My two creative writing classes convened today with Jim Mullen. Mullen is a comic writer whose novel It Takes a Village Idiot has been a huge hit in these parts. He lived between the towns of Delhi and Walton when he wrote the book, so the town in his novel is called Walleye. The novel opens with a description of Mullen's high society life in NYC in which he knew the likes of Malcolm Forbes and dined on his yacht with 102 other sit-down guests while VIPs flew in and out on helicopters as they had to get to their next date.
Mullen's wife got sick of that life and they moved up here, and soon Jim found himself stoking his castiron fireplace in May with woollen gloves with the fingers poking out (local style). He describes my college as the vandalization of a perfectly good hilltop by a cabal of Soviet architects.
We went to the local Sushi place and I ordered a Bento box with salmon. He ordered some kind of sushi special followed by a fried ice cream. He used the chopsticks while I asked for a fork. I drank green tea, however, while he had a Diet Coke. He regaled me with stories of his illustrious youth in NYC including the 700 guests who came to his 33rd birthday party, and how he knows the editor of Parade Magazine, Reader's Digest, and many other journals from his days as a Bohemian writer living in Chelsea, and scrambling between Forbes magazine, various radio programs, and so on. I'm not sure what the bill came to, because he paid. I put in four dollars for tip. He said it's important to pay your dues in writing by living in NYC for at least a decade, to meet the muckety-mucks. He said you do this by drinking in decent bars for years on end. Since I don't drink anything but tea I wondered if there were alternatives.
He has self-published a new book called Now Out in Paperback, and has many other books (Baby's First Tattoo), plus he has a syndicated column in 600 newspapers that tell jokes on strange stuff like how the summer's tomatoes are doing (two years ago when it first came out they all had blight), and why his wife gives him flak for his Hawaiian shirts. Mullen has 200 ties, but he never wears them up here. He said he feels overdressed in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and sandals at a funeral in these parts. I wonder if he should add a straw hat, just to add a subtle touch. Straw hats are de rigeur at Catskills funerals.
He seemed to be an endless repository of the work of odd writers. He recommended Moonwalking with Einstein, about mnemonics. He also recommended Sol Stein on writing. And there is The Short Happy Life of Oscar Wao. The last name is apparently how a Hispanic would say Wilde.
I felt like I had my finger in a socket for four hours. I hope my students got half as much out of it as I did. I'll ask them on Wednesday for feedback.
2 comments:
This is refreshing.
Perhaps this is your "surreal" side, Kirby.
Not angry. Not indignant. Not suspicious.
I loved Mullen, and have always thought he is a genius. His IQ is probably ten times higher than mine (mine is 40, which does indeed make me angry and indignant!).
Mullen always has lots of tricks up his sleeve. Self-publishing he claims is the wave of the future since the big publishers charge you so much to push your own books that it makes no sense to do so. When you publish your own, you keep most of the cash on any given sale.
He said there was something called I think Clearspace through Amazon.com where you can publish cheaply and the books look just like other paperbacks. I loved the quality of his latest book: nice big dark type, good content, and he got to control all of it. With the big publishers they control the cover, and can even control content to a degree.The refreshngness in the post was probably due to Mullen. I'm an embittered old hack, let's agree on that one thing, at least, Curtis!
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