Books, they say, are dead. Publishing, that once sacrosanct institution, is now no more than a burning Gomorrah. And literature, text the tween throngs, “iz ovr fuckn omg g2gpc… r u there…suuuup?” and so on. These are the kinds of portents, which, while increasingly true, are, for one weekend in October, depth-charged and blown to bits.
I’m talking about Texas Book Festival 2012!
Oh, come on. I love skeletons and Krackel and Halloween as much as the next guy, but a Krackel does not (usually) allow one to, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. [That] you belong.” Fitzgerald was writing about literature, which is like Krackel, but with metaphor and litotes instead of chocolate and crispy rice.
If you were lucky enough to enjoy the offerings of the Book Festival this weekend, you no doubt felt that books, publishing and literature are alive and well in Austin, Texas. As the author of Whore Stories: A Revealing History of The World’s Oldest Profession, which has appeared on countless “Best of” and “Kick Ass” lists taped to my desk, I was privileged to begin the weekend at what promised to be an elegant and refined “Author’s Breakfast” at the Governor’s Mansion.
And there they were: CNN talking head and New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin holding forth on the Supreme Court (or his favorite brand of frozen yogurt, I couldn’t tell). Toobin is known for keeping people at a distance, especially when they’re eyeing his fruit plate with injudicial lust. No matter. As I swept across the lawn, I noticed the eminence gris of political historians, Mr. Robert Caro, who has spent more time writing about Lyndon Johnson than Lyndon Johnson spent being Lyndon Johnson.
“Mr. Caro!” I shouted, feeling stupid and that he probably likes to be called “Doctor Caro,” or “Caro the Sturdy” or something. And alas, as distinguished people tend to do when I yell at them, the Pulitzer-prize winning author slunk around a corner then reappeared with a tray of orange juice.
“Orange juice?” asked Robert Caro, dressed in vest and thick with sweat.
“Thanks. I love your work,” I said.
“Eh?” grunted Caro, no doubt tired of talking shop. I could see I’d get nowhere with the dogged scholar, that perhaps he was more nervous than I, and what’s more, I wasn’t even sure I knew what Robert Caro looked like. This is what differentiates a film festival from a book festival: these people could be anyone.
But one man stood out. That’s right, our own Governor Rick Perry. Now, I’d presumed he might emerge from the gubernatorial balcony to fire grape shot over a posse of post-structuralists then repair to the boudoir, but no. Our man was here. In it. Mixing it up, by God.
I heard him before I saw him. “And then,” said the Governor, “Sam Houston, at the urging of his wife Margaret, who was worried for his mortal soul, tossed the letter into the fireplace.” Governor Perry then tactfully pointed at a fireplace. I remember touring this mansion on a field trip once when I was in 3rd grade. The tour guide also mentioned a Houston throwing a letter in the fire, but in this case it was Margaret Houston doing the burning. Curious. I researched a little more and found that the Houstons were always throwing letters in the fireplace; like it was just a thing they did for the hell of it.
Governor Perry, standing under an enormous mural of Sam Houston, stopped his lecture and said “Tyler Stoddard Smith,” reading my nametag.
“What book did you write?”
“Whore Stories,” I said.
“Uhn-kay,” drawled the Governor, sheepishly, as if he hadn’t even tried to read it, or if he did, he was perpetrating like he didn’t. He just went right on with his lecture.
“…Sam Houston was 6’6”… and so it is of my opinion that had Sam Houston run in the 1860 presidential election, he not only would have won, there would have been no Civil War.” Good old Sam Houston, saving the Union along with his slaves and an unyielding pituitary gland. I should mention that the Governor uttered this pronouncement while wearing a baseball cap and a pair of throwback Oakley razors.
I was tempted to ask the Governor to leave, as this was an “authors only” party, but was then reminded of Fed Up!, Mr. Perry’s 250-page discourse on how everything but horses are unconstitutional, and On My Honor, his creepy book about the Boy Scouts.
Besides, I wasn’t here to tussle over politics and old grudges—I was here to meet authors. I heard someone say that if you threw a rock, you’d probably hit a famous author, so I did, but all I hit was a grackle. I thought of how this was irony, and how the Book Festival was really going to start (irony is a literary technique where the protagonist throws something inorganic), now that I’d helped to create a “literary” vibe.
Part of a literary vibe, is of course, the literary feud. You know the ones: Mailer vs. Vidal, Nabokov vs. Edmund Wilson and most recently, Richard Ford’s loogies vs. Colson Whitehead’s head. The feud is engrained in the writer, much like the fear of giving directions is engrained in the mime, and so you can imagine that when I ran into Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara and, most recently, the National Book Award-nominated Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk sitting on a curb, making dramatic notes on the sidewalk with his corn dog, he was tense and eager to rumble.
“Ben!” I cried. “We missed you at the authors brunch.” He removed his sunglasses. After looking at me for a little while longer he said, “Tyler.”
“Yes,” I said.
“It was early, that author’s breakfast,” said Fountain, grammatically.
“Maybe too early,” I noted.
“Too early for me.” The tension scythed across the barricaded blocks. Ben Fountain was a powder keg and I didn’t want to ruin things again by asking why he was never worried that his titles would run off the page. He got lucky with his first book, but what if people wouldn’t buy Billy Lynn’s Long Half?
SPOILER ALERT:
If you read Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk upside down and right to left, it’s an erotic novella called Billy Lynn’s Long Half, about a good old boy trying to make it as a small arms dealer in Greenwich Village with nothing but his wits and his abnormally large…process. This is what happens when you doubt a writer like Fountain, FYI.
I tried a different tact:
“So, Ben. You know Junot Diaz is speaking tomorrow?”
“Sure. Sure.” I felt like any second now Ben Fountain was going to snap and impale me with his corn dog pen.
“He got nominated for the National Book Award, too,” I said, and took a step back.
Ben Fountain stared right back at me—bullets. Dude was figureando hard, I thought, plagiaristically. I could tell he was raring to squabble, so I tried to help him out a little:
“You two ought to settle this thing old style, don’t you think? We need a literary feud.”
“A feud?” said Fountain.
Now, I knew that in a previous occupation, Mr. Fountain worked as an attorney, something I had to keep in mind as I proposed to set up a kind of “cage-match,” in which Mr. Diaz and Mr. Fountain would square off to eliminate one another from the National Book Award pool. I threw a little legalese at him, mentioning a “writ of mandamus,” then begin to outline the arrangement-cum-duel. There will be no weapons, but each author will be provided with a mask and, if necessary, some hand chalk. When the gorgon is released from a hydraulic chute looming over the arena, Mr. Fountain apologizes and moves on to speak with an “old friend and colleague” who seems to be asking for spare change.
My dreams of becoming the literary Don King dashed off like some passage of purple prose, insult was added to my injury when I hear that Junot Diaz has cancelled his appearance, citing a tryst with some tornado of a chica named “Sandy.” Does anybody else feel like writers are getting soft? With the author’s brunch wound down, and the panels starting up, I made the rounds of the Capitol and listened to some of today’s best and brightest authors restore my faith in the power of the written word, even though none of these scribes could tell me, pointblank, what that “word” was, exactly. But don’t get me wrong: Geniuses know what they are doing, even when they’re intent on using the term “gestalt” to get out of answering a simple question about whether they think they could best Joan Didion in a battle of wits and knives. Isn’t that right, Jewel?
Perhaps the best way to enjoy the Book Festival, then, was to sit back and let the festival happen to me. It turns out that you can’t just let the Festival happen to you all day, though, because after a while, the police shoo you off the benches if you’ve been snoozing too long, assuming you’re just another drunk author. All the better, I thought, looking at my watch. I’ve got to get to MY panel anyway; to impart my unique extraction of literary wisdom and regale the LitCrawl crowd with some whore stories. I hopped in my car and headed east, set up shop with the rest of my panel at Shangri-La on East 6th and waited to begin.
“Excuse me, everyone. Excuse me!” said the dour event coordinator at my panel’s venue, “I have an announcement.”
The crowd went silent. The author next to me on the panel was huge and I hoped that all my maneuvering to start a writer’s feud hadn’t backfired. He’d also authored a book called Drugs, and for all I knew, could have been on the really good ones that make people fight like champions and feel no pain, or some kind of Lance Armstrong shit. I wasn’t ready to trade blows with this guy, nor was I ready for the rest of the announcement:
“I have a bit of sad news. Everyone shut up—I’m being serious. On the way driving here with the till and the credit card machine, our volunteer hit a deer. Therefore, we apologize to you and our authors, as we won’t be able to sell any books until…until…” and then her voice drifted off, as did she, disappearing behind a tree to pull it together. Everybody felt bad for the deer, which is understandable. My co-panelists and I looked at each other and shrugged. “Who are we to own literature,” we seemed to say to one another, although at the time it was more of a “Can you believe this shit?”
During the panel discussion, I did my best to reply to our moderator’s questions and then those of the audience.
“Yes,” I said, “Steve McQueen used to masturbate into a coffee cup on a moldy stage in Havana, Cuba.”
It was a triumphant night for me. Here I was, a first time author at the Texas Book Festival, even if a deer did try to sabotage my literary career. It’s the words that matter, after all, I thought. Then my head cleared and I recognized that the whole day, the night—right now—was an apt metaphor for what is happening in publishing.
The sting of these hard truths sank in soon after the last complementary bookmark was swept away by the city street sweeps, and I found myself late night at the Driskill hotel where the last of the authors (and even some auteurs) and booklovers hovered over greasy sliders and greasier scotches. I scanned the room to see many of the biggest names in literature talking, exchanging ideas, the flowering of creativity oblivious to the oncoming digital roar. I howled, I pounded my fist and portended apocalypse, overcome with emotion, with sentimentality for the BOOK, the page, the ink, the sweat of it all. We were all that deer and the future was a big angry ball of fuel heading right for us? Would we be fast enough to outrun it? Or would it roll us over into the hot tar of morning?
Literature may be doomed, but you’ll all be delighted to learn that later I found out I it wasn’t a deer that got run over after all. It was a feral hog.