“My wife liked it,” my health club friend (Penn ’65) said, “and she didn’t know anything you were talking about.” “What about you?” I said. “I liked it. Good title,” he said. Well, that won’t make my list of quotable reviews. I thought.
Sold two “Cheesesteaks.” One to a fellow from the Philly suburbs (high school classmate of one friend/med school classmate of another). One to strangers. Regular customers at the French they had eyed my book once, then broke down and bought it. No responses as yet.
In other news, I received a pdf of the fully laid-out “Schiz” from Milo. For the first time I saw the illustrations in place I laughed out loud at three of the first four. The text impressed me too. I think we have a hit, I told him, and opted for the higher of the optional print runs we’d discussed. On the downside, my line editing has caught some troubles. The big one is that between conversions from Word Perfect to Word and formattings and divine intervention portions of multiple, multi-party conversations have been lumped into single paragraphs rather than standing apart speaker-by-speaker. Who-said-what is clear, but you must pay attention.
Clarity suffers. Readers are inconvenienced. On the other hand…
If I had been concerned about “inconvenienced” readers, I wouldn’t have written this book. Plus, Cormac McCarthy left out quotation marks entirely, and William Gaddis went with –s, so I can be said to be striking my own blow for avant guarde individualization. Plus it adds an improvisatory jazz feel, altering the reader’s rhythm. Plus it’s like a tip-of-the-hat to John Cage’s openness to randomness. Plus Milo says he found it Altmanesq.
That’s quite a pedigree, but I’m waiting to hear from Adele.