Author Archive: jsomers

This morning I woke up to discover that I had been moved to a new hotel room while I slept. My entire bed had been somehow transported to a room that appears to be in an entirely different hotel. How this was even possible is a question for some genius scientists out there, though I believe the secret can be gleaned from the movie Meatballs.

So far no explanation has been offered from my corporate masters. I look in the mirror and I am gaunt and unshaven, slightly yellow. This is probably not going to end well. They’ve pretty much broken me, so I think I’ll start posting to this blog on a twice-daily basis to see if my treatment improves.

I’ve actually got a reading scheduled, as you might note below; That also is probably not going to end well. For me, that is–for you if you’re in the audience it might end well, especially if it ends like my readings usually do–with me screaming and being beaten by security. Highly entertaining. But for me? Not so good. While I make it look easy with my superstar looks and boyish charm, readings are simply No Fun.

Hmmmn…someone just knocked on the door to the room and shouted in a thick Bronx accent that telling people how bad my readings are is unmutual, and if I don’t stop they’ll replace all the liquor in the honor bar with Near Beer. Crickey.

My readings aren’t terrible. I do, for instance, actually read coherently, and sometimes try hard to put some life into my words (it helps if I’m boozed up, which, honestly, I usually am, a trick I picked up back in High School). But Writers as a breed, I am convinced, write because it does not involve public speaking. If we had talent in the public speaking sphere, we’d be performers. Writers invariably write things down for a goddamn reason.

So, readings have always been  a strange promotional tool as far as I’m concerned. Take a bunch of pale, socially awkward people who have rich inner worlds and put them on stage. Brilliant! My god, have the gods of publishing promotion ever been to a reading? Mumbling, stammering, heckling–oh, it’s fun.

Here are my top three Reading Moments from past attempts to make a name for myself. You can be the judge of whether superstardom is in the cards for me or not. These are in reverse order of humiliation:

 #3 -  The Hecklers at Rocky’s. I read at Rocky Sullivans, which is a bar, and which convinced me to always read at bars from now on. I got a little drunk before getting up to the podium, which is why I think all readings should be at bars–the drunkening. Not everyone at the bar was there for the reading; some folks just wanted to drink and talk, and my reading was obviously annoying them, so they heckled me. And I was just Drunk Enough–you know, that magical twilight between sober and snookered–to respond with smart comebacks. At least they seemed like smart comebacks, and everyone laughed.

#2 – Dito. When my first novel, the lamented Lifers, came out, I set up some readings and landed a slot at the Barnes and Noble at Astor Place in Manhattan, which was cool. They paired my up with Dito Montiel for some unknown reason, who was not only reading in support of A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, which eventually Robert Downey Jr. turned into a movie, but who was being filmed by a documentary film crew. I went on first, stammered my way nervously through a passage, and respected the five minute time that had been suggested to me. Dito got up there and. . .performed. he sang, he told stories, he actually did read a little bit, and he basically wiped me off the floor. It kind of sucked.

#1 – Olssons. When I set up the Big Assed Famous Tour of 2002 I tried to hit as many cities as I could where I knew someone. New York was my town, so that was easy enough. In Chicago I had Quimbys Bookstore as an ally. I didn’t know anyone in Philadelphia, and somehow that turned into a triumph with press coverage and everything. In Washington D.C. I had a friend who’d once lived there, and he helped set me up with Olssons, who scheduled me despite not knowing who I was. They then did absolutely nothing to promote the reading, possibly because it had been booked as a favor. As a result, when I drove down there with a few friends, the future-wife, and my Mo, I ended up reading to. . .no one.

Absolutely no one.

Oh, one guy who’d been browsing the magazines wandered over and watched me for a few moments, but I literally read to my 3 friends, my fiancee, and my mother. Needless to say, there was some drinking that night.

Anyway, let’s hope the readings we set up in support of The Electric Church are not quite so horrible. Although, for your sake, maybe they should be, as they’re more entertaining that way.

Yesterday the street urchin who occasionally does dirty jobs for me in exchange for a few coins informed me of a steam pipe explosion not too far away. Since I saw this news on the Internet, I know at least that my corporate masters are keeping me in a Hotel in Manhattan. Which doesn’t surprise me, since corporate masters are notoriously cheap so they wouldn’t spring to fly me anywhere.

I’ve been pondering the sad tradition of writers doing readings. After all, as a species we’re people who found our creative voice in the private, dry scratching of a pen against paper–generally speaking we’re not really meant to be performing before the public.

A few years ago I wrote some articles for my zine about the Big-Assed Famous Tour my wife and I organized around my first novel and a zine collection I’d published, so I thought I’d reprint it here for yucks, to give you a taste of what my readings are generally like. So here you go (note that some names have been changed–my wife, for instance, prefers to not have her name splashed across the Internet, so she is referred to as “The Duchess” at all times):

BIG ASSED in CHICAGO

Jeff’s Book Tour Diary: Part One, Quimbys

Pigs, it’s a sad fact of life that there are now so many humans in the world that simply being moderately smart and articulate no longer makes you a superstar (see the commentary “Where’s My Intellectual Elite?” elsewhere in this issue). This means that simply because I release a book unto the world doesn’t mean the world notices or cares. So I have to promote the damned thing. Having had a moribund novel on the shelves for a year, and a new collection of ziney goodness coming out, I launched the Big Assed Famous Tour to promote both. First stop: Chicago, Illinois, and Quimbys Bookstore.

PRE-TRIP PREPARATION

April 15, 2002: 7:34PM. Having transitioned from my Young River Phoenix Stage (scintillatingly beautiful with substance-abuse issues but still alive) into my Late Jim Morrison Stage (bloated, mush-mouthed, and scruffy) I avoid anything which requires effort, concentration, or sobriety. Having scheduled a trip to Chicago to read at Quimbys, and being determined to not travel by plane (flying being the worst possible way of traveling ever devised) this determination to remain parked in my easy chair was under assault, because I never learned how to drive a manual transmission, which was the only car available to drive out there.

Legal Counsel The Duchess marched into the living room three days before departure wearing a crash helmet and an umpire’s vest, an inky black suicide pill clenched between her teeth. She rudely slapped me on the back of my head, waking me from a fitful, booze-haunted nap.

“Up, doughboy. Time to drive.”

I cowered and whimpered in my easy chair, as is my usual reaction when The Duchess appears suddenly, demanding action.

The training was long and grueling, leaving me sweaty, drained, and bruised from The Duchess’ frequent bitchslaps. But I learned, oh, I learned.

(more…)

They shut off the water to my room yesterday, leading me to suspect I may have actually misread the boilerplate in my contract, since I can’t blog for my corporate masters if I die of dehydration.

I’ve survived so far by drinking water from the toilet tank, which is a little rusty and. . .brakish, but that won’t last forever. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to decide if I’m being punished and, if so, for what. I have to admit the contract was lengthy and I was sleepy and didn’t read it very closely. I may be required to do all sorts of things.

I’ve been keeping myself busy by making copies of my zine, The Inner Swine. This is pretty involved. I have stacks of photocopies of the innards of each issue, and stacks of the covers. I also have a long-necked stapler, Put a cover on top of the 15 double-sided pages of each issue, staple twice in the middle, fold, and voila! One issue of my zine, ready to be stuffed into an envelope and mailed to the handful of people who cared enough to mail me some sweaty dollar bills in the mail. It’s a beautiful thing.

It’s also kind of labor-intensive. The Helper Monkeys used to help, once I’d trained them using my patented beer-no-beer system, but the Helper Monkeys long ago escaped, and even if I wasn’t trapped in this hotel room, forced to blog, the wife wouldn’t allow them in the house anyway.

It used to be worse. My zine used to be distributed by Tower Magazines within Tower Records stores, as well as an outfit called Desert Moon Periodicals, and I was at one time making thousands of copies. By hand. Using the fold-and-staple technique. With Helper Monkeys doing more crapping and flinging of crap than actual zine-making. This took forever, as you can imagine, but the upside was that my zine was showing up in stores all over the world and I actually got little checks in the mail that helped pay for everything.

Today, however, both Tower and Desert Moon have gone bye-bye as the world discovered recently that it is impossible to actually make money by selling zines, and I don’t have to make nearly as many copies each issue. Still, a few hundred is pretty tedious.

Why do it? Well, the zine will always be a place where I can be as dumb and ridiculous as I want, which is pretty damn dumb and ridiculous. It’s also a place where I can dump lazy, unrevised writing filled with terrible grammar and bad spelling, poorly researched opinions and bad, superbad poetry, and no one can complain. Or if they complain, I can then make mean fun of them in the next issue! Plus, if I didn’t, I’d just spend all that money on more liquor, which I think we all agree would not be good for Jeff. Insofar as you have any opinions on what’s good for Jeff in the first place.