Writing and selling

I now have to confront two very different problems: selling something that's written, and writing something that's sold.

What's written is the novel, A Gift for the Sultan. (For more on that, scroll down to the entry for 1/18. I'll be reading two chapters at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange this Saturday.) I may have trouble selling it, due to (as one reader put it) "the plethora of unfamiliar proper nouns (from the archaic to the simply exotic)." The novel is set in 1402, in the waning days of the Byzantine empire, which was a long time ago and pretty far away, so I have to decide whether archaic and exotic are assets or defects in the telling. My aim was to make the story authentic, meaning as true as possible to the way these characters would have experienced the world. And their world is pretty strange to us. Submitting a couple of chapters to an audience this Saturday will be an important test.

The thing that's been sold (to W. W. Norton) is the book Latin American Architecture and Urbanism, which I'm co-writing with Susana Torre. She's made more progress than I, and deadline is looming, so I have to get cracking. Right now I'm focusing on the pre-colonial period, especially the Andean architecture of the Incas and the Meso-American of the Mexicas and Mayas. And now, to work.

It was so cold...

...that the amber light at Astor Place and Lafayette froze, and cars had to negotiate their crossings by horn blasts and feints. It was so cold that a water main burst at the corner of Broadway and 4th Street, where I live. The pipe had been exposed for days by an excavation for some other repair, and denuded of its protective asphalt, had been covered only by big planks of steel to let the traffic pass over. It was as though you had gone out to do battle on the frozen Neva clad only in your armor and not your furs. No water also meant no heat, in our building or our neighbors'. It lasted only a few hours -- city workers got right to it and patched the pipe. But it was a reminder of how fragile our urban ecosystem is.

Census miscounts

Monday's reports ot new US Census findings that "Hispanics" were now a larger "minority group" than African Americans stirred me to action. Such confusion about changes that are so important I took as a direct provocation. This is because I dealt with all those issues pretty thoroughly, I thought, in Hispanic Nation (1996; paperback 1997; see link on my main web page). Yesterday and today I wrote two op-eds about it. If they don't make it to print, guess I'll put them here. Meanwhile, I just found this angry, cranky article with which I mostly agree strongly, The 'race' question on the U.S. census is racist, by Bob Curtis.

The city beautiful, the city dangerous

Canberra, Australia's capital, is one of several areas hit in the past few days by devastating fires causing great property damage and loss of life. An Australian colleague forwarded letters to the editor of the Melbourne Age discussing the connections between the city's much-praised design and the special severity of the devastation there. Here's one of them.

21 Jan 2003 p. 15
Crispin Hull, 'The surprising dividend to be found among the ashes'

'Canberra has the best infrastructure of any city in Australia. It is the best planned city in Australia. Yet the bushfire at the weekend claimed hundreds of homes and let a community stunned.

'Why? The key lies in the word itself - bushfire.

'In Australia, bushfires often claim the odd rural dwelling or a few houses when they reach the edge of a town or city.

'But Canberra is different. It is known as the Bush Capital. And if your city is bush, then it will be subject to bushfire in a way that other conurbations will not.

'In other places, the fire hits the edge of town and stops. In Canberra at
the weekend, the very fact that the city has been so beautifully planned was its nemesis. The flames did not meet a fire-resistant slab of urban development - of tar, cement and bricks. Instead they met trees.

A funny travel book on Italy

By my friend Don Monkerud, Italy Uncensored. The endorsements by noted celebrities (some of whom you may have heard of) will make you want to run out and buy a boxful.

anti-war demo

Big anti-war demo in San Francisco

This is a photo-free weblog. Not because I like it that way especially, but because I haven't learned how to load photos. But do go see this handsome composition, Everything is at Stake, and other photos taken by Daniel del Solar at Saturday's big demo in San Francisco.

Freelancers' travails

A colleague in the National Writers Union forwarded this NYT column by Abby Ellin. When you can't think of anything to write, write about writing, or not writing.

Another NWU colleague writes:

When first investigating an unknown publisher or agent, always check at
least these three places:

National Writers Union (naturally)
Preditors and Editors
Writer Beware

It also wouldn't hurt to plug the name into the Google search engine, both for the web and for groups, especially groups, to see if there are any bad reports.

Another good place to check and to post a query is the sff.net newsgroup, sffNet WebNews.

Mediocre like us

Last night we invited "Cristina" into our home. Not our own beloved Cristina, she of the tango and the stained glass (see below), but Cristina Saralegui, star and hostess of the show "Cristina." We don't have much of a TV habit in our house. In fact, the only TV we can receive now that the true believers have knocked down the World Trade Center towers (where New York's major broadcasting antennas were perched) is Channel 41, the Spanish-language Univisi�n, whose antenna was always on top of the Empire State Building. That's just as well, because the only show we normally watch is the Univisión nightly news at 6:30. And that's why we made an exception last night to watch the 10 p.m. show of silly, blonde Cristina Saralegui. She promised us intimate portraits of the people we see every night on the Univisión newscast.

I feel a special connection to those people. I interviewed Jorge Ramos and María Elena Salinas (the long-time co-anchors) for my book, Hispanic Nation, and I still occasionally exchange an e-mail or two with Jorge. (I got to know Blanca Rosa V�lchez, their NYC Bureau Chief -- or actually, the entire bureau -- much better, but she wasn't featured on last night's show.) I was looking forward to hearing more stories of the problems Jorge and María Elena had had to deal with on the job. But Cristina's aim was to produce "un programa motivacional" -- uplifting, I suppose you would say. She repeated that odd word, "motivacional," several times, so you can guess what kind of self-help books she has been reading. So she spent most of her program interviewing Teresa Rodríguez, whose great dramatic story is that her husband (a Univisión executive) died suddenly a few months ago, and another couple -- corpulent Fernando something the sportscaster and his thin blonde wife (does some kind of goofy interview show I never watch) whose "motivational" story was that they'd just adopted a cute Russian infant. Nice, but not very enlightening. As for Jorge Ramos, he wisely avoided talking about the kinds of serious professional challenges he and I discussed when I interviewed him (take a look at that chapter in my book), but mentioned that once in Afghanistan a guerrilla chieftain pointed a gun at his head and would have blown him away if he hadn't forked over the $15 in singles he had in his pocket. That's it? Hell, scarier things have happened to me! And probably to most of the people in his audience. And María Elena, who could also have told a dramatic professional story (again, see the book), recalled having to go on the air in Texas right after she'd learned that a hurricane had blown away her house in Florida. Well, yes, that's dramatic, but it's not particular to people working in the media.

Cristina Saralegui's aim was to show that the glamorous people on camera are just ordinary people like you and me. See? They're as mediocre as you are, so maybe you too can imagine yourself as glamorous. It just ain't true. Professionals are professionals, and they are where they are because they worked to get there (or had some extraordinary luck).

The program motivated me to continue avoiding "Cristina."

Recent research findings

The equality of the sexes has been much exaggerated. I have had a woman under close observation for over 25 years. Prior to that, I had occasion to examine closely several other specimens, some in brief laboratory encounters and others in prolonged investigations extending to weeks, months, even (on two occasions) years. I can confidently report that women in general are not naturally competent to load a dishwasher.

As a byproduct of this research, I can also confirm today's reports of scientific findings that love-making is more effective than chocolate for producing a sense of well-being. It is of course also less fattening.

Greenhouse in the sky

A Certain Person (of whom you have seen mention here before) has been most annoyed by the biased reporting and lack of architectural acumen regarding projects for rebuilding at the World Trade Center site. Most recent annoyance was today's NYT editorial, which inspired her to fire off this guided missive to the Editor:

Re: Next Steps for Ground Zero

Crucial decisions will be made about schemes for Ground Zero without a considered public discussion about the context for the memorial, the public space at street level and the proposal�s contribution to the skyline. For example: in looking at Daniel Libeskind�s scheme, could someone please explain why the memorial should share its site with the rattling trains and rather large PATH station, why should it be entered from a museum hovering overhead, and why New York City needs a 40 story high decorative greenhouse that will require substantial admission fees, and skyscrapers whose tops ape Johnson/Burgee�s 1976 Pennzoil Place in Houston, TX?

Susana Torre
New York, January 21,2003