“You might say that the Beach Boys’ long history of feuds, friendships and lawsuits exemplifies two sides of the American character. On the Brian side we have an uncompromising blue-state idealism, and on the Mike side we have red-state utility and sticking with the formula.”

Read more here.

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• Love of My Life: Freddie Mercury’s Death, 20 Years Later

“What’s the name of that singer you love so much?” she asked, cigarette and coffee in hand. “Because he’s on the news.”

I was a 23-year-old slacker with an English degree who graduated the previous May. I had no job, no future prospects. The week before I’d moved out of the apartment I shared with a crazy ex-girlfriend and was staying at my mother and stepfather’s house until I could find my own place.

Surrounded by my possessions in trash bags and milk crates, I arose from an air mattress with the sound of Kurt Loder from MTV News announcing that Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the rock band Queen, died the night before from AIDS-related bronchio-pneumonia.

“That’s such a shame,” my mother said. “And he was so handsome.”

She knew this was a big deal for me. Her garage was stacked with boxes of every record Queen ever made, every 45, tubes full of posters. Second only to the Beatles in Great Britain, Queen ruled the charts with the stadium anthems “We Will Rock You” and “We Are The Champions.” There’s also the operatic opus cum karaoke staple “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

By that November, now twenty years ago, their stardom had faded, especially in the U.S. It was then I realized that my fandom-turned-obsession was also a kind of love affair, which was now coming to an end.

Since I was nine years old, Freddie Mercury—flamboyant frontman, rock icon—was at the center of my rather dull suburban life. Like millions of others, while he was alive, he earned my devotion and hero-worship. It was only when he died, and in the years that followed, that he became an actual human being. I finally saw him for who he was: a gay man.

***

Everybody loves Queen nowadays. This past September, Google celebrated what would have been Freddie Mercury’s 65th birthday with an animated doodle on its homepage. Singing competitions feature Queen every season, with Freddie’s operatic voice as a benchmark for melismatic contestants. There’s a long-running Queen musical in London’s West End and around the world, a competition to be in an official tribute band, and a biopic with Sacha Baron Coen in the works. In 1991, however, Queen couldn’t get arrested in the U.S., and being a fan of Freddie Mercury was tantamount to saying you were either gay, unhip, or both.

Growing up, I didn’t want my rock stars to be like me. Life in South Jersey was boring, unsophisticated. The son of a truck driver and part-time secretary, I lived in a rancher and went to Catholic school. Nothing around me could be rockstar-like. Everyman rockers Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar made me cringe back then.

“People want art,” Freddie said in 1977. “They want showbiz. They want to see you rush off in your limousine.” He toasted his audiences with champagne in ballet tights. I wanted some of his showbiz presence to rub off on me, but what was that presence?

Rock ’n’ roll equals sex. To listen to Jim Morrison or Elvis Presley for years as obsessive teenagers must leave a different effect than listening to, say, singing along to the lead singer of a rock band called Queen who dressed like Leatherman from the Village People.

Once in high school I got into a fight with a boy named Frank when he said I was gay because I liked Queen. To admit that my rock idol was gay would be tantamount to saying that I, too, was gay, and that was social suicide as a teen in South Jersey. So we duked it out. Most of the time I would say Freddie Mercury was “bisexual,” as if he had somehow reformed himself. I wasn’t especially naïve, and Freddie didn’t hide his sexuality, but he also didn’t proclaim it. He said it would be “boring” if he did.

If we were good Freudians, we would concede we’re all a bit bisexual. At some point, gazing at Freddie channel Elvis Presley in “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and Donna Summer in “Another One Bites The Dust,” I questioned whether all this added up to me being gay myself. Was I in love with Freddie Mercury?

When Queen’s video to “I Want to Break Free,” an homage to Coronation Street in which the band members dressed in drag, came out, it was banned by MTV and seen as some transsexual recruitment video. I was doubly horrified. I am ashamed to admit to this gay panic now, but I was afraid Freddie’s gayness was rubbing off on me.

It’s not that I didn’t suspect or understand on some level that Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of a rock band called Queen who sported the Chelsea macho clone look, was gay.  Should sexual preference matter when someone loves that artist’s work? Certainly not. What about if you’re obsessed with the person who made it, want to know everything about them? This complicates things.

It came to a head after the summer before I started college. I knew I liked girls, but the two times I had sex were clumsy affairs. One night, drinking at a bar in Philadelphia that would serve my friends, a nice man in motorcycle chaps and studded vest struck up a conversation.

He placed his hands was on my shoulder, rubbing it, then started to move down. We got to the point where I had to give my first “I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression but I’m straight” speech.

“But I heard you talking about Queen,” he said. “How can you love Freddie Mercury and not be gay?”

Back then, there were many feminine rock frontmen to choose from—David Bowie, David Lee Roth, Robert Plant—but there was something different about Freddie Mercury. Biographers point out his “exotic” background. Born Faroukh Bulsara in Zanzibar to a Parsi family, he went to boarding school in India and moved with his family to London in 1964, when he was 17.

“I’m not going to be a rock star,” he told a fellow art student at college. “I’m going to be a legend.”

Back then, I chose Freddie because of his voice and the songs he sung—sweet and soulful one track, operatic and angry the next. I swooned to his records with headphones on in my room. I was a dramatic kid, and Queen provided the perfect soundtrack to endure the chronic humiliation of adolescence.

Freddie wasn’t just my rock idol, I now realize; he was my diva. In The Queen’s Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum writes that when a gay man chooses his opera diva, it’s for life, and this pairing is unavoidably erotic, a devotion or obsession beyond even the bonds of marriage. “Only one diva can have the power to describe a listener’s life, as a compass describes a circle,” he writes.

For Koestenbaum that compass was Anna Moffo; for me, it was Freddie Mercury.

***

By 1991, I’d met real, live gay people and I was comfortable in my role as humdrum heterosexual. I knew about AIDS and HIV. Condoms were everywhere. Safe sex PSAs ran in the student center non-stop. I also knew AIDs didn’t just affect gay men—Magic Johnson had just announced he was HIV-positive earlier that month.

Freddie’s gaunt appearance in the final videos reminded me of the men I knew in Philadelphia and New York City, many of them writers and artists, who wore baggy clothing and a beard as they faced the end of their life. Queen stopped touring in 1986 and their singer became a recluse. Fans kept guessing, and he and the band kept his illness secret, recording songs until the end.

In the summer of 1991, I went to my first Queen fan convention in a hotel in Pennsylvania. In a conference room, we screened some recent videos, and Freddie looked particularly unwell.

“He’s just skinny is all,” one Midwestern woman said to me. “He just needs a couple square meals.”

The day before he died, he issued a statement announcing his HIV status, where he lay in bed surrounded his assistant, rock legend Dave Clark, as well as his boyfriend of six years and his cats. Freddie didn’t go out with a long guitar chord or pyrotechnics. He didn’t die a tragic figure, nor did he die a heroic one. He went out the same way all of us will: as a human being.

The biographies and tell-all memoirs that followed painted a slightly different picture of Freddie. He was outrageous onstage and a party animal offstage. He also kept a koi pond, loved Japanese art, went to nightclubs, enjoyed elaborate dinners, took care of his parents and made up female nicknames for all his friends.

He was, in other words, a middle-aged gay man. Which made me love Queen’s music and fall in love with Freddie all over again.

***

Perhaps it’s the case that my love has become more unabashed now that he’s gone, not only because I’m comfortable with my own sexuality and his, but because it has become cool again to love Queen and Freddie.

Critics who called Queen everything from self-involved prats to fascists have largely died off, replaced by a new generation who see Freddie and Queen as the missing link between David Bowie and ABBA, a Beach Boys in Led Zeppelin clothing led by a Liza Minelli fanatic who toured like the Who.

In this age of meat dresses and same-sex marriage, it doesn’t matter that Queen’s singer was a flamboyant gay man. Lady Gaga’s namesake comes from Queen’s 1984 hit “Radio Ga Ga,” an homage to both singers’ showmanship.

When students at the college where I teach find out I am a Queen fan who wrote two strange books about the band, their eyes light up.

“Queen is my favorite band, too,” one always tells me.

The 20th anniversary of the death of Freddie Mercury won’t be marked by gatherings in Central Park. I know that. This week I’m keeping it simple. I’ll pour a glass of champagne and sing along to “Love of My Life,” one of Freddie’s trademark ballads, sung by thousands.

No one will ask, “Where were you when Freddie Mercury died?” A better question might be: what died along with Freddie Mercury, and what still lives on, 20 years later?

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• How To Be Inappropriate: A BookExpo America Guide

According to Daniel Nester and Steve Black, authors of the article “Here Today, Here Tomorrow: On the Lifespan of the Literary Magazine,” literary journals are actually far more resilient than you may think. Using data that compares the survival rates of different types of periodicals, Nester and Black discuss why some literary journals stick it out while others fail, and why despite all the challenges, new publications continue to crop up.

(via Bookslut)

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• Warm, Wise Submissions Tips
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• Love of My Life: Freddie Mercury’s Death, 20 Years Later

I do hope you have heard about Matthew Lippman’s new book. It’s called Monkey Bars, just out this Fall by Typecast Publishing, the new outfit born out of The Lumberyard, a poetry journal done on letterpress that is at once beautiful and not-precious about it. I reviewed Lippman’s first book, The New Year of Yellow for upstate New York magazine Chronogram, and here’s part of what I wrote: “Initially, Matthew Lippman’s debut poetry collection looks like loopy-lyrical-riffs on quotidiana: jazz, getting fat, blondes. And it is: His generous humor alone makes it a good book. What makes it a great book is how it transport us to places unexpected, strange, sacred…brave enough to move us.”

We live in an age of contemporary poetry where the self-fashioned indie rockers have won; we’re all indie now, which of course makes that meaningless. This presents for poets and what’s left of its readers a new paradigm: if we are all detached, vanguarded and twee, concepted-to-the-hilt, maybe the most rebellious job is to fuck up shit by making sense. And that’s what I get out of Matthew Lippman’s poetry.

I talked to Matthew via Word attachments over email, asking him a couple questions at a time, over the course of about three weeks. He is unfailingly friendly and not caught up in Poetryland, which at least for this writer is refreshing and worthy of emulating. He teaches at a place called Beaver Day School near Boston; he offered me a t-shirt after I expressed interest for what seems to me obvious reasons, but has yet to follow through on this. He did, however, express man-love for me at one point in this interview. So I have that going for me. Which is nice.

The Rumpus Interview with Matthew Lippman

The Rumpus: First question: Hi Matthew. How are you? Where are you reading this question? What are you wearing?

Matthew Lippman: I am well, thank you. I am reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Dorothea Lasky’s Black Life, some Larry Levis, Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors and some Doonesbury comic strips. Wearing? I’d like to say nothing but that would be a lie. I got a nice J. Crew button-up shirt with some wicked stripes, some comfy corduroys that feel like my second skin, athletic socks and some Ecco shoes.

Rumpus: Hmmm. That’s a nice picture you painted there. I am a Clark’s man myself. I am excited about your book, who published it, and how it was published. And, of course, the poems.

Lippman: Typecast Publishing, a new press, founded by the wicked smart Jennifer Woods, published the book. She published it out of a desire to make books that were little art pieces. Her brother, Eric Woods, runs a letterpress, Firecracker Press, so the two of them put their heads, hearts and talents together to make this cool book, Monkey Bars. I wrote the poems over the course of three years. It’s a bit of angry book, funny, all that shit. It came out of thin air as far as I am concerned.

Rumpus: One of the things I love about your poems is their wacky plainspokenness, by which I mean these poems, at least on the surface, could be read as if it were two people talking to each other, or a poet-speaker to a reader. Then, somewhere along the line, the reader or the speaker realizes something is amiss, or fucked-up, or epiphanic.

Lippman: I just write the way I think I talk. I’m glad you enjoy them, get them, hear them. I would like everyone to embrace the plainspokenness of the poems. I just read an interview with Gerald Stern in The Rumpus, and he was talking about poetry now and how poets are NOT saying anything about the world and how that is not the best thing, you know, for poetry. So, that is what I hope, deep down in my fat gut, that these poems do—that they say something about this fucked up, beautiful, amazing, breathtaking, god-awful-difficult world. I think they do and that is why I want everyone who picks up the book to connect to the work, because, I would hope, I am writing poems that speak to many things that are both of me and outside of me at the same time. I don’t want to alienate anyone with my poems. I think that’s foolish and stupid. Poetry is difficult enough as it is. I want to bring people in. I want it to be a love fest. It would be cool as shit if all of us poets could have the kind of mass appeal as a Lady Gaga or Tampax.

Rumpus: If you write the way you talk, then what thought do you put into line breaks, compression, word choice?

Lippman: It’s the spirit of the thing, really. I have no idea why I break lines the way I do. I write in blocks, long paragraphs, then go back and break the sentences up. Something happens in my body when I’m doing it and it tells me, my body, break. So I do. I have not ever wanted to fuck with that process. It’s a little thing I’ve had going with myself for a long time.

Rumpus: Have you ever thought about putting a 25-cent word for a 5-cent thought and held back? I guess what I mean to say is: have you ever said to yourself, fuck it—I actually want to alienate somebody with this line/stanza/poem here?

Lippman: I think this new book of mine is all about alienating people. I did not think about it when I was putting it together but it’s not for the weak of heart. There’s a lot of language in here that could offend people. I hope it does. Not to be a bastard just to make folks think. It’s an angry book. It’s a colorful book. It’s a short book. It’s a funny book.

Rumpus: Do you have anything to say about the star-machinery of the American poetry world? Or do you want to just skip that?

Lippman: It’s stupid and cute.

Rumpus: When I was coming up as a poet, maybe it was the way for you to, but there was this idiotic movement to rid poems of “narrative,” as if that was the problem with the poetry of the 1980s and 1990s. Do you remember those days? Did you come up against that when trying to get your poems published? Also: do you consider yourself a narrative poet?

Lippman: I have to admit I have always been pretty set on doing what I do no matter the tone, tenor and or climate of things. I never envisioned myself as part of any poetry world, believe it or not. I understood that my work, back in the late 80’s, when I first started out on the serious poetry road, was not what everyone else was doing. I was cocky and a cave-dweller at the same time. Mostly, I just never took myself that seriously as a poet so it did not matter in the end.

Even still, that is all I wanted to be, a poet. Hell, it took me fourteen years to get my first book published. Maybe that’s because I was writing, and continue to write, narrative poems. I don’t know. What I do know is that I love stories. I am a product of a lot of television and movie viewing. I read a lot of books when I was young. Stories are in my nature. But, also, the world loves stories. What’s the problem with telling stories? I never understood it. I have always worked in that mode because it makes the most sense to me and I think, too, it appeals to the most amount of people.

Ultimately, as I have said, that’s what I want to do—tell stories that are about me and then not about me at the same time. It’s nothing new. But, it’s the only reason to continue writing poems. I think building houses and making organic tomatoes and teaching and raising children are far more important and satisfying than writing a poem. Globally speaking, that is. It’s a conundrum I can’t quite figure out yet.

Rumpus: So when you say you never envision yourself as being part of any poetry world, are you saying that being part of some team, coterie, movement, Elks Lodge of like-minded poets has been important to you? Poets tend to move in packs, perhaps to protect or promote each other. With you that hasn’t been the case—but at the same time, you did attend arguably the center of poet-career-making, the Iowa Writers Workshop. Was that a freakout for you, or no?

Lippman: Kill me if you want, but lately I feel a little more like I’m in the club. I like that because it makes me feel like I’ve arrived a bit. Truth is, that’s only a feeling. I have never arrived. I don’t know if I ever will, whatever that means. I got lucky with Iowa. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I was accepted. Hell, I never finished my application because I gave up the whole idea half way through the process.

While I was there I hung out with people who were not part of the team. I had two great teachers: One, Gerald Stern. The other, a fellow student, Juan Felipe Herrera. What this has to do with anything I don’t know. I just hung out on the fringe when I was there. It was great and I love that I was given the opportunity to attend that place. It did nothing for my career but I was not thinking about a career. That was, in hindsight, both a good and bad thing. Now, 23 years later, I’m a broke poet with two books and a small fan base that digs my shit. Not too shabby for a half-ass, lazy, somewhat smart guy like myself.

Rumpus: I think about that sometimes, what to do after you do make it into the club, or a club, or are let past the velvet ropes. I used to think all my problems would be solved with getting a book—that’s how I put it, “getting a book.” Once that happens, it’s like you’ve started a “career.” Or something. But I still have that focus on the difference among the poets I see around, the way they approach or not approach the world, or even mention or not mention it, as Gerald Stern says. In Monkey Bars, you write about “rich white corporate Don Henley dick suckers” and turn into Moses (“Wal-Mart Poem”) and turn, again and again, to the “nut-job baboon type” America has to offer. You say it’s an “angry book,” but it seems to celebrate a certain kind of buffoonery that Americans in particular have always celebrated. I’m thinking of an H.L. Mencken quote I like to trundle out but can’t find right now; it’s something along the lines of “Like most Americans, I’ve spent half my life laughing.” I’m reading the NYRB reprint of Constance Rourke’s 1931 book American Humor: A Study of The National Character, and in it he mentions a certain “backwoodsman”darkness to our humor, that it’s somehow more necessary in the U.S. to have in even the lightest of light verses—“Hallelujah! I’m a bum!” and all that. I’m not sure this is a question so much as I want to throw these ideas at you and see if you have thought along these lines.

Lippman: I just want to say before I talk to these issues a little that I love you. You can print that or not but it’s the truth. It’s not so far-fetched to say. I don’t even know you, really, but this love thing is very important to me in the context of your thoughts.

It’s true, all of it, about the darkness and the humor. Maybe it’s very American, too. I think of people like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Sandra Bernhardt—dark and hysterical. Poets like Alan Dugan and Jennifer L. Knox and Gerald Stern and Philip Larkin. These folks had/have an itch to scratch. You got to be pissed off to be funny. I believe in that. I also believe that there is a tremendous amount of generosity in channeling both energies and that generosity is about celebration or love. I think about your book, God Save My Queen and how much of all this is in there—anger, lust, humor, love.

Once, I got slammed for writing a glowing review of a new book of poems; the reviewer called me a name, and I read it and thought, Hey, wait a minute, it’s just poetry. It’s not like I’m coming at you with a spear to knock off your village. Shit. Shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up. There are so many wonderful ways to say stuff and either you like it you don’t. It’s not very sophisticated but it’s open-hearted and, at the end of the day, if you can’t be open-hearted, then the world is a harder place. Too much being said, too much language. But, I’m one of the guys saying things and putting out the language. Wicked contradiction.

So, really, I don’t know what I’m saying or where I am, even. I think if you really, really, really love to play with language because it’s like you really, really, really love to walk down the street, then it does not matter about the clubs, the books, the banter. There is nothing more exciting and fun to me, other than being with the wife and kids, that is like writing a poem. The flat-out experience of making some crazy shit up out of thin air that expresses exactly and inexactly, at the same time, how I feel or see things, is just way too much fun. It’s my thing and it has helped me survive into and out of love my whole damn life. So, I’m grateful I have that. I know people who don’t and it bums them out. I got lucky not because I got two books or any of that. I got lucky because I was born with this poetry thing and I did not let it pass me by. For this, I am grateful and I love you.

Rumpus: Whew. I am verklempt. Let’s take a break: Give me your top five Phil Collins/Phil Collins-era Genesis songs.

Lippman: The Carpet Crawlers
The Chamber of 32 Doors
Take Me Home
In The Air
You Can’t Hurry Love (cover)

Rumpus: And we’re back. You also went to one of the best teacher education programs, Teachers College at Columbia. If you were put in charge of some educational system—a school or city-wide system—what would you do?

Lippman: I would get rid of homework. I would kick any kid out of school for bullying, forever. I would abolish standardized testing. I would build a curriculum that was a based on a philosophy of creative problem-solving and I would pay teachers lots of money.

Rumpus: I admire your set-edness, the way you’re sure about what you do. Do you still watch TV? What shows do you enjoy?

Lippman: Damn straight I watch TV. I suck on a lot of sports and the stupid television shows that have me transfixed these days are Fringe, Event and the new zombie series on AMC called Walking Dead.

Rumpus: You have a poem about monkeys, or should I say monkey-wanting, in your first book, The New Year of Yellow, and have the word monkey in the title of this book. Would it be fair to say you have an interest in monkeys more than the average poet?

Lippman: My interest in monkeys comes from growing up in New York City. My classes—1st, 2nd, 3rd grade—would visit the Central Park Zoo once a month. We could walk there. This was the 1970s so it was all pretty disgusting in Manhattan. We were kids. We did not care. We used to go visit the monkeys and they would howl at us, pee at us, scream their monkey heads off. I thought it was the coolest and cruelest thing all at once. I wanted to bust them out of there. I also just the love word, monkey. Touch my monkey. Monkey see monkey do. Monkey up. Monkey down. Monkey all around the town. That’s some music!

Rumpus: We first met when I had you come to a Sunday afternoon reading series in Albany, where some 15 people showed up, and then I reviewed your book positively in a free local arts monthly magazine. To what degree do you owe your success to me, and will I ever see some of the profits from Monkey Bars?

Lippman: Seriously, you have been such a big fan. I love you for your fan-ness. How can I repay you? If there was money…um, that’s a rough one. I got two kids. I can interview you, perhaps, for a cool, hip journal like The Rumpus. Will that do? The subject/topic of the interview will be: why you left poetry and why you returned to poetry.

Rumpus: Geez, that’s kind of heavy. I think I left poetry more about the people and leaving New York City than disliking poems or poem-making. I’ve never stopped reading them. I might be able to guess who your influences are poet-wise, but maybe you could point out a poet whose work you love, but I might not expect you to love? Maybe stick to 20th Century?

Lippman: Hart Crane. That guy rocks my world.

Rumpus: Last question: I am about to play laser tag, or lazertag. Do you have any tips?

Lippman: Shoot to miss.

Read The Rumpus Review of Monkey Bars.

Related Posts:

• Interviews With Poets: The Rumpus Original Combo with Traci Brimhall
• Monkey Bars
• The Rumpus Original (Supersized) Combo with Neil de la Flor
• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Emily Rapp
• A Quick Interview with Diana Salier

This is, I think, a good way to approach an online poetry journal–make it something other than a paper journal transferred onto a website.

Sherman Alexie hates the Kindle.

Google has now digitized ten million books. Presumably, none of them are poetry collections by Sherman Alexie.

Daniel Nester loves The Outfield’s “Your Love.” And why not? I saw them play in Fayetteville when I was in grad school–they were pretty good.

I’m going to start including a link to someone I think you should be following on Twitter. This week: John Williams of Linebreak. If you have suggestions for people I should follow on Twitter, leave them in comments or email me at poetry-AT-therumpus-DOT-net.

Brian Spears

Related Posts:

• “Robinson Alone” by Kathleen Rooney
• “Pachyderm”
• The Rumpus Interview with Barbara Jane Reyes
• Why I Chose Amy Newman’s Dear Editor for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
• Why I Chose T. R. Hummer’s Ephemeron for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

Selected Factor Loadings of Specific Inappropriate Behaviors of Four Inviolable Proscriptive Norms at BookExpo America

Comments, Sexual and/or Non-Predatory

Q65 “Creepy” brush of hand atop young publicist’s buttocks:  skirt.
Q66 “Hug-and-Tug” atop the oblique depression above young publicist’s buttocks.

Inappropriate Remarks/Blatant personal disregard/
Maladaptive behavior

Q23 “When I touch here my [name of body part] disappears.”
Q213 Repeating question such as “Can I have a taffy now?” or “Will Jesus come as a thief in the night?”
Q80 Any verbalized anxiety about state of publishing industry.

Intrusive Interpersonal Behavior

Q77 “Close talking” with coffee breath.
Q78 “Close talking” without coffee breath.
Q79 “Close talking” on microphone at plenary discussion; see Q81 Plosives.
Q101 Use “Colonel Klink accent” exclusively in International Rights Center.
Q129 Leave freebies from publisher A on publisher B’s table.

Negligent Endangerment of Others

Q22 Publicist locking eyes, smiling excessively at conventioneer.
Q23 Writer with promo brochure stepping on, breaking ankle of Barnes & Noble rep.
Q24 Aggression toward interns and/or security staff (see Q345-Q355 Naomi Campbell)

Follow Up With New Contacts Immediately

It is received wisdom in dating that one should wait a few days before contacting one’s prospective mate.  This wisdom is wrong, however, while attending BookExpo America.  Before you even place someone’s business card or information in your wallet or organizer, well before you enter that information in your wallet or organizer, well before you enter that information in a Personal Digital Assistant (or PDA), one should follow up that connection with a phone call.  Nothing pleases a foreign rights associate more than a call on their cell phone from a self-marketing author who is walking the floor.  The call you make doesn’t “distract from doing [his/her/my] job,” as one often hears.  Calling minutes, even seconds after the exchange of information solidifies the relationship; young female publicists especially see this behavior as establishing a “safe zone” in which the relationship can grow.

The same applies for how often one should call a new contact.  “Never call someone more than once a day unless they reply,” the website TopDatingTips.com tells us. “Desperation and instability are huge turn offs.” Again, this is not applicable at BEA. One should not only call contacts early, but often.  Calls get dropped, calls are forgotten, voicemails accidentally erased.  Only through saturating follow-up calls can you force the question of whether that co-marketing scheme could work out, or if that editor still has that unsolicited manuscript you handed to him, then emailed, and then FedExed.

Whenever possible, you should have crackers, pieces of candy or breath mints on hand so that you and your new contact may ceremoniously “break bread” with each other.  A small-sized box of Wheat Thins, Graham Crackers, or Saltines kept in a side pocket of a messenger can make sure a “bread” is “broken.”

Regarding Learned Helplessness at BEA

We know from the literature that mice, when placed in a Zero Maze, experience an increase in thigmotactic and locomotive anxiety levels. Recent research indicates that manipulating the D2R and D2L dopamine receptors play a prominent role in mediating emotional response to novelty and inescapable stress.

In a similar way, conventioneers wend their way through the Javits Center or are placed in eight-by-ten-foot booths experience a “learned helplessness”—a kind behavior that can be broken down into the categories of “desperate looks” and “grooming deterioration.” Therefore, it is recommended, then, that conventioneers administer some sort of dopamine-manipulating medication, such as crystal methamphetamine or a milder amphetamine, to assist their performance while attending BEA (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Author, publisher, and book buyer levels of learned helplessness, desperate looks, and grooming deterioration, pre- and post-administering D2R and D2L dopamine receptors.

Nasty and/or Attention-Getting Comments

Unlike other industries, where the practice is regarded as inappropriate, “out of line,” or “bad for sales,” the use of nasty comments at BEA can help business. Although not officially sanctioned by Reed Exhibitions, the company with a majority stake in running BookExpo America and BookExpo Canada, the use of nasty comments can increase market share and garner media attention.

Figure 2. Nasty comments on three successive days at BookExpo America 2003.

The 2003 BEA nasty comment-filled feud between political authors Al Franken and Bill O’Reilly at an author breakfast proved to be an effective publicity-magnet for all concerned. As Figure 1 shows, successive nasty comments can have diminishing returns, however.  A solid stream of nasty comments tends to reach “white noise” level by Day 3 of any professional convention.

Used in a shrewd and prudent way, however, nasty comments at BEA can still create buzz.  The perfectly placed “That [Name of Prominent Press Editor] is a complete know-nothing cunt” will garner buzz on the Javits floor.  The days of the blanket nasty comments, the so-called “nasty blast,” have passed.  In this niche-driven marketplace, you need to offer nasty comments to a select few, people who you trust, who will carry that message over to another select group.  This “permission nasty marketing” method will ensure you get the nasty comment message out to those who need to hear it.

Selected Factor Loadings of Specific Inappropriate Behaviors of Two More Inviolable Proscriptive Norms at BookExpo America

Public and Private Flatulence

Q11 “Crop dusting” Left Behind Books/or Tyndale House Publishers booths.
Q12 Exclaim “Fame’s posterior Trumpet has blown!” after letting one rip in front of publisher to elevate conversation, as an allusion to Fourth Book of Alexander Pope’s 1743 work, The Dunciad (lines 71-72).

Inappropriate Remarks

Q222 Urge to insult other people.
Q234 Insult colleagues in your mind without actually saying the words.
Q267 Have regular urges to make socially inappropriate remarks.
Q268 Find self fighting the impulse to yell “fire” in a public place such as the Javits Center.
Q269 Try to cover up your inappropriate action(s) by carrying out another action that is not inappropriate.

Streaking and Other Forms of Public Nudity

Sometimes nasty or attention-getting comments is not enough, either to market your publisher or your own title, or to promote your public library.  In those rare instances, then, it is customary at BEA to resort to the use of public nudity.

The critical literature bears out this tendency.  In a national study of the 1974 “streaking” fad on college campuses, a group of social scientists set out to find patterns and classify observed instances of streaking. (Aguirre B.R., Quarantelli, E.L., and  Jorge L. Mendoza. “The Collective Behavior of Fads: The Characteristics, Effects, and Career of Streaking.” American Sociological Review, Vol. 53, No. 4. (Aug., 1988), pp. 569-584).  The research team at Texas A & M mailed out a 24-item questionnaire to deans of student affairs at various colleges and identified 10 attributes of streaking events for which there was numeric information:

1. Length of streaking incidents.
2. Total number of streakers
3. Location of streaking.
4. Number of places streaking occurred on campus.
5. Units in which streaking occurred.
6. Time of day.
7. Gender of streakers.
8. Whether streaking was done to establish or break a record.
9. Whether nonstudents participated in the streaking events.
10. Whether “mooning” (baring the buttocks) occurred.

The researchers concluded that public nudity is at its most pervasive when exams and other stress-inducing events occur. At events such as BEA, where so much product is being sold and the state of publishing causing stress in perpetuity, one way to reach those “Big Mouth” bloggers and Twitterers who will talk up your new title is to exhibit flesh. Baring buttocks or hiking up skirts or even khakis may work in lieu of head-to-toe nudity.

Giveaways/Candy/Third-Party Punishment

Handing out free items at a publisher’s booth is common practice at BEA.  It’s a publisher’s way of reinforcing/creating a brand in the minds of the Book Buyer, Reviewer, or Fellow Publisher.  When you receive a piece of candy, you are designated a “Big Mouth Marketer”—someone who will spread the word of that brand once you leave the Javits Center.

But inappropriate behavior can solidify this exchange and offers a more sustainable model.  If, for example, candies associated with a title are placed on the table of a publisher, do not simply pick up the candy and walk past the table.  Rather, as you pick up the piece of candy, propose to form a “Candy-in-the-Butt Club” or “Candy-in-the-Cleavage Club” to bond with your fellow publishing insider.

One variation, the so-called “Kinship and friendship in a trust game with third party punishment (TPP),” involves the placing of candy inside a third person’s cleavage and/or butt, and is especially effective in establishing a relationship with colleagues.  Drawn from research conducted in southern Namibia (Karas) and the bordering northern South Africa (Namaqualand) by Björn Vollan and colleagues at University of Mannheim, researchers found that “kinship is the baseline behaviour when no other features are available to humans.”

A personal exchange among friends, such as candy placed up butts or inside cleavage, in which a third-party observer is punished plays an important role in solidifying cooperation among friends.

A Closing Note from the Author of This Guide

The term “inappropriate” can mean any number of things in any number of social situations. There is inappropriate dress, inappropriate acts, inappropriate words, settings, interactions, touches; abnormal, unsuitable, unbecoming, unfitting, unseemly, unbefitting, incongruous, ill-defined; to be out of place or keeping, inapt; the manner in which a clergyman touches a woman’s leg or the content of a congressman’s homoerotic text messages; an Australian opposition leader caught sniffing a woman’s chair; late night talk show host Conan O’Brien’s skit, “Heavy Metal Guitar Legend Clive Clemmons’ Inappropriate Response Channel.” Through the bank-and-pile and torrent of manners and human custom, “inappropriate” has come to mean anything aberrant, odd, out-of-place.

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