The Blog

Celebs keep writing, publishers keep paying

By Diane Evans

One of the books you’ll see all over the place this fall: The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. With Bantam paying $7.2 million for North American rights to the title, expect big promotion – even though you may not see Buffett on a single talk show. He currently has no plans to be part of the promotion.
Which brings up a question: Would Buffett, at any point in his business life, pay that kind of money for rights to a celebrity book – knowing that 60 books already have been written on that same celebrity (in this case him) and about a dozen new ones are in the works.
I’d like to see that business plan. Especially given that it is common for celebrity books to lose money. For lovers of good reading, the real question is how many worthwhile manuscripts could have been discovered with $7.2 million. Perhaps a character as captivating as Harry Potter? Or a writer as reflective as Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love?
If publishing has lost glory, it’s because publishers go almost lock step on the road most traveled, which means playing off existing celebrities rather than creating new ones. They take the short cut, figuring, for example, that if you sell a million Buffett titles, you avoid the hard work of poring over heaven knows how many manuscripts in search of something great or at least inventive.
Is it any wonder that with the Harry Potter series completed, nothing has emerged of equal potential?
In The Snowball, the distinction is that Buffett pledged his cooperation to the first-time author, Alice Schroeder. He gave her access his files and correspondence. He also opened doors for her to interview people who could contribute insights. Schroeder and Buffett first met in the late 1990s when she worked as an analyst at Paine Webber covering Buffett’s Omaha-based conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
How well she analyzed Berkshire Hathaway is beside the point. In selling celebrity with a few new add-ons, she sized up the current book publishing industry right on.
The Snowball is due out Sept. 29.
Here’s another upcoming title, based on access to inside information: This one is Bob Woodward’s fourth book on Bush administration, titled The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008. It is due out Sept. 8.
Publisher Simon & Shuster is keeping the book under tight embargo, although embargoes are often broken to generate buzz. “There has not been such an authoritative and intimate account of presidential decision making since the Nixon tapes and the Pentagon Papers,” Woodward’s longtime editor, Alice Mayhew, said in a statement. “This is the declassification of what went on in secret, behind the scenes.”
A celebrity journalist since his role in uncovering the Watergate scandal, Woodward also co-authored All the King’s Me” and The Final Days on the inner workings of Watergate and the Nixon administration.

Diane Evans is founder and president of DelMio.com and SuLit Communications LLC.

By Diane Evans
If you go to Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York, you learn pretty quickly that you need to show up early at the bookstore on the square if you want to be sure to get a New York Times before they’re sold out. It’s that kind of place during the summer season of programs. It’s where you might take a yoga class, go sailing, hear a lecture by someone famous from Harvard, and maybe go to church – all in the same day. And amid all this, the bookstore buzzes all day.
So, since Chautauquans view themselves as a literary bunch, you might be interested in what they’re reading. Here are a few of the titles that have been on the central display table this summer:

Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert:
Some people hibernate when dealing with the emotional trauma of a difficult divorce. But not Gilbert, who self-prescribed a year of exotic travel and convinced a publishing house to pay for it with a book advance. The result is her adventure story, of self-discovery in Rome (the eating leg of the trip), of an ashram in India (the praying portion) and love (in Bali, where she reconnected with joy).

Marley & Me, by John Grogan:

This is Grogan’s love letter to his incorrigible Labrador retriever, Marley.
In telling of his own experience with the ill-mannered, psychologically challenged Marley, Grogan examines the mysterious bond between dogs and their owners. And through stories about his needy pet, Grogan also shares observations of life, marriage and fatherhood.

A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini:
In his first novel, The Kite Runner, and then in A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini writes about the Afghans caught in the middle of a seemingly endless string of wars and battles for power. Both novels paint a grim and moving picture of life in a war-torn country, and of lives lived in the face of hunger, death and a bleak future. Hosseini makes you realize that, even while bombs rain down and people are dying of hunger, people still fall in love, seek friends and, mostly, try to remain human.

The Dangerous Book For Boys, by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden:
The Dangerous Book for Boys is not just about growing up, nor is it geared only for boys. It’s about the lessons from boyhood that come in handy later on. It’s part Boy Scout manual, part history lesson, part old-fashioned schoolbook. Some of this stuff might leave you scratching your head over its selections, such as must-read books for boys, or the five knots that every boy should know. Some stuff, such as how to build a bow and arrows, will probably appall many of today’s superprotective “helicopter” parents. But then that’s the point of the book: It’s OK to put a little danger in your life.

Dissecting the feminine psychology

By Diane Evans
DelMio.com

The other day I won a bingo-like game during one of the summer courses at Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York. I was the first to call out four corners – which meant I got first pick of several books spread out on a table. For my prize, I chose a thin paperback titled She: Understanding Feminine Psychology, by the psychologist Robert A. Johnson.
After class, the instructor’s husband, a defense attorney from the Buffalo area, whispered that I had picked the best book there.
Interesting paradox, right off. First, a book written by a man about understanding women. (Are we not sufficiently unpredictable to remain a collective mystery?) And second, another man saying “right on.”
OK, enough of the jibjab. Johnson is a noted lecturer in the teachings of the late psychologist Carl Jung, and this Buffalo defense lawyer is married to an expert on Jung and he, along with his wife, studied at the Jung Institute in Switzerland. The book She examines the ancient myth of Amor and Psyche and what it says about the universal challenges that women face.
My revised edition, published in 1989 by HarperCollins, is only 80 pages, so it didn’t take long to read. For me, not every point was easy to understand. But it was well worth getting through the occasional difficult passages to discover the many precious nuggets of timeless wisdom.
Take this little tip as an example: “If you wish to give your children the best possible heritage, give them a clean unconscious, not your own unlived life.”
Or this: “For a young woman to cope with her mother-in-law’s power system is to attain feminine maturity.”
The myth of Amor and Psyche is one of those stories you can spend a lifetime studying and still not uncover all the nuances. In the broadest sense, the story deals with the suffering that Psyche must endure to come into her own, be the authentic person she was meant to be, and reach her full potential in life. The process requires Psyche to meet challenge after challenge, until finally she must travel to the underworld. Yet as painful as her journey is, there is reward in the end. She ultimately marries Eros (or Amor, depending on your version of the story) and the two give birth to a daughter named Pleasure.
And the mystery of women? Near the end of the book, when he describes Psyche emerging from Hades, Johnson addresses this point:
“The deepest interior mystery for a woman may not be named or given any label,” he writes. “It is the essence of that feminine quality which must remain a mystery, certainly to men, and hardly less so for women. It is not less than the element of healing itself.”
Also, you might be interested in a couple of companion titles by Johnson: He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, and We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love.

I was half-listening to the NPR guy talking about three must-read baseball books, and my ears perked up when I heard Veeck — as in Wreck.” It’s a funny title based on the whacky baseball life of an unapologetic baseball huckster. He left his mark with the Cleveland Indians, among other baseball franchises. I remember seeing it on my dad’s nightstand in the last year of his life. My dad grew up in the Cleveland area, Solon mostly, moved to Columbus when he was in high school and went to Ohio State (as did I — go to Ohio State, that is, not grow up in Solon). But he always had great affection for all things Cleveland, including the Indians and the Browns. Both teams had good years, and they had interminable stretches of being either mediocre or downright awful, especially the Indians.

Veeck (rhymes with wreck) was one colorful character connected to the Indians, staging goofball promotions and fielding funny characters in the games — anything to put butts in chairs, as the expression goes. As far as I can tell, he was not connected with the 10-cent beer fiasco of the early-mid ’70s, one of the most infamous riots in sports history.

But that radio commentator declaring Veeck — as in Wreck a must-read seemed to create a connection to a memory that had begun to fade.

Brought a smile to my face. The reason Alan Schwarz of the New York Times liked it and the other two titles so much is that they didn’t get all nostalgic about the “good old days” when baseball was pure and innocent — because it wasn’t. It was racist, for starters. As Lou Brock told him a while back, baseball tends to reflect society as a whole. Baseball in the ’40s was segregated, observing the same ugly Jim Crow laws American society honored. To look back at the ’40s and ’50s and see segregation viewed as something that’s normal is as foreign to today’s kids as is the concept of slavery. It simply does not compute.

So yeah, maybe you could get a bag of peanuts for a nickel and a beer didn’t cost $8 (or more), but there are some things in baseball’s history that we ought not be so proud of.

Kind of got off on a rant there, didn’t I? Oh, well.

By Diane Evans
DelMio.com
OK, explain life to me.

That’s what the life’s work of the late psychiatrist Carl Jung attempts to do. Sure, a lot of people try to explain life. But Jung’s work stands out, and is the subject of so much modern study and commentary, because he appeals to what many of us know intuitively. In other words, he validates concepts many of us feel and believe through our inner wisdom.

Each year, I look forward to classes on Jungian thought during the summer season of programs at the nonprofit Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York. Jung taught that myths and fairy tales mirror the basic patterns of the human psyche. The Chautauqua classes most often focus on these myths and fairy tales, through the masterful teaching of Kaye Lindauer, now in her 21st season at Chautauqua, and recently retired as a school librarian and lecturer at Syracuse University.

During one recent session, Lindauer told an Italian fable about The North Wind.
In the story, a poor farmer worries about how to feed his family after winds destroy his crops several years in a row. The farmer goes to see the North Wind, to plead for help. Depending on your beliefs, you can see the North Wind as a symbol for God, or a higher power, or even a positive force of energy.

Long story short: The North Wind helps the farmer, but the farmer keeps sabotaging his own interests and his family’s interests, by letting his landlord (who also happens to be a priest) take advantage of him.
Each time the farmer falls into despair, he goes back to The North Wind (a good move). The farmer ultimately prospers once he learns not just to take the gifts of the North Wind, but also – and this is critically important – to protect those gifts from people, such as the priest-landlord, who are greedy and try to push others around.

The moral of the story: Living a just life doesn’t mean you’re so goody-goody all the time that you let other people take advantage of you. Balance is required, and that means you need to be tough and aggressive at times for your own good and the good of those in your care.

The key is balance. If you’re too passive, expect to get snookered. But if you’re too aggressive, you’ll end up being a bully and you’ll pay consequences in the end.

Balance is central to Jungian thought, as it is to various religious beliefs. In Jewish mysticism, for example, the whole idea of the tree of life is about keeping life in balance. Each positive attribute must be kept in check against its negative counterpart. For instance: Too much generosity and you go broke. Yet on the other hand, too much stinginess and you end up poor in spirit.

Standing up for ourselves – with just the right dose of force – can be one of the most difficult balancing acts of all. In The North Wind story, the farmer takes his blows until he finally learns the hard way.
You probably don’t need to study Jung to know that’s the way life is.

By Diane Evans
DelMio.com
Ever heard of a fairy tale called The White Snake?
I hadn’t, until hearing a lecture on it recently during the 2008 summer programming at the nonprofit Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York.
The classes on myths and fairy tales are among my favorites each year at Chautauqua. A lot has to do with the teacher, Kaye Lindauer, recently retired as a school librarian and lecturer at Syracuse University. Lindauer, who is in her 21st summer season at Chautauqua, teaches from the late psychiatrist Carl Jung’s perspective that fairy tales mirror the basic patterns of the human psyche.
Now to the story. The crux of it is this: A wise king has a servant bring him a covered dish every day after dinner, but no one, including the servant, knows what’s on the plate, because the king waits until the servant leaves before lifting the cover. Each day the king eats a piece of the white snake.
You can guess what happens next: The servant gets curious, and one day lifts the cover unbeknownst to the king. The servant, too, takes a bite of the white snake, and immediately gains the ability to understand the language of animals.
On the very same day, the queen loses her ring. The servant becomes a suspect and faces execution unless he can find the ring. Turns out a duck had swallowed the ring, and because the servant understands the language of animals, he overhears the ducks talking, learns what had happened and retrieves the ring – saving himself but not the duck.
The servant then asks the king for a horse and a little money to travel. The king agrees and the servant sets out. End of story.
For Kaye Lindauer, the symbolic meanings of even this short story took up two days of 75-minute lectures.
A couple points, to give you an idea:
• Fairy tales show how a new cycle of growth evolves in a person. Change is the goal, which is huge, because it means that a new dominant voice within you must replace the voice that has you locked in your comfort zone and trying to please others, even to your own detriment. If you opt for change, expect conflict in your life, because the price of growth is that you must fight resistance. In this story, the snake represents renewal, because a snake sheds its skin. As Lindauer pointed out: Jung believed that we are constantly pushed toward growth, and if we try to repress such growth, it comes out in the form of sickness or maybe an accident. Status quo is not an option. We either grow or we digress.
• Once the servant tasted the snake, he gained new insight, and once that happened, he couldn’t go back to being the person he was before. Lindauer: In real life, the process can take years. Once you know what you know today, you can’t go back to where you were before. Your own knowing keeps you from going back to the place of not knowing. It’s the Garden of Eden metaphor: Once Adam and Eve tasted the fruit, they couldn’t go back to their prior innocence. And the white snake? Given that we, too, are constantly shedding old skin, the challenge becomes that of saying yes to a life that over and over will never be the same.

I don’t have a lot of highways in my life. There are literal ones (I-71), but figurative ones, too. I have a daughter and a wife, so I’m part of the parenting universe. But I’m also in my mid-20s, so I’m over there, too. I enjoy gardening and chopping firewood, but also going to the museum and live shows of the Prairie Home Companion.

It’s hard sometimes to know what you want and who you are. Do you really get to define yourself, or do other people do that for you? Can you change that definition, or are you inexorably the same person, no matter what?

Who’s really in charge of you?

– Chuck Bowen, on Feathers.

My wife is a speech pathologist, and so thanks to her, I have more exposure to the Deaf community than I think I otherwise would have. That’s Deaf with a capital D, which is different from someone who is deaf.

That capital D brings with it a world of meaning. The Deaf community can be insular, and believes that there’s nothing wrong with being deaf, and its members shouldn’t try to learn to speak or have hearing aids. They don’t want to be “fixed” by the medical and speech communities.

Sean and his family struggle with this in Feathers. How do you celebrate something that sets you apart so obviously from society and that can cause such feelings of isolation, especially as a tween? Sean was very lucky his family all learned sign language; many families elect to get hearing aids and push their deaf children to learn to speak.

Perhaps we should all try and celebrate who we are, even if it does make things harder sometimes.

— Chuck Bowen, on Feathers.

One of the best parts about writing is the ability to create entire families, cities and even worlds with the tap of a keyboard or stroke of a pen. Jacqueline Woodson (CLICK HERE) talks about getting in trouble for telling lies in school. Her teacher said if she wrote the lies down, they become fiction.

What power.

And what makes it such a powerful medium of expression is that it is so accessible. You don’t need a set of paints or brushes; you don’t need an instrument. Like Benjamin Disraeli, if you don’t have anything that you like to read, you can just write something you do.

It’s hard sometimes as a journalist to keep the fiction and the nonfiction separate. It’s not that I want to fabricate things in the articles I write, but part of my job is to meet interesting people who have had great adventures. They’re ready-made characters for a book, and sometimes I just want to rearrange their stories for more punch and drama, to add a little more detail and dialogue. But I guess that’s what they call a jumping off point; art imitates life, right?

– Chuck Bown, on Feathers

One could argue whether Web entities are the cause or effect of continuing cuts at newspapers and other print media (probably both), but the growing influence of information sources that start with “http” also places greater responsibility on those sites. Like, for instance, DelMio.com.

In other words, we have to work harder to cultivate and protect our credibility as believable sources of news. With all of the slimeball Web operations perpetrating their versions of “truthiness,” serious e-journalists have to be extra vigilant for bias, or worse, half-truths or outright lies. Yes, adjust to the fast-moving pace of the Web, but protect the values of journalism — being fair and balanced (NOT the Fox “news ” version — check this out for “fair, balanced“) seeking the truth, not just a narrow piece of “evidence” to support a particular political point of view.

What got me thinking about this, and set me off on a mild rant, was news that the Cleveland Plain Dealer, an operation I once considered (mostly) friendly competition a few miles up the road from my former employer, the Akron Beacon Journal, is cutting back on its Sunday book section. OK, it’s hardly shocking news. Newspapers and magazines have been losing readers, advertisers and revenue streams left and right, first in trickles, now in huge gushers. A pair of Cleveland weekly alternative papers are merging into one: Cleveland Scene. And more people are going to lose their jobs. U.S. News and World Report is going to biweekly publication, scaling back from weekly. Layoffs at newspapers have become as common as auto plant layoffs. Only news folk don’t get called back when the economy improves.

The predictions made three decades ago of the impending demise of newspapers now suddenly seem not so implausible. The threat is real. Is the Internet to blame? In part, yes. But so is TV, and to a lesser extent radio. There are just so many outlets for news or what passes for news these days. Hell, most under-30 types get their news from Jon Stewart! At least it ain’t Rush Lintball. And many newspaper companies (and their stubborn employees — I saw it firsthand) were too slow to respond to the challenge, to be creative in applying their fabulous newsgathering abilities and shaping them for the new media.

I can’t tell you how many times I heard a reporter/editor/photographer say indignantly, “We don’t DO that!” Well, you’re right, you don’t do it anymore. The ones who are left there ARE doing that. Now, when you have reporters being sent out to take photographs, chances are about 98 percent of the time the quality of the photo is going to be noticeably inferior. Same when you have graphic artists being made to do jobs they have limited training in, or any other situation where you jam square pegs into round holes. But you can take a tape recorder, convert the conversation to a podcast, or send a photog out with a camcorder (the only real difference is sound) and upload that.

If it goes viral on YouTube, you’ve got big returns.

Anyway, my initial point is that with traditional media losing market share, the onus is on “new” media to get it right. The rise in the 20th century of a serious journalistic code of ethics was a reaction to irresponsible behavior such as “yellow journalism” (That and some costly libel suits). In the 21st century, it’s the same game, different playing field.

It’s time for a gut check, for new media and old.