set, the writing is sort of poured into it, then the central casting author is photographed, flaps are written and blurbs for the back are solicited. Authors who want nice blurbs (and good treatment from their publishers, since the blurbers are often from the same “stable”) write really nice blurbs. Some of them are better written than the quoted author’s own books, probably because they spend so much time on a few sentences rather than reading the book. Of course, none are negative. If the book falls flat, no one will look to see who thought it was brilliant.

It used to be that the author was sent around the country on tour, going from one big bookstore to another. There is never any real guarantee that an audience will form. Even at Powell’s I’ve seen readings where there were maybe five people and others where there were a hundred or more crammed among the shelves, usually not reacting to the book so much as the politics or trendiness of the subject. If the author is gay, American Indian, Arab, or some other non-standard type, he or she will be handled extra-well, in order to reassure the kind of liberals who read books.

They tell me that now the idea is to compose a website, hopefully with an interactive feature like questions to the author and maybe a tour schedule. Some authors include prompts to start discussions at book clubs. Or a way you can sign up for a newsletter mailed monthly. But I’m hearing that the thing to do is to produce a DVD or at least a video for YouTube. (Serendipituously, I was interviewed on the radio by George Cole and that is on the Internet. You can find it with Google.) Then mail the DVD to potential radio or TV interviewers or to magazine and newspaper writers. Maybe a podcast.

Except for George, who actually read most of my book (I could tell because he’s the kind of person who reads with a highlighter), few-to-no interviewers read the books of the authors they interview. Someone like Oprah has staff who read for her, but most interviewers simply read the materials the publisher sent. At my publisher, the only person who actually read the book was the line editor. (Who looks for typos, bloopers, grammar.) Even the person who prepared all the handouts and publicity releases did not read the book.

Anyway, she knew nothing about the subject matter, had no contacts in the world of cowboy art, and simply didn’t have time to find out. The press had a protocol checklist: catalogue, Amazon, local universities and historical society magazines -- the end. Same for all books. It was an academic press which means that the author makes NO money. The staff makes their salary; most of the writers are faculty members who make tenure. The rest just creates the illusion of a press in the full sense.

Many publishers now ask the author to prepare for submission with their manuscript the nature of interested groups, estimated sales, marketing suggestions. This is more important than the actual manuscript. One Montana publisher said he would simply not consider any author who didn’t make it his or her mission to sell their book, no matter what it took: effort, expense, health, whatever. He cared more about the promotion than the content, more about the book than the author. He was simply being realistic.

Bookstores do promote and hand-sell via clerks, along with special set-ups like row “cap” racks and tables in the aisle or cardboard displays. Sometimes the publisher pays for this. Amazon et al and even some used bookstores will also keep track of customer preferences (according to their algorithms) and "push" your category online the way Netflix does.

What most of us don’t realize is that behind the bookstores are another set of salesmen who “rep” the publishers, maybe individually or maybe in related groups like academic books. The alternative is booths at fairs or tables at events, like the ones at the Montana Festival of the Book. If THOSE guys can get enthusiastic and push a book, that causes the bookstore to get excited, which might even make the local media curious. Those unknown salespersons spend their lives on the road. I suspect they read at night in motels. We need to know more about them. Is there a professional organization? What turns them on?

I would like to see an accounting of a big time publicity campaign plan with the costs spelled out. That would have to be the minimum a book is likely to make before a money-making publisher is really willing to look at it. But why couldn't an author pay for such a campaign directly? Would it be different from a millionaire running for political office?