Readers and writers blog

OK, you just might find a picture of Gerard Jones under ‘curmudgeon’ in the dictionary, but like most snarly guys, he can be a sweetheart, too.

That’s why his website is the latest addition to our blogroll.

The site, Everyone Who’s Anyone,* isn’t a blog in the traditional sense but has sporadic posts dating back to mid-2002, most of them diatribes against publishing and entertainment that live up to their title, Chronological Ranting & Raving.

Jones also is author of Ginny Good, a memoir of sorts — he calls it a ‘nonfiction novel’ — that chronicles his classic love of the 1960s, a love that like all classic stories is a tragedy. It also is the only book of his ever to be put into print by a publisher, a considerable achievement in light of this soon-to-be 66-year-old’s attitude toward publishers.

And now the good-guy stuff:

Jones has reacquired the rights to Ginny Good and is offering it free as both an e-book and an audio book, each of which we plan to pass on to our readers.

We don’t know if Jones is independently wealthy (we suspect not), but he certainly is independent, fiercely so, and that gives a certain integrity to his other free offerings — notably, his extensive listings of literary agents, publishers and other influential figures in print, broadcast and film media.

We came across his site in a search for literary agents. Jones has all the important ones — thousands of them — listed with contact names, telephone numbers and both snail mail and email addresses. It’s the kind of stuff you have to buy for several hundred dollars a year from other sources.

Jones, who spent years compiling his lists, provides them for free. And he weeds out the phonies and predators wherever he can.

What we liked about his list of literary agents is that Jones includes his correspondence with some of them. Here’s an exchange with a snippy agent who reminded Jones that a “professional writer acts as such before they are published”:

How does one ‘act’ professional? Is that some kind of code word for being a kowtowing, no-talent, kiss-up gerbil who couldn’t write his or her way out of a paper bag? Just curious. G.

No, more along the lines of not writing a nasty response when receiving a letter declining representation.

Oh, come on, you think Kafka didn’t get a little ticked when nobody published any of his stuff while he was alive? And yet if you had one of his ‘nasty’ responses you could auction it for more money than you’re gonna make in the next ten years. Chill, dudette. G.

To her credit, the agent replied simply:

I’m sure that’s true. Happy Holidays.

And sometimes the invective becomes a volcano, as in the following note to an unresponsive agent (our deletions):

Hey, Warren, it just dawned on me what a total f—ing c— you are. Has it dawned on you lately what a total f—ing c— you are? It really should, you know. It will. You’ll see. It’ll send a little chill up your spine when you get a glimpse of your total f—ing c— self in the mirror, you total f—ing c—. Oh, and after you’re done looking at your total f—ing c— self in the mirror, how about sending me my book back? Thanks. G.

But notice that last word. The explosively angry guy still takes time to say thanks. This clue didn’t escape Linda L. Richards, an author and editor of January Magazine, when she reviewed Ginny Good in 2004:

Jones brings a sort of careless insouciance to Ginny Good. An early hippie devil-may-care- ef-em-if-they- can’t-take-a-joke attitude that pretends to mask deeper feelings. Pretends, of course, because it’s clear that Jones cares deeply about everything that befalls him and Ginny and the others we meet in Ginny Good. And he wants us to know he cares, but he wants us to find our own way to that conclusion.

Richards calls it an “intelligent respect for the intelligence of his reader.” We’re reading Ginny Good, and we agree. We hope you do, too. You can find the book right at the top of his website, and we’ll soon be serializing it as well.

His is a refreshing voice in these present days of ours when most of the guys you’d describe as fiercely independent are apt to grab one of their guns and shoot you.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*That’s just the short version of the title, which continues “. . . in Adult Trade Publishing, Newspapers, Magazines, Broadcasting and Tinseltown, Too.”

As with most writers, my experience with literary agents has been, while not all negative, generally one of rejection. So after I recently mass-emailed a lot of them, it was a pleasant surprise to read some of their responses.

Now I don’t do much to promote this website other than writing for it. In fact, the only promotion I’ve ever done was the mass-emailing — well, let’s call it what it really was: I spammed them all, although the spam at least was in intelligible English and not promoting Viagra.

And here’s why: I felt someone other than me — and you, o revered readers — should have an occasional look at what writers have had the courage to let us post in our nonfiction, fiction and poetry sections.

Writing is hard work, and showing it to someone else can be even harder because it further weighs down the burden of work with the burden of courage.

I particularly have in mind one of our featured writers, Joseph Cigan, a nice guy from Chicago who is sweating through his first novel, Sniper in the Mist, and is beset by all those second thoughts, third thoughts and endless doubts about what he has written, bless his soul.

But I’m also thinking about Steve Karmazenuk, a nice guy from Montreal who managed to get his science fiction novel, The Unearthing, into print but still is struggling to promote it. Not to mention the other writers in our Works section who have lent the products of their talents to us.

And so I sent the following email to 1,045 of the nation’s top literary agents:

Dear Sir or Madam:

This is not a submission but a one-time note to let you know that our website, Readers and Writers Blog (http://www.readersandwritersblog.com/), publishes works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry that may be of interest to you either now or at some point in the future.

We seek no gain other than to help aspiring writers be noticed by those influential in the publishing world, which in turn may attract other aspiring writers to our nonprofit website.

Thank you for any consideration you may give us.

For the uninitiated who may be out there, it’s been a long time since a writer sent a manuscript to a publisher. Nowadays, you need a literary agent, and they can be as steely-hard to convince — or even reach — as the publishers were.

Well, a few of them were out of the office, and a surprising number were out on maternity leave. One of them, Rick Balkin of the Balkin Literary Agency, was traveling incognito.

Michael Murphy at Max & Co. said he was away from his email, but “not at any St. Patrick’s Day parade. I’m not even particularly Irish. Tom Murphy impregnated my fine French family of Genet’s & Bossardet’s and stuck us with his peat bog digging name. I am, however, feeling lousy. I plan on lying down to see where this goes. Until further notice, I am gone from email with my phone turned off. Just one of those things.”

Only seven bounced our email back to us — the way Yahoo’s qmail-send program put it was that the particular IP address “did not like recipient” — and one IP couldn’t accept our email because its user’s mail folder was full.

And now the heroes — remember, these are not minor-league agents — who responded with a kindness that we will try to repay with links to their own or associated web pages:

• Anthony Arnove of Roam Agency, who said he’d keep our link.

• Whitney Lee of the Fielding Agency, who said she’d check out our site and added a wish that we “enjoy the week.”

• Matt Wagner of Fresh Books, who sent his regards and said he’d check us out, too.

• Helen Zimmerman of the Helen Zimmerman Literary Agency in New Paltz, N.Y., a neighbor of ours, who sent her thanks.

• And last but not least, Joan West of Bennett and West Literary Agency, who thanked us for our note, found our site excellent and said we are “doing a good service for writers.”

Thank you, Joan, and thanks to the rest of the agents we emailed, even those who didn’t like us.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. The book image at the top is the only response we got from Manhattan literary agent and author Katharine Sands. Maybe she found our pitch wanting. But if you want her ‘Making the Perfect Pitch,’ here’s one place to get it.

2. Hey, Ned Leavitt Agency, what’s up with that “if you don’t hear from us within four weeks, please feel free to approach other agents.” Ned, this was Sid calling.

. . . These days, everybody’s written a book.

I’ve heard that a lot, and I’ll bet you have, too. The Internet has been the latest technological advance to quicken this truism. Before that, it was the personal computer, the word processor, the typewriter, the advent of the ballpoint pen and cheap paper, and they were probably saying it in Johannes Gutenberg’s day.

What with that movable type these days, everybody’s written a book.

Like a disconcerting number of truisms, it isn’t true. Sure, everybody wants to write a book, everybody says they ought to write a book, but not everybody does. Not everybody can.

But for those willing to try, the Internet and websites like our own R&W Blog do offer a new tool, the e-book-in-progress — for example, that of our latest featured writer, Joseph Cigan, called Sniper in the Mist.

Now there’s nothing new about a work-in-progress — WIPs always have been sent to other authors and readers for their reactions and advice — but the Internet gives an e-book-in-progress a potentially much larger audience.¹

This is the fifth straight blog entry I’ve written about this subject, and I guess the word ‘harping’ comes to mind. We haven’t had much response to the series other than a comment from another writer we’re featuring, Steve Karmazenuk, author of The Unearthing.²

But as we’ve said before, this is why this website-weblog went up in the first place, and we’ve signed on for the ride.

Another truism that is true: Writing a book isn’t easy.

(I notice I’m using a lot of italic. I must be intense on this subject. Well, I guess I am.)

As a newspaper reporter, I averaged at least 10 column inches a day — that’s about 350 words — five days a week for about 1,750 words a week, 50 weeks a year for about 87,000 words a year, 20 years for a total of about 1.7 million words, and that’s not counting the headline and editing words I wrote for another 18 years as an editor. And yet, I had a hard time writing a book — a book in areas familiar to me, reportage and autobiography — of a mere 102,000 words.

My book looks like it was written by a reporter, or at least a columnist — chapters that are short, subjects that change abruptly. But let me tell you, fitting those short chapters together in the way I wanted — I can describe it only as a spherical poem not just about my life and the lives of people I knew or met but about life itself — was one hell of a hard job. It took five years. In a truck.

Cigan faces his own difficulties. For one thing, although he’s written music reviews for Amazon.com and other short works, he’s a first-time novelist. And while he’s written, rewritten and edited his chapters probably more than he would like to think about, he continues to worry about his book’s organization.

“Finally, my greatest concern is that the entire story is too rambling and without a clear arc,” he told us in an email earlier this month. “I know that ultimately I will have to reorganize some of the material.”

Well, other than the effort of editing and reorganizing, which can be considerable, making changes in an e-book is simple. E-publishing, unlike print-on-paper publishing, allows changes at the speed of electricity.

As for Joseph’s editorial concerns, we can’t say. Because, like you, we haven’t seen the whole book. We do know that his Chapter 6, our latest installment, contains some beautiful writing.

If you’re wondering about the picture at the top of this entry, it is a spinning bullet, a projectile subject to the chapter’s title, “The Magnus effect,” and becomes a metaphor for many other things.

The guy can write.

Also today:

– We present the latest chapter in Steve Karmazenuk’s The Unearthing, an ‘Interlude: Rain of Tears’ in which members of a future scientific survey team bid farewell to the leader of their expedition, murdered by an unknown gunman.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. In fact, thanks to an article posted on her Facebook page by fellow blogger P.L. Frederick, author of Small & Big, the e-book-in-progress is becoming more common on the Internet than even we thought.

2. And some nice remarks about our site’s look and style from a couple of fellow bloggers.

———————————————

And a tribute to the late Arthur
C. Clarke, writer and visionary

(See note at bottom)

———————————————

Here’s something I never expected to say in retirement: I’ve been busy.

But it’s true. We at R&W Blog are now serializing two novels — yes, count ‘em, two — and that involves something I’m supposed to be good at. Actually, several things — editing, proofreading and, thanks to my latter years at work, using a computer to convert words into readable type.

Today we offer two new installments in our fiction section — Chapter 5 of Sniper in the Mist by Joseph Cigan and Chapter 7 of The Unearthing by Steve Karmazenuk.

Believe me, it’s a pleasure to work on these books. But it is work. Not so much editing, because both these guys are very good writers, but a lot of proofreading. Karmazenuk’s science fiction novel comes in as a pdf file, and that isn’t easily converted to our page style. Cigan’s chapters arrive as OpenOffice files that also must be proofed line-by-line.

And just in case you think reading proof is easy, I defer to a higher authority — the pseudonymous June GonnaEatThat, author of the weblog Bye Bye, Pie, who is a professional proofreader. In her blog’s previous incarnation, Bye Bye Buy, she had this to say about her calling:

So, I am going to come out now and tell you what I do for a living. I am a proofreader. Which means I read every letter of every word with excruciating slowness, searching for inaccuracies.

If you are now thinking, “Oh a proofreader. How fun. I love to read,” please let me take this opportunity to fill your nasal cavities with a fast-hardening cement. You do not love to PROOFread. You love to read a nice novel. You like to catch up on that Miss Marple, see what shenanigans she is up to now. So do I. That, however, is not PROOFREADING. Unless you read like this: “Y (capital Y? Yes.)ou caaann copyyy saaaved (saved past tense? Yeah. Okay.) dataaaa (data? Are they using data as a plural? Are they using data as a plural in the rest of this thing? Okay.) (Wait. Didn’t it say 10 pages ago that you CAN’T copy saved data? Hang on.). . .”

Just as an example, an average chapter in Sniper in the Mist runs about 4,500 words, in The Unearthing about 6,000 words. The total, 10,500 words, is about the same as two and a half full-sized newspaper pages filled only with small body type, no headlines, no pictures. And we’re trying to process this much type twice a week.

Hell, I’ve been planked into this chair in front of my computer for days now, trying to get ahead.

But I protest too much.

You know, when I used to think being a reporter — a job I did for more than 20 years — was getting too hard, I thought about those summers working in the woods for my stepfather, a logger, or those nights in the woolen mill, wrestling with heavy bolts of cloth, or selling brushes door-to-door, or waiting on tables where tips were nonexistent . . .. Being a reporter was a lot easier. Just carry a small notebook and pencil, talk to people, nothing to sell, do a little typing.

And when that got too hard, I became an editor, a job I did nearly as long as reporting. And by the time that got too hard, I retired.

I still think about those summers in the woods, those nights in the mill, those days on the pavement or lugging the trays. And you know, this chair is pretty comfortable. Even more than that reporter’s chair, where there was pressure from daily deadlines, impatient editors and an occasional source insisting that what was said really wasn’t said. And even comfier than that editor’s chair, where, thanks to computers in my latter days, an editor also became a typesetter, compositor and graphic designer as well as a proofreader.

So it is with a remembered humility that I recommend our latest installments:

• In Chapter 5, Sniper in the Mist, Joseph Cigan through his protagonist, Joseph Varga, recreates some of the characters — and youthful drug adventures — of life in his Chicago neighborhood of the 1960s.

• In Chapter 7 of Steve Karmazenuk’s The Unearthing, Professor Mark Echohawk and a team of scientists venture into the bowels of a huge alien ship unearthed from the sands of New Mexico, a foray that ends in tragedy.

Please check them out. For we proofread so that you may read.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

Arthur C. Clarke, who died Tuesday (U.S. time) at age 90, is remembered for his vision of the future and his contribution to science fiction by one of our featured authors, Montreal writer Steve Karmazenuk, in Tuesday’s post on his weblog, Kspace.

Reading about all the fake memoirs in the news these days, it struck me as odd that some of the writers with the most interesting biographies — life stories that would make the greatest memoirs — choose instead to write novels.

What brings this to mind is Joseph Cigan, a Chicago writer whose first novel, Sniper in the Mist, we are now serializing.

I mean, Ernest Hemingway, whose decades of fiction reflected everything about his life, never finished his memoirs, A Moveable Feast.* And Harper Lee apparently put all of her life into one major work, To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel, considered by some as the best of the 20th century.

So what the hell is with James Frey, who faked drug addiction in A Million Little Pieces, Monique De Wael and her phony memoir of the Holocaust, and now Margaret Seltzer, a white suburbanite, whose Love and Consequences tale of surviving sexual abuse, foster care and gang violence turns out to be a complete fraud, including her claim to native American heritage?

The answer seems to be that most readers, like a lot of TV viewers, prefer reality to art.

That’s too bad. Because Cigan’s work proves to us that art is reality. Put another way, well-written fiction, like good theater, leaves us no choice but to believe that it is a reflection of reality.

In our recent blog entry about the second installment of Sniper in the Mist, we quoted Cigan’s description of his protagonist, Joseph Varga Jr., escaping as young child with his family from communist border guards and their police dogs in the thickets of former Yugoslavia. Not coincidentally, Cigan and his family made a similar escape to Austria in the early 1950s.

In that and other chapters of his book, Cigan writes about his East Lake View neighborhood and the tough guys, junkies, rock ‘n’ rollers and other characters of various ethnic persuasions he grew up with in the 1960s.

In today’s installment, Chapter 4, he talks about Chuito:

Flako’s brother Chuito was and remained an enigma to me. We called him the day tripper ’cause he always dropped his acid during the day. We’d see him walking in the park with his leather, a purple silk shirt, pork pie hat and dark shades, sporting a cane and a “Giaconda Smile.” The smile became a grin when he’d see someone he knew. He’d just stroll by with a little bop in his walk, neck arched a bit and leading with his chin. He avoided getting strung out on junk like his brother, but I knew he chipped, dabbled that is.

Making five hundred dollars a week, when that was some real money for a working man, with two young babies and Ruthie in his life, the chump burns out his veins as well as his life, slumped into a corner where the dogs piss and the winos vomit.

We suspect that Chuito in fact existed, although maybe not by that name and maybe not in one body. That’s what we suspect. But what we believe, reading Cigan’s novel, is that this sad chipper, Chuito, is real.

In fact, Cigan’s writing reminds us a lot of Jack Kerouac’s, but — and here we apologize to the icon of the Beat Generation — with a better style. There, we’ve said it.

So check it out, and don’t forget . . .

• Our other offering today: Chapter 6 of Steve Karmazenuk’s science-fiction novel, The Unearthing, in which a Canadian defense minister and an American air force lieutenant colonel get involved in the investigation of a huge alien ship unearthed from the sands of New Mexico.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*His fourth wife did.

We’re about to get doubly literate on you, dear reader. Because now our fiction section is presenting installments of two new novels — count ‘em, two.

And, oh yeah, we also present the results of our trip to a thesaurus for a word making our headline a pun on Charles Dickens . . . hmmm, ‘prolificity,’ good word. Please attribute this act, less of literacy than of verbal gymnastics, to our giddiness at having an abundance of new works:

• First is the latest chapter of Sniper in the Mist, a novel-in-progress by Joseph Cigan that draws from his life in Chicago as well as his heritage as a refugee from Slovenia in the 1950s.

• And now, thanks to the generosity of another author, Steve Karmazenuk, we begin serializing the remaining chapters of his science-fiction novel, The Unearthing, which we debuted in February in a four-chapter sample.

(You can get to either work by clicking on Fiction at the top right of this page, then select the appropriate title or chapter.)

As we’ve said before, this is what we had in mind when we started this website-weblog more than a year ago. In fact, the weblog didn’t become part of the general website until last April, five months after we began, when it appeared that not many writers were willing to submit big-ticket works like novels for free and we had to fill the site with something — like the musings, and sometimes rantings, of a retired newspaper editor.

Our initial experience was much like that of an Internet pioneer we consider our predecessor, David Guest, who in 1998 put up a site called Readersandwriters.com only to let it go inactive after several years of waiting in vain for submissions.

“Writers all seemed to want to earn money from their efforts and were afraid to put their works in the public domain,” Guest told us after our first month of operation. “I just let the site sort of die …. I always said I would rather have a thousand readers than a thousand dollars … but I wound up with neither . . .”

(By the way, his domain name was bought up in 2004 by a British company that is holding it for resale for about $13,500. As we said in our initial blog entry, we offered them all we could afford — 50 bucks — and never heard from them again.)

Well, things are beginning to change, Karmazenuk tells us.

“I just wanted to let you know that after discussing it with some web-savvy friends and advisers, I’ve decided to release the whole of The Unearthing as an ebook in hopes that it will generate hard-copy sales,” Karmazenuk told us by email.

“Since its launch a couple of days ago, I’ve had as many downloads of the book as I have had sales in the year and a half it’s been published,” he wrote.”I don’t know if any of those people are actually going to buy the book, and you know what? I don’t care.

“The only thing I’ve ever wanted is for people to read my writing.”

We couldn’t agree more with his motivations and philosophy. That’s why we’re here — to publish works by writers who had to write them. Yes, the money would be nice, but Karmazenuk, Cigan and others, we’re sure, are writing for a more basic purpose — for the eyes and minds of others.

So today we present:

• Chapter 3 of Sniper in the Mist, a look at Cigan’s life through his main character, young Joseph Varga, in the Chicago neighborhood of East Lake View in the changing times of the 1960s.

• Chapter 5 of The Unearthing, as one of Karmazenuk’s protagonists, Professor Mark Echohawk, and colleagues take a closer look at an enormous alien ship that has been unearthed in the New Mexico desert.

We hope you lend them your eyes and minds.

– Sid Leavitt

I fell in and out of sleep on my father’s shoulders and woke from one dreamy interlude to the sound of dogs barking. . .

The scene is Eastern Europe — the old Yugoslavia, to be precise — and the Varga family is fleeing west to Austria. It’s part of the narrative in the novel Sniper in the Mist, Chapter 2, which we present today in our fiction section.

It’s also drawn from the life of the author, Joseph Cigan, whose family made a similar escape to freedom in the 1950s when he was just a small child.

Father accelerated the pace to a double-time trot, pulling my now-exhausted mother by the sleeve of her long overcoat. We were crossing a field recently harvested with corn stalks vertically stacked in a circle against each other forming teepee-like cones scattered haphazardly in our path. My father stopped abruptly at one and, shifting some stalks to reveal the hollow space within, urged my mother to enter. He set the suitcase and me on the ground, entered the corn shelter pulling both in behind him and arranged the stalks to partially cover the entrance. Mother sat cross-legged with my sister in lap as the barking of the dogs gained in volume. . .

Those memories don’t fade. And the way Cigan writes about them, although in fiction, gives them a vividness that makes them real.

That’s not the only memory of the East that comes through the work of this Hungarian-American author. He also writes about his ethnicity with a freshness imbued with both poetry and logic found only in the best writers of any heritage:

Hungarians are an Asian people. Usually, I prefer the term ‘Oriental’ instead of the more politically correct ‘Asian.’ Notwithstanding the likelihood that the genesis of our use of ‘Oriental’ is firmly rooted in a cultural elitism manifest in the Eurocentric orientation of our compass, the Orient is undeniably to the east. It can also be argued, for that matter, that it is to the west, although it would require a much longer argument. Asian, although general, is still somehow too specific geographically. Oriental is much less defining and more intriguing, the difference, perhaps, between the earthy flavor of a dark roasted Arabica coffee and the ephemeral perfume of a Japanese green tea. Hungarians, though, are definitely Asian. Wild Scythian winds from the steppes of Central Asia tore the back door to Europe from its hinges, and howling through on their wiry overachieving ponies rode Attila the Hun and Arpad the Magyar.

This quality of writing is why, as we explained in our previous entry, we decided to serialize Cigan’s novel, his first. Again, as we explained, it’s not yet finished. We know at least eight or nine chapters are complete, but who knows where the book goes from there?

We just don’t care. We think what Cigan has written so far is well worth reading, and we’ve signed on for the ride.

We see Attila and Arpad, and we hope you do, too.

– Sid Leavitt

Joseph Cigan, 57, is an independent trade contractor in Chicago. He is not a professional writer, but he is a writer. And he has a story to tell.

It is called Sniper in the Mist, and what a story it is.

The first installment — a prelude and first chapter — is presented today in our fiction section at the top right of this page. Just click there on Fiction, then on the title, or go straight through by clicking here.

Yes, the novel is about snipers, but its theme is not war, crime or suspense. It is a story drawn from Cigan’s own life, a story about snipers who threaten not only our bodies but our minds, maybe even our souls, as well.

Cigan was born in Lendava, a small town in northeast Slovenia, when it was still part of Yugoslavia. In the 1950s, his family escaped to Austria and lived for several years in a refugee camp before being allowed through Germany to board a converted troop ship that brought them to the United States. His was among the last families processed through the Ellis Island immigration center.

Since 1957, he has lived in Chicago, and his novel recreates the neighborhoods of his youth — mixtures of Scots-Irish, Eastern European, Latino, Jewish, even Japanese heritage and tough guys with names like Tiger, Babyface and Black Tony.

Like Cigan, the main character of the novel is of Hungarian or Magyar stock, a young man named Varga who at one point muses:

Some of my people were ‘cool in Astrakhan’ . . . though almost always in the crosshairs of a wretched, metaphoric sniper, like Dean Barrera who struggled unsuccessfully with his sanity. . .

Dean was picked off by schizophrenia – his arbitrary assassin.

We will be presenting Sniper in the Mist in installments in our successive Sunday and Thursday postings as we receive chapters from Cigan.

For those of you old enough to remember, novels at one time were commonly serialized in magazines, usually one chapter per weekly or monthly issue. In fact, many of Charles Dickens’ novels were published as serials in 19th century magazines, as were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories into the 20th century. More recently, Stephen King wrote The Green Mile as a serial.

The difference with Sniper in the Mist — and it is a big difference — is that the novel isn’t yet finished.

But, ah ha, electronic publishing is not the same as print publishing. We can make revisions — everything from small editing, to chapter overhauls, even adding or deleting chapters — without having to go out and recall all the versions in print.

We can do it as we go.

Frankly, we wouldn’t do this for everybody — in fact, not for most writers whose work we see. But all you have to do is read Cigan’s opening lines to realize that he’s not most writers. We’ve seen several subsequent chapters, and we find them just as good as the first.

Even if it takes a long time, we’re willing to wait while this novel is created.

Or not created, if that be the case. If for some reason the novel is never finished — a prospect we doubt — what Cigan has written so far is, in our opinion, well worth reading.

Furthermore, Cigan says he’s open to reaction from readers.

So it will be a collaborative effort: While he writes, we read, we respond, he considers, and who knows what will happen. We think it will be exciting to watch a novel play out before our very eyes.

This is why R&W Blog exists. We are, as we say in the nameplate at the top of this page, an interactive universe of the written word.

So please let us know what you think.

– Sid Leavitt

I was reminded the other day of an old Bob Newhart routine about a room full of monkeys with typewriters — you know, the one based on the premise that if given enough time, the monkeys hitting keys at random would eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare.

In his monologue, Newhart is a monitor in the room. “Wait a minute, Charlie,” he says to another monitor. “I think number 17645 has something: ‘To be or not to be, that is the qwertyuiop’ . . . Never mind.”

Now I’m misquoting the comedian. The nonsense word he originally used was something like ‘gezortenblatt,’ but whenever I’ve co-opted the joke, I’ve always used ‘qwertyuiop’ because it’s the top row of letters on a typewriter. (Why did I once memorize that? Ask the fudgsicle. And if that makes no sense, look at the middle row of letters. Don’t ask for the mnemonic for the bottom row.)

In fact, the comedian is misquoted everywhere. As I’ve scoured the Internet looking for the original text, the nonsense word is listed variously as gzrbnklap, gzortnplatt, gazerninblatz, gezundenplatz, and the imaginary sidekick is listed as Charlie, Harry, Fred, even Bob. (Where’s YouTube when you need it?)*

And the premise is quoted everywhere. The best guess is that it originated in 1913 with French mathematician Emile Borel, a pioneer in the fields of measure and probability theory. But one guy in England, who doesn’t seem to like monkeys, uses the mathematical improbability of the premise to argue that it proves Darwin’s theory of evolution wrong. Ah well.

Other humor has spun off the premise. I found a cartoon at an old website, the WSFA Journal, showing a balding man looking at the work of a monkey at a typewriter: “This is Hamlet,” the man tells the monkey typist. “We wanted the WSFA Journal.” At another site, a cartoon shows two guys standing in a room filled with monkeys except for a pig in the front row. “It is the complete works of Shakespeare all right,” one guy says, “but the pig’s claiming he wrote them.”

I once bought a birthday card for my mother. The front was a photo of a monkey at a typewriter hitting a key, click, then another photo showing him hitting another key, click. Inside the card, a two-letter greeting — “H I” — then, “Just monkeying around, but I wanted to wish you a happy birthday.” My wife wouldn’t let me send it. Mothers like sweet cards, she said.

The greatest birthday card my wife ever gave me shows a photo of a goofy dog sitting beside a toilet bowl, one paw on the rim, and looking into the camera with a quizzical smile: “It’s your birthday?” Inside: “Well, this round’s on me.”

That card has a place of honor on my bookshelf.

Anyway, what reminded me of the Newhart routine was a couple of pieces of spam we received the other day at R&W Blog. Yes, I’m still fascinated by spam, maybe because it’s mostly what we get in our comments section.

Last time, I wrote about spam in French. Now we’re getting what I can describe only as Q&A spam. One, from an Arwin Mercy, asked the question:

Please suggest me where I can find a website where I can purchase accessories by seeing them before I purchase them?

Then, as if by magic, a spammer named Robert Crain in the next file offered:

To purchase a accessory I would better go to a retailer rather than staying online but if you still wish to then do try this site accessories about.info.

Hell, the spammers are now conversing with one another in our comments section. Not really, but the messages purportedly were in response to two different entries on our blog, both of them posted months ago.

Those spam computers are getting more and more clever. In fact, another comment, this one from Nikky Bikky, had a certain poetry to it:

The whore had delecate blueness and Clare off at a jessica simpson hair syles stand. It felt pouty to hover that way.

Wow, it almost made sense. But then there was the next comment, this one from T.W. Ha at mail.com:

Bvonuzytd fayj blipta ejafdhzvt yahrxjtom ebrc xevwol.

As Bob would say, “Never mind.”

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*The original is on Newhart’s second album, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back (1960), which I do not have. According to Amazon, the cut is called “An Infinite Number of Monkeys.”