Another Box of Books

Corporate Rock Sucks, #UlyssesTogether, The History of Reggaeton & Saying Goodbye

The rumors are true: the Advance Readers Copies for Corporate Rock Sucks have arrived and they are beautiful.

Another box books

An Advance Readers Copy (ARC) is a nearly finished copy of the book. It’s typically generated for members of the media well in advance of publication so they have time to consider it for coverage. In the old days this meant book reviewers, journalists, magazine editors, etc. But the decline in book coverage in mainstream media means that ARCs are sent out to podcasters, producers, and writers across a wide range of media. (If this is you, hit me up.)

What does nearly finished means? My publisher generates ARCs from the first proof. You might recall from a few weeks ago I was working on the proofs during the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. So none of the changes I made to the proofs are reflected in the ARCs, including the word “conventual.” As a longtime book reviewer, I’m accustomed to reading ARCs with typos and grammar errors, but the perfectionist in me wants to dig a hole and throw all my ARCs in there.

Obviously, I’m not going to do that. Some writers hate promoting their books but I actually enjoy this part of the process. I worked really hard on Corporate Rock Sucks and I want to do my best to help readers find out about it.

Today I want to tell you about some of the features of the book that are a little inside baseball (i.e. mega book nerdy) but I think are pretty cool. These are things I requested and the publisher was gracious enough to agree to even though it meant extra work and/or expense.

Endnote formatting. Corporate Rock Sucks has a lot of endnotes, like over 600. I want my book to be useful to people who are serious about punk rock. It bugs me when punk books don’t have an index or of the quotations are poorly sourced. If I quote a zine published 40 years ago or someone I talked to on the phone last month, I want the information documented so the reader knows exactly where it came from. I also drop the occasional snarky remark in the endnotes. (Why have endnotes if you’re not going to have fun with them, right?) To prevent the endnotes from getting to cumbersome, the numbers reset at the end of every chapter, which brings us to…

Chapter headings. Nearly every book has headers: the title of the book on the left and the author on the right. I requested that the author name be replaced by the chapter title so when readers are flipping back and forth between the endnotes and the text, it will be easier to find their place. It’s a minor thing but if it enhances the reading experience for a handful of readers then it will be worth it.

Images and facing pages. When I got the contract for Corporate Rock Sucks, it stipulated that I provide between 20-25 images. Most publishers typically put all the images together in an insert on high quality paper. I didn’t want that. I wanted twice as many images spread out through the entire book for a curated experience. This was a big ask because it meant more work for the designers but the publisher agree to it. Then it was up to me to license all fifty images that appear in the book and I paid the photographers out of my own pocket. But I’m no dummy. I didn’t want to spend all that money on beautiful images and not be able to showcase them. Each new chapter has a facing page with a full-page image on it. Friends, it looks awesome.

But you’re going to have to take my word for it—for now. I’ll share some of the images, many of which have never been published before, when we get a bit closer to publication. If all this book talk is making you excited, here’s a link where you can work out of some of that energy by preordering Corporate Rock Sucks.

Back East

It’s been a whirlwind of activity lately. I went back to Virginia for the celebration of life ceremony held in my mother’s honor. That sounds more somber than what it was. The whole idea of having a celebration of life was to avoid the baggage that comes with “memorial service.” My mom didn’t want that. She wanted a small, informal gathering where people could talk and share stories. My mom was a painter and a quilter and we had some of her work up on easels. There was food and coffee and tea and Irish music playing in the background. It was all very pleasant.

My brother, Emmett, and his wife, Laura, set-up the whole thing and they did a tremendous job. My only responsibility was to put together a slide show of images from my mom’s life. My mom hated having her photo taken, and as you were taking the photo she’d grit her teeth and tell you how much she hated it. She did this every single time so she always looks mad in her photos. It was like a bit only she didn’t think it was very funny. She once took a painting class where she had to paint a self-portrait. My guess is she painted the portrait off of a photograph because she looks super pissed-off in the painting, which I think is hilarious.

She understood the assignment.

As I dug through some of the older family photo albums I found some photos I’d never seen from way back before I was born. There aren’t many photos of my mom during the period when me and my siblings were young because my father was often away on a ship and she was taking all the pictures. But the photos of her with us kids she looks very happy. That’s the person I remember. Before her illness, before her children became adults. A time when she was closer to the beginning of her journey than the end.

Emmett, mom & me

When I was going through my mother’s things I noticed something strange. Her bookshelf was full of books written by people I know. Some were written by friends, others by writers who read at Vermin on the Mount. Many were indie writers I knew only by reputation. It dawned on me that these were all books that I’d reviewed and that my mother had bought the book in a show of support. Maybe the reviews did their job but but I think she wanted to support the writers I’d written about. I was really touched by that.

At the celebration, many of my mom’s friends in the painting community told me stories about how she’d sewn costumes that were subsequently used in paintings. Smoking jackets, ball gowns, clothing with a pattern or type of texture the artist wanted. She probably didn’t think of these pieces as art, but the jackets and dresses and other things she threw together live on in those paintings, which I think is pretty cool.

The next day, Nuvia and I went to my father’s house in West Virginia with my sister where we did little more than sit by the fire, watch football, and decide when and where and what to eat. My parents have been divorced for over thirty years so it must have been a strange weekend for him as well.

We didn’t stay in the mountain state for long. On Monday we went to the airport to pick up our rental cars. (Travel tip: if you’re renting a car over a holiday, always use the airport location and by all means make sure you’re a member of the loyalty program so you can pick up your car in the lot and drive off without having to wait in line or else this might happen.)

Our destination: Brooklyn. There was traffic in Philadelphia and the GPS suggested a route through Pennsylvania farm country. Not being in any kind of a hurry, we set off down winding roads that cut through green fields dotted with red barns. In a blink of the eye we were on the New Jersey turnpike and crossing the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to Bay Ridge, the part of Brooklyn where my mom grew up and my cousin still lives. Although I was born in New York, I moved away when I was just a kid and Bay Ridge is the corner of the city I know best.

What did I do in New York? It’s all a blur. It’s always a blur. I ate bagels. I rode the subway. I went to the Strand. I ate pizza. I baked biscuits. I watched the New York Giants. I kicked a pile of leaves. I didn’t see the Lemonheads play, but I met up with Evan Dando at his hotel the next day. I gave thanks and ate a lot of stuffing. On the last day, Nuvia and I took a bouquet of white roses and one by one tossed them into the Narrows where the Hudson empties into the sea. One last tribute to my mother before returning to California.

I don’t believe in closure, especially when it comes to the dead. A person’s life is not a story in a book where all the loose ends are wrapped up and tied in a bow. Life is complicated and messy. It’s inexplicably joyful and maddeningly sad. When someone we care about passes on, our job is to keep their memory alive. I’m not saying we should seek out pain and embrace misery, but we shouldn’t try to avoid our feelings. Nuvia shared something with me that one of her friends told her: the hardest part about losing a parent is that we no longer have access to someone who knows our whole story. My mom is gone but because her life was so full her story has many caretakers, and I’m honored to be one of them.

#UlyssesTogether

Speaking of stories, I mentioned last week that I was going to reread my favorite novel with #UlyssesTogether. I haven’t been posting much but my reading is on track. The first three chapters of Ulysses concern Stephen Dedalus, the young protagonist of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is kind of a caricature of young Joyce who goes around with his head stuffed with big ideas and grand ambitions. When I first read Ulysses I was fixated on Stephen because he was the character I related to the most, but over the years as I’ve become a husband and a father and accumulated more life experiences, I started to embrace Leopold Bloom, who will be our guide for most of the book. But I’d somehow forgotten that Stephen is grieving the recent death of his mother. Stephen’s mother asked him to pray at her deathbed but he refused. He’d fled the priest-ridden island for Paris at the first opportunity. Now he’s back home and at loose ends. Oof. I can certainly relate to that.

When we meet Stephen in the opening chapter he’s bothered by the fact that the flat where he pays rent has been overrun by the medical student Buck Mulligan and an Englishman named Haynes who has night terrors and is armed. Stephen feels unwelcome in his own home because of the presence of an unwanted Englishman and the Irishman who let him in—a symbol for Ireland in 1904.

Stephen teaches morning classes at a nearby school and after collecting his money goes for a walk on the beach before running errands in Dublin. These chapters are dense and loaded with allusions to things that will become clearer once we get deeper into the book. Many people become disillusioned with Ulysses during Stephen’s beachwalk. Words, ideas, memories, and observations, run together like the endlessly churning tide. “Listen:  a four-worded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeeiss, ooos.”

Although Stephen’s thoughts teeter on the edge of nonsense, fear not. When Bloom takes the helm in part two things get far less murkier.

I’ve been thinking about podcasts

At Nuvia’s suggestion, I started listening to the Spotify podcast Loud: The History of Reggaeton. Nuvia has been obsessed with reggaeton lately, which I confess isn’t my favorite genre of music. Nuvia has been into J. Balvin and I’m just not feeling it, so I thought I’d go for some good old fashioned music appreciation. The podcast, which is narrated by Ivy Queen, is excellent. The podcast presents a deep dive into the history of Reggaeton but it’s not a sanitized one and is told in a mix of English, Spanish, and Spanglish with language that would never fly on NPR.

My sister (Hi Molly!) is in the podcast production business and she’s been urging me to do a limited series podcast about SST as a way to give listeners a preview of Corporate Rock Sucks. Listening to Loud has been inspiring, but they have a massive budget and extraordinary production. I obsessively listen to You Don’t Know Mojack and I can only image how much work goes into producing it each week.

What do you think? If you’ve read this far, I’d love to know your thoughts.