{"id":1364,"date":"2014-02-19T10:39:40","date_gmt":"2014-02-19T17:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/?p=1364"},"modified":"2014-02-19T10:39:40","modified_gmt":"2014-02-19T17:39:40","slug":"self-loving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/archives\/1364","title":{"rendered":"Self-Loving"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"When<\/a><\/p>\n

When Your Heart Is Strong<\/em>\u00a0drawing by Nolan Winkler<\/a><\/p>\n

(This\u00a0article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser <\/i>February 2014)<\/p>\n

\u201cMarketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.\u201d David Packard<\/i><\/p>\n

A friend of mine went to graduate school at Yale in theater management and marketing where his favorite professor was forever reminding his students: \u201cFor every hundred queries you send out, you can count on one response. This won\u2019t necessarily be a positive response, but at least it will be a response.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a writer and musician who for many years fished, so to speak, in the smallest tributaries of the mainstream before experiencing a few years of success on the cultural Mississippi, as it were, of New York and Hollywood, only to return to the hinterlands where I have continued to cast my line for the past thirty years, I have sent out thousands of queries, stories, songs, novels, plays, screenplays, and music CDs to agents, publishers, producers, directors, DJs, magazine editors, and people randomly selected from the phone book, and in my experience the professor\u2019s estimate of one response per hundred submissions is right on the money.<\/p>\n

I was one of those young writers who, for fun and incentive, once papered the four walls of my rented room (from floor to ceiling) with form rejection letters from The New Yorker<\/i> and Esquire<\/i> and The Atlantic<\/i> and Playboy<\/i> and dozens of other magazines large and small\u2014the collage of hundreds of colored rectangles strikingly beautiful, though the cumulative negativity of the verbiage writ on those disingenuous notes (we carefully considered, we\u2019re very sorry) eventually caused me to burn them all in a bonfire of rage against the machine and in hope of exorcising the demons of self-doubt.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell-ordered self-love is right and natural.\u201d Thomas Aquinas<\/i><\/p>\n

Nowadays, as a sometimes self-publishing author and musician, I frequently encounter disdain and contempt from all sorts of people for manufacturing my own work. Yes, Mark Twain self-published most of his novels, and countless other revered writers and artists self-published, self-promoted, and self-sold, but the dominant cultural myth remains that self-manufacturing books or musical recordings is pathetic and disgraceful, especially for someone no longer in kindergarten.<\/p>\n

This anti-self-publishing sentiment is especially true among people over fifty who were not raised on YouTube, though many people under fifty also make a clear distinction between an artist who brings out his or her own creations and the artist who manages to sell himself, literally, to a subsidiary of a multinational corporation. Is this not a form of cultural idiocy? And from whence does this antipathy to marketing our own creations come from?<\/p>\n

\u201cThis self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind: it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.\u201d Voltaire<\/i><\/p>\n

So there\u2019s Voltaire, the keen observer of social mores, three hundred and fifty years ago warning against public displays of self-appreciation, regardless of the emotional importance of such self-positivity, thus confirming that self-negation as cultural norm is nothing new. And who in our steep-sided pyramidal society and pyramidal economic system benefits most from this bizarre idea that it is shameful and wrong for a free lance artist to manufacture her own art and then alert the world that her art is for sale?<\/p>\n

\u201cMarketing is a contest for people\u2019s attention.\u201d Seth Godin<\/i><\/p>\n

A Seattle publisher recently reissued my novel Inside Moves<\/i><\/a> in a handsome paperback edition after the good book had been out-of-print for over thirty years, and dozens of people who had previously snickered and snorted in derision at my self-published works wrote and called to congratulate me, a few of these brainwashed peeps actually saying things like, \u201cMust be great to have a real<\/i> book in the stores again<\/a>.\u201d How bizarre! I was going to say how fucking<\/i> bizarre, but that would be crude.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cSelf-love is a big part of golf.\u201d Lewis Black<\/i><\/p>\n

Nine times. Think of the Beatles song Revolution 9<\/i> with that annoying voice in the background intoning interminably \u201cNumber Nine, Number Nine.\u201d Recent marketing research indicates that busy publishers, editors, DJs, and other persons bombarded with press releases and poems and screenplays and songs and cries of \u201cLook at me jumping!\u201d by millions of Baby Roos (see Winnie-the-Pooh<\/i>) need to be loudly informed about something nine<\/i> times, <\/i>on average, for the thing to penetrate their overloaded cerebrums and get them to take notice. Oy vey. Such postage and envelopes and mailers for the struggling artist!<\/p>\n

Speaking of postage, over the last seven years I have sent out rafts of copies of my four piano CDs and the two music CDs Marcia and I made together, these rafts going to radio stations around the country, with one response for every hundred submissions a close approximation of my success rate, whether that means actual airplay for Incongroovity <\/i><\/a>or Mystery Inventions <\/i><\/a>or a terse: Go Away! We Only Play Music Recorded By Famous People.<\/p>\n

I hasten to add that these are not large radio stations I apply to, but small ones kin to our own KZYX whereon you will be lucky, indeed, to hear our music, though not for lack of my sending them our CDs. Jamie Roberts, bless him, occasionally plays my recorded fiction, and Joel Cohen has played a few cuts of my piano music\u2014local exposure a special thrill for us. The good people at KMUD are so stoutly unified in their indifference to my offerings, I have ceased to bother them.<\/p>\n

But I have managed to win over a handful of daring and prescient DJs who now regularly spin my tunes in Warren Vermont, Bloomington Indiana, Arcata California, Fort Collins Colorado and Astoria Oregon. Mazel tov!<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, I think everyone struggles with self-love.\u201d Philip Seymour Hoffman<\/i><\/p>\n

When I was a preschool teacher\u2019s aide, one of my favorite things about the three and four-year-olds I had the pleasure of overseeing was their unabashed love of their own artistic endeavors and creations: crayon drawings and finger paintings and block towers and sand castles and somersaults and dances and impromptu songs\u2014everything! Countless times an excited little kid would show me his or her creation, and in response to my saying, \u201cThat\u2019s wonderful!\u201d the little Picasso or O\u2019Keeffe would confidently reply, \u201cI know!\u201d<\/p>\n

But something happens to most American children in the years following kindergarten and continuing for the rest of their lives, some multi-level, multi-layered reprogramming goes on at home, at school, on television, at work, in life, so that by the time children are six and seven-years-old they are much less likely to share their creations with an adult, and by ten-years-old most kids cease to create anything.<\/p>\n

From happy self-loving declarations of \u201cI know!\u201d to complete emotional and creative shutdown in just a few short years\u2014the result of our horrifying and incredibly effective system of mass repression.<\/p>\n

What are you talking about, Todd? Look at the millions of people making YouTube videos of themselves and their kids and cats and stuff, and the millions of people taking pictures of themselves with their smart phones to go along with their tweeting and sexting.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.\u201d Herman Melville<\/i><\/p>\n

In my perusal of sports highlights on my computer, I am required to sit through commercials in order to see brief snippets of games I\u2019ve missed for lack of a television. Thus I have seen many ads for razors, cars, big-budget movies, computers, running shoes, and Disney vacation resorts. In the latest series of Disney ads, people are shown publicly acting out in spontaneous and imaginative ways, and then being judged idiotic or crazy by their families and friends.<\/p>\n

In one such Disney ad, a father and his two children are in a hardware store when the father gets the wacky idea of donning a welding helmet and picking up a fluorescent light tube and pretending to be Darth Vader wielding a light saber. In his excitement, the father gets carried away and knocks over a display, a heinous act that embarrasses his well-behaved children and dismays the other people in the store. But in a twinkling, the father and children and their mother are transported to a Disney resort where the father is allowed to duel with real (fake) light sabers and a Disney employee dressed up as the real (fake) Darth Vader\u2014the children no longer embarrassed by their impulsive father.<\/p>\n

The Voice accompanying this vomitous series of ads declares, and I paraphrase, \u201cSo if you want to be even just a little bit creative and spontaneous and playful without punishment and censure, you must give large quantities of your hard-earned money to the Disney Corporation and we will allow you to be slightly more carefree than you are allowed to be in real life, though we know that even when you come to this totally artificial place, you will be too inhibited to act in ways that will necessitate our having to punish you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Your Heart Is Strong\u00a0drawing by Nolan Winkler (This\u00a0article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser February 2014) \u201cMarketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.\u201d David Packard A friend of mine went to graduate school at Yale in theater management and marketing where his favorite professor was forever reminding his students: \u201cFor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[268,2567,2565,2577,2555,2575,2430,843,2557,749,2574,2353,8,1768,2570,2572,2571,2564,2573,13,2554,1295,2569,1894,104,2537,2558,2576,2566,2561,2553,2562,2563,2559,842,2560,9,33,2045,2013,2568,2556],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1364"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1367,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364\/revisions\/1367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}