And Now, We Pivot

I’m sorry if you like the old version of this newsletter. It’s dead and it’s not coming back. I did ten of them! That’s perfect. The Amazing Electric Ephemera lives on in archive form.

I’m shifting this into something more personal, focused, and shorter, but also still entertaining. I have another one I’ve written and it’s ready to go, so I’ll probably send it out next week? I don’t know. I don’t want to give anybody any unrealistic expectations.

Check out the end of this newsletter for information you might find exciting.

I didn’t meet my favorite writer.

Let’s Start with Mickey Spillane

I saw an interview with Mickey Spillane once. He was old and gnarled and scrunched up, like my dad’s baseball glove. He was talking about being angry about something someone else said to him once.

Why was he angry? Someone had called him an author. He wasn’t an author. An author makes books. Mickey Spillane was a writer, goddamnit. Writers are, authors do. Writers write, authors make books. There’s a difference there if you think about it.

I bet he said “goddamnit” a lot, all one word. GODDAMNIT. It feels good to say it when you’re frustrated and you need a word that bounces out of you.

My favorite writer (he’s not just an author) is Neal Stephenson. He is, I think, good at writing exactly what I enjoy reading, and what I want to write. I got to hear him talk to a group of people that was 1/4 the size of the crowd I saw Roxane Gay speak to, which I find interesting to consider.

Who Shows Up?

Neal Stephenson is a mega-writer. His books sell millions of copies. His audience is enormous. Roxanne Gay is accomplished and widely read but I suspect the sales of her books are small in comparison to Stephenson’s. Stephenson rarely makes public appearances, while I think Gay is more accessible. How is it that an arguably more famous author is relegated to the small Carnegie Library Lecture Hall while Gay was able to fill the Music Hall to capacity (the former seats 600, though I estimate only half that number attended, while the Music Hall seats 1900)?

Roxane Gay is active on twitter and is an accessible person. If you tweet at her, she’ll probably respond (if it interests her). Also, her audience trends younger and I think young people are more likely to seek out these kinds of things whereas old people like me would rather stay home. Also, I think that Stephenson’s reputation works against him.

Not a Luddite, But Looks Like One

Neal Stephenson was briefly famous for something other than his novels, kind of. It was a weird modern kind of experience where someone whose work you enjoy and whose name you know does something that brings them into the larger zeitgeist and everybody knows about them for a little while. It’s like finding out one of your friends went to school with your brother and you never knew. It just never came up.

Neal Stephenson would not answer emails. He didn’t do interviews. Social media didn’t exist yet, but there were things on the internet that kind of resembled them, and he was not interested in any of them. He believed, and still does, that his primary mode of communication with his audience was through his novels. If he spent time doing these other things, he would never have time to write his novels, which is what these folks were wanting to communicate with him about. In a time when everybody who could connect was suddenly connecting, and the internet was growing, the people who wrote about what it might look like in the future were the people you‘d think most likely to participate (like Neal Stephenson, whose cyberpunky Snow Crash was like the flashy little brother of William Gibson’s less accessible Neuromancer). But here was a guy whose major contribution to pop culture was a book that half took place in the internet, and he refused to use it! He had a website where he spelled this out and used a phrase that stuck in my head: slabs of time. He needed great slabs of uninterrupted time in order to work on his novels, so don’t expect to communicate with him. This is the Neal Stephenson I know about, which makes it even stranger that I had an opportunity to speak to him and for some reason elected not to.

There are a few factors involved here, so watch me as I unpack them and dissect myself:

Reason 1: I don’t like bothering people.

I know Neal Stephenson is uncomfortable with communicating with his audience. I’m making that up. His reason for not emailing has nothing to do with comfort. I’ve decided that it is true because it justifies my decision to not bother him by asking him to personalize my book (it was already signed). The purpose of personalizing a book is 1/5 to acquire a book that is personalized and 4/5 to have a personal interaction with the author. I saw a photo of Neal Stephenson shaking hands with someone on Facebook and immediately regretted my decision.

This led me to put myself in his situation, and I would absolutely not be bothered to meet a succession of people who liked my writing so much that they would spend money on a book of mine they hadn’t read yet. I would be touched by every single person. I would be thankful that they came to see me and happily exchange a few words and a handshake with them, not because I wasn’t interested in longer conversation but because it would only be fair to the rest of the people in line to keep it short.

You can see where this is going.

Reason 2: My breath was bad from not having eaten all day.

Reason 3: I didn’t have anything interesting to say.

So what? He wasn’t going to remember me. I look like the statistically average person who likes Neal Stephenson, and anything I said would have been pretty close to the statistically average words someone like me would say to him: I love your work, it means a lot to me. That’s pretty much all I would have to say to him, and then I would regret not saying more, or not saying something more meaningful, despite not having much more meaningful things to say.

His writing did not lift me out of depression or “save my life” as I’ve heard people say about writers they particularly like. His writing consistently gives me great pleasure, and has done so since I was very young. I don’t think anything I said would have been meaningful enough to make him remember me.

Reason 4: I don’t like waiting in lines.

This is true and unavoidable. I have likely missed out on a few pleasurable or interesting experiences because I saw the line of people going into it and said “forget it.” Actually, I probably just thought that and what I said was “ugh.” Lines are not just inconvenient, they are also fraught with social danger. What if I’m stuck with someone intolerable? What if they have bad breath and won’t shut up? What if that person is me? What if they want to talk about Neal Stephenson? That’s probably what they’d want to talk about, and I would gladly talk about Neal Stephenson in any context other than a Neal Stephenson reading. It’s like wearing the band’s t-shirt to see the band. It’s obvious. I don’t like being obvious, either.

These reasons all add up to one final conclusion: I never was going to line up to mutter a few words at my favorite writer and shake his hand. I saw a photograph of a friend’s teenage son shaking Neal’s hand. He looked thrilled. Neal wasn’t sitting behind a table, he was standing behind it, and had his sleeves rolled up, sharpie in hand, clearly enjoying himself. I immediately regretted all of those stupid reasons and wished I had stood in that damn line.

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I love writing about things that aren’t me and the Electric Ephemera thing was a fun way to do that. I want to make more things like that, so I’m working on a new project called The Hazlett Histories. I’m going to use Substack.com for that (Substack is popular currently for its monetization, but I’m not monetizing any time soon – I just like its editing tools). It’s under my new pen name, Hazlett Foreman (which isn’t really a pen name since it’s my actual name). It’s going to be about the history of the Pittsburgh region, but told from the corners. There are so many interesting facts about Western Pennsylvania/Eastern Ohio/Northern West Virginia that I want to tell you about!

If you get this newsletter, you’ll get an invite to the new thing, so look out for that. Subscribe if you want. I don’t do this for you, I do it for me! I’m still working on what it will look like, but it’ll be a lot like the Electric Ephemera. I want to have a bunch of them ready to go before I launch it, so it might take me a couple of months. Anyway, here’s a link: The Hazlett Histories

Thank you for reading!