I finally got a copy of the gally (I guess you could call it that) of a book I helped fund over a year ago. I gave $150 to a Kickstarter drive from someone writing a book, and it felt for most of the past year+ that I had thrown the money away. I do not remember now what my “reward” was supposed to be but getting an advance copy for editing was not in the original plan. I think the writer’s editor quit. Whatever the case, as I am mentioned somewhat prominently in the book i wanted to make sure he spelled my name right. By “prominently” I don’t mean that I get page after page of mentions. I think I occupy 2 or 3 pages. But it is, as the author said to me in an e-mail last year, a key turning point in the book, as it references the first New York Times story which featured the Payphone site. He recounts an e-mail from me that i do not recall. I certainly wrote it (cannot imagine why he would make it up) but have no memory of writing to him the day the story was published with the message “Looks like we made it.” I would have to read the NYTimes story again but I seem to remember being the lead subject, with his site mentioned in a few paragraphs toward the end, and me wrapping up the story with a quote that I do not remember ever uttering (or typing… there was no direct conversation or phone call for that story, unlike the next one). The story appeard in the erstwhile “Circuits” section. A few years later it somehow came up in conversation with a new boss at Time Inc. He was unwavering in his assessment of that story: “That story was fucking weird, and i don’t mean in an amusing or intriguing way. I just thought it was fucking weird.” I don’t know what is up with that guy any more, though after he got whacked from Time Inc. he used to contact me yearly on my birthday, sometimes treating me to steak dinners at Smith & Wollensky. I remember him describing a car wreck in which he was involved. He was thrown from the car onto the pavement, a huge gash in his leg that took a year to fully heal. He described looking at the spike sticking into one side of his leg and coming out the other side. All he could think to do was look for his wife and daughter, who he could see standing and walking toward. “Once I saw they were OK I knew everything was fine. They were all I cared about.” My admiration for that guy has never faded since he said that to me. And I not only accept but embrace his reaction to that first NYTimes story. Weird is better than boring, right?
My initial comment about Doc’s book is that it is waaaay too long. At 175,000 words I just don’t know how much air he can stir up to keep this subject afloat. The writing starts out reasonably strong but I jumped ahead to the last pages and found that things seemed to go haywire, with all kinds of run on sentences and glaring typos. The book is basically about how one man’s interest in a phone booth in the desert came to define him. As such the critic in me thinks that he should just let that happen.Filling an .RTF document with 175k words detailing how this happened … well, I just don’t know how that fits in to the cultural pantheon of trivial things (of which this is one).
I predict at least another year will pass before this thing is officially published (whatever that means any more). I don’t mean to sound cynical, and as I realize that I do sound cynical I should explain that the sentiment is tempered with good humor. Considering the subject matter and the self-aware peculiarity of it all I think one can allow himself a bit of indignant nonchalance. In the meantime I will continue fleshing out the outline of my book, which comes from a different tack, embracing some of the “MY WEB SITE CHANGED MY LIFE” aesthetic but subsidizing that with research spade work and arias from my life spent looking for payphones.
Before all that I will continue appreciating the beauty of the drop-dead gorgeous woman at the other end of the bar. She’s with a white guy (she’s black) and all I can say is that he is one lucky dude. They make out for a second or two then both go to their phones and chicken wings. They are comfortable together. That seems nice. From this distance that seems nice.
This is my secret place no one knows of… of which no one knows.
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I scanned more magazines, switching from 600dpi to 300 just to see if it really made an OCR difference. I don’t think it will except for those pages where the text is teeny-tiny. Even there I think 600dpi creates more problems than it might solve. Specks and splotches on the pages (these magazines are 90 years old) become hyphens and exclamation points when increased in size like that. What is 600dpi really good for, anyway? (What an unusual question…) I just want to get that mountain of papers out of my space whilst preseved for posterity.
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