Cheesecake and Coffee At The End Of The World (as we know it)

Special note: The following is a brief description of a wild and wooly adventure I had with a book that is, alas, no longer publishable…by me, in any case. More importantly, it contains a call to arms and authors (of a certain age). It asks that you who are both writers and members of the Millennial generation take pen in hand …or wordprocessor on desk…and write a great American novel. Or non-fiction blockbuster.

Exactly what kind of book that is…well, you'll have to read the essay to find out.

Also, there are some really amateurish, badly done, probably sexist, and downright silly cheesecake-type illustrations of beautiful women and stalwart men to go along with it. But, to see those, you have to go to the other place this essay is posted, Belfort and Bastion's PWYW page, or right about here:

Cheesecake and Coffee

Or, if you don't want to read the essay at all, and just want the really amateurish, badly done, probably sexist, and downright silly cheesecake-type illustrations of beautiful women and stalwart men, well, there's a link on the PWYW site that will take you to where you can download a bunch of 'em.

Cheers
Mjt



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                           Cheesecake and Coffee, or the End of the World As We Know It


                                                     By Michael Jay Tucker

1.

So, once again, I offer you a story of an illustrated book that I’m not publishing.

It is a complicated tale: one in which I strive to protect an author, wrestle with the end of the world, and…and ….

Produce pictures of pretty girls and handsome boys. In varying degrees of undress.


2.

It starts like this.

About the time I founded Belfort and Bastion, my little publishing company, I was approached by a talented young writer whom I happened to know from another aspect of my professional life. Let's call him Siegfried.

Anyway Siegfried had several books he wanted to show me. Most of these were travel books…visits to lands new and far (he's a great traveler) and his observations on same.

But, one of these manuscripts was a novel. Part of it was pure fiction, that is, invented, but much of it (like all novels) was autobiographical. Individual details, the general pattern of events…these were from the author's life, and he admitted to me as much.

In the book, the protagonist, like the writer, is a young man, in his mid-20s, from a privileged upper-middle to upper class background. Over the course of the novel, this character flounders about, desperately trying to find some place for himself in life…and failing consistently.

Also, there was an awful lot of sex in the book, and for this reason Siegfried was reluctant to have the work published under his own name. In fact, his family didn't want him to publish it at all.

Eventually, he had gotten their permission to try to publish the work on the condition that he do so under a pseudonym. I suspect, but do not know, that they also gave their consent knowing that I would be the publisher…i.e., someone unknown, whose customers would surely not include family, friends, or important connections.

In any case, we chatted about the problem. I agreed to keep his identity a secret. I even invented the penname he elected to use. Again, to protect his identity, I will not reveal what it was. Suffice to say that it had connections to the Aesthetic Movement of the nineteenth century.

And, like that movement, it had a certain overtone of studied decadence.


3.

Why decadence? Because of the sex.

Siegfried's goal with the book was to explore the ways that people of his generation and his class have been, well, set up. Young people of his cohort, and he is from the upper crust, have been given a rather fearsome set of instructions. They have been told time and time again that they must not have ordinary, everyday, happy lives of moderate means. No. They are supposed to achieve genuine greatness. They are expected to go forth and become CEOs and Senators, great Scientists and Doctors, fabulously successful Entrepreneurs and Artistic Innovators...

The problem is that not everyone can be a CEO, a senator, a famous scientist or doctor, or an innovator of any sort. Most of us can't. Most of us are doomed to lives of mediocrity, if not of outright failure. That is the sad fate decreed by an indifferent heaven to the vast majority of men and women, even when they are gifted and talented. The race, alas, is not always to the swift. Indeed, it usually isn't.

But Siegfried felt that he and millions like him …the children of affluent suburbs across America…had never learned that. They were burdened with, or, rather, poisoned by these vastly unrealistic expectations. They were sent out into the world with the motto do or die…and, most often, discovered the first wasn't really an option.

So, Siegfried's character spends most of his time in frantic activity. He is almost a blur! He tries one thing after another. Surely, surely, something's got to work. Something will allow him to achieve the grandeur that he feels he must somehow obtain…or else, be a total failure.

And in this breathless dash toward a wholly unobtainable goal, sex is something of a distraction. Yet, he cannot help himself. Siegfried's character is an attractive man, and a lusty one, and he finds himself blundering into and out of relationship after relationship. All of them cold and empty. None answering any human need. And yet the protagonist is enmeshed in them. Trapped. A "prisoner of sex."

Thus the connection to decadence. To a sexuality which includes no humanity. Which is casual to the point of indifference.


4.

I thought that was all a rather good idea for a book. Still do, for that matter.

The problem was, I really didn't have a handle on the book that Siegfried had genuinely written. I was so taken with the idea of the protagonist in his struggle to achieve greatness that I missed what the author was really after.

You see, Siegfried's book was a very personal book. It was profoundly autobiographical. It reflected his own struggle to find some way of leaving his mark upon the world. It was the story of one human being in a particular set of circumstances.

But I, being me, interpreted the book instead from my own strange perspective. I am obsessed with the idea that ours is an age of transition…an age that will be as dramatic as the Industrial Revolution or even the Neolithic. When it is done, our lives …how we make our livings, where we dwell, who commands and who does not… will be radically different.

I think all this because I cannot help but see the trend toward intellectual industrialization … to computers, to machines. I'm not talking about Artificial Intelligence or the "Singularity" or any of the rest of it. No.

But it is inevitable that most white-collar jobs are going to be as automated as the blue-collar ones before them. Just as the artisan fell before the Assembly Line and the industrial robot, so too will the middle and even the upper manager be increasingly rendered irrelevant by machines. (Every economist, every social planner, should be forced to watch the Jeopardy episode in which IBM's Watson successfully competed with humans. It is…instructive.)

In the long run, I am an optimist about this transition. I think we will see a more comfortable world for it.

But in the short run, I'm afraid that things are going to get very messy, indeed.

And that was the framework into which I tried to shove Siegfried's book. I tried to make it the story of a man who realizes that some ages lend themselves to new explorations, to the winning of empires, to new and stunning insights.

But some ages do not lend themselves to such things. In some ages, the path to greatness is quieter and less evident. In eras when empires collapse, when horizons contract, the resolute hero is the man or woman who fights to conserve what has been gained. He or she is the individual who entrenches, who retreats, who fortifies, who evacuates the innocent to shelter, and who plans the counter-attack.

And having thus realized the nature of his age, the protagonist would, like the older and wiser Candide before him, set out to cultivate the garden to the best of his ability.

In the process, telling his parents, his high school guidance counselors, and all the other self-important and toxic people who would run his life for him…that they can go straight away to hell.

Like I say. I think it's a great idea for a book. I wish someone would write it.

It can't be me, because I'm the wrong generation. It should be someone in their 20s or 30s. Maybe, someday, some young writer will appear with such a book in hand at my door. Or, maybe Siegfried will do the piece.

But, in the meanwhile…


5.

So, I set out to sell Siegfried's opus. And,  I failed.

I failed because I was actually trying to sell the book I wanted to see written. Not the one that Siegfried had written. I marketed a book that existed only in my imagination. That's the book I described in all the supporting materials, the press release, the "about this book" that went on Amazon, and so on.

And, of course, it didn't work. When people downloaded the text, they discovered it was not the story I'd told them it was. So, they did not recommend it to friends and family. They did not review it. Or, if they did, then they did so in grudging tones.

I grew increasingly frustrated. Why, I wondered, wasn't the book selling? It seemed like such an easy pitch…

I went back and re-read the work. Dimly, I began to realize that I'd not understood it.

Or rather, I'd understood it well enough. But I had chosen to promote another book entirely… the one in my head.

And both consumer and creator had genuine reason to be angry at me.


6.

The good news was that Siegfried wasn't angry at me. Or at least didn't elect to show that he was. The bad news was that having perceived my error I didn't know how to correct it. You see, it is hard to sell a personal vision.

Yet, I thought, perhaps, I could do so. First, I'd have to recast the advertising materials to stress the protagonist's genuine condition. That is, I would abandon the conceit that he was Everyman (and -woman) in the Age of Diminished Expectations. Instead, I'd point out that Siegfried's character was what Siegfried himself was, i.e., a semi-aristocrat, the child of the 'burbs, facing the anguishing question of what he could do to be worthy of his nobility.

Second…the sex.

I could stress the sex. I hadn't done so because I'd thought of it as being far less important than the social message of the text. But, on reflection, I realized that it was at the heart of the book. The protagonist is constantly attempting to make human connections, through sex, and never manages to do so.

That was an interesting way to take the marketing—particularly since the protagonist, at one point, considers a career in writing erotica. After all, he has lots of experience. It is just that when he tries to put pen to paper, it all comes out dry and tasteless.

But how to emphasize the sex? That was my problem.  After considerable thought, I had a bit of a brainstorm. Why not illustrate the book?

The wonderful thing about electronic books is that you can have pictures in them quite cheaply. Where a full color illustration in a print book can cost you an arm and a leg, it is pretty simple to slip it into an e-book.

Maybe, I thought, we could even break the book up into a series of illustrated, interconnected sub-sections. It would be like an old-time serial. Each chapter would be published separately, as a stand-alone e-booklet, each with five or six semi-erotic pictures in it.

Where would we get the pictures? Well, that was a problem. However, if we could come up with the money, we might be able to hire an artist to do some illustrations for us. In fact, I knew an artist I might be able to use. I had been at one of the innumerable arts and crafts fairs that regularly pop up in New Mexico and I'd met a woman who did color drawings that looked a bit like those of the great Art Deco illustrator, Louis Icart (1880-1950)—i.e. languid women, lounging in clinging evening gowns, mischievous and lascivious, each faintly considering an evening of passion with whichever swain it is that most attracts her.

Or, if we couldn't come up with the money, I might try something myself. I'm not an artist, God knows, but I might manage something with my little painting programs and the Seashore graphics editor.

In fact, I realized, I should do up some images in any case. If I was going to pitch the idea to Siegfried, I'd need show him a little bit of what I had in in mind. And, besides, I thought it would be cool to something kind of sexual. I'm a good, red-blooded, heterosexual male. I'd enjoy doing those kind of pictures.

And…

And it would make a nice change from all those monsters I'd done as Montag.

I produced several images that might perhaps be used to illustrate such a series. (I ought to stress that they were not based on any particular scenes in the book. I just produced the pictures as something Siegfried and I could use as possible models for something we might do later.)

Then, I gathered up the results and prepared to share them, and my idea, with Siegfried.

Cue the Debacle, stage right…


7.

It was, I think, the day before I intended to actually get in touch with Siegfried and explain what I had in mind.  Martha, my father, and I had all gone down to the big Walmart store on Wyoming and Menaul. We'd seen an advertisement about upgrading our iPhones at the store and we thought it be would be quick, simple, and cheap to do so. (It wasn't. And we didn't. We finally had to go to an AT&T store to get the job done.)

Martha decided to visit the women's department. Dad and I went up to the front where we could get a coffee and he could sit down.

While we were there, lingering over the coffee and watching the whole wide world go by (as it always does at Walmart), my phone beeped. I had email.

I glanced at it.

Siegfried…


8.

Siegfried had a problem. Or, several of them. I only got bits and pieces of the details, and I'm not sure I understood everything, but what it boiled down to was that his novel and his other works had to absolutely…positively…exit the Belfort and Bastion catalog. Right now.

Why? Well, it seems he'd gotten a job with a certain large organization. A powerful one. Doing good things for America everywhere. However, this organization would look with displeasure on an employee who might have authored a book that could be considered …pornographic.

In some of our subsequent communications, in which I basically pleaded with him not to take his stuff out of the B&B catalog, I pointed out that he had published it under a penname. There was no way for his employer to know he'd written it.

He did not exactly say, Yeah, right…but that's what he meant. Had I ever heard the name Edward Snowden? If so, did I really believe that there was anything like privacy or secrecy on the Web?

Oh, I said, in a very small voice.

So down came the novel. And all his other books. They are no longer in our catalog. There's no record they ever even existed.

All gone down the memory hole…

Welcome to the new millennium. When technology was going to make censorship impossible. There was a TED talk that said so. So it must be true.

Right?


9.

I didn't blame Siegfried. He was quite right.  He needed to protect himself.

But I was disappointed. His going meant a big hole in our catalog. And, of course, I had those pictures sitting on my hard drive…just waiting for my wife or someone to run across them and raise an eyebrow. ("So, exactly what are you doing with your computer when you say you're working late.")

At first, I was tempted to trash them. But, then, I thought, well, what the hell? Let's use 'em. Let's just throw 'em out there. Maybe someone will find them arousing. Or at least amusing.

So that's what's here. In this document you read.

Oh, and one other thing.

I still think that someone ought to write that book I described. Someone, somewhere, a member of the Millennial Generation…someone in that age cohort which has taken so much abuse from their elders for being "The Peter Pan" generation, and the "boomerang generation," and all the other well-reasoned insults which basically come down to, "You have not lived up to our expectations…even though the world we have given you is resource poor, threadbare, in debt, and in conflict."

Someone needs to write the book that rejects that criticism as drivel, the slander of self-important and self-aggrandizing old fools...

And that, afterwards, points the way forward. 

The way that leads through sacrifice, and struggle, and pain…and, ultimately, I think, to a new world. A world made pure and golden and one.

So, writers, begin. I await your wisdom. And your manuscripts.

~mjt