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Show Acting Alone Page 28 Sam knew. But writers have to think this amoral way in the era of Norman Mailer and his fee-charging agent Scott Meredith - the prototypical Whore and Pimp of the literary world. Beautiful language and deep, honest soul-searching are liabilities nowadays. Opportunism and whoredom are in. Meredith and Mailer have soaked American literature, American life, with a stinging black syrup of corruption that smells like old toejam. Meredith rakes in big bucks charging young writers "reading fees," his huge stable of language-hating hacks flattering the young writers, egging them on, with no intention of ever representing their work on the open market. And gulls like Sam fall for it every time with book after book, just to get somebody besides Mom to pretend to read their soft porno. Still, Sam could not help it: he kept trying to tell himself and Shannon that he was not a shameless opportunist, all the way up to Kiev, Nebraska. "Think of the things Sgt. Spikey can teach me about human nature. Think of what he has seen. A revolution, for hell's sake! A real revolution! Think of the depth I can gain as a novelist, as a grownup, from talking to your cousin, looking at him -" "What's a oppore-tune-iss?" piped Shannon, rubbing her little hand on the crotch of her fake designer jeans. It was she whose life Hollywood and Gulf Oil and Mailer and Meredith were molding. Both of the youngsters pretty much ignored the considerable amounts of Nature that the car cruised through on the way up to Nebraska. Sam did take note, slitty-eyed, of a hedgeball branch loaded down with ratty itchy grey starling birds, chirping nonstop, idiotically, the same way a true pro taps out true-to-life journalistic novels one right after the other. |
