Well, it’s time for me to rouse my slumbering mind and
charge out there onto the field once again. The old cerebral
cortex seems to require more of a prod than usual this
month; it would rather stay in bed, snug and blissful under
the covers, content to drift in and out of glimmering
dreams. Who can blame it? My mind naturally seeks comfort,
and writing a tirade -- writing ANYTHING longer than a
greeting card message -- demands a mobilization of brain
cells comparable to putting the Chinese army on stand-by
alert.
How easy it was in the early days, tossing phrases like
cherry bombs and delighting in the smart pop of their
explosions! For a direct-mail copywriter who had secretly
longed to be a satirical wordmeister, those first tirades
released energies long trapped under sedimentary layers of
dutiful professional drudgework. I was a volcano of cynicism
rumbling and spewing after twenty years of dour dormancy,
and I relished my monthly eruptions. I relished them the way
a Puritan enjoys banishing cigarette smokers to the parking
lot. I felt the rippling and triumphant glee of a righteous
contrarian. If nature had fitted me for any activity other
than eating, sleeping and Trivial Pursuit, this was it: the
creation of darkly mirthful messages that would cheer the
lonely outlaw souls of enlightened cynics from Missouri to
Mozambique.
Now, as I attempt to fling my words onto the screen for
the fiftieth time, I’m conscious of dimming fires,
sluggish neural connections, the creaking and clanking of
verbal gears. At fifty, my tirades are middle-aged like
their author -- and I fear they’re aging even more
rapidly. They grow heavy about the waist; the youthful spunk
and urgency are almost gone. I’m no longer a rumbling
verbal volcano; I hammer and bend my words like a meticulous
silversmith. The prickly indignation of my early tirades has
given way to autumnal reflection and avuncular advice; I’m
turning into Ralph Waldo Emerson, but without his missionary
zeal or his Harvard connections or the aphoristic brilliance
of his prime years. I’m on my way to becoming the Sage of
Allentown, Pennsylvania -- a balding, nominally cynical
Confucius dispensing quaint homilies amid the occasional
grumbles -- but even my adopted hometown has no idea what to
do with me.
One thing hasn’t changed since I started writing my
tirades fifty months ago: I’m still not famous. I’m not
even infamous, except at my former workplace. This vast
public indifference disturbs and perplexes me. The Roman
satirist Juvenal penned just sixteen peevish poems and won a
lasting place on the slopes of Parnassus, at least until my
fellow Baby Boomers decided to discard everything that
happened before the 1950s. Here I’ve written approximately
forty-nine and one-third tirades, all of them browseworthy,
some of them (like this one) admittedly self-indulgent or
just plain silly, most of them amusing and a handful of them
inspired beyond the journalistic standards of Rupert Murdoch.
I’m more profound than Dave Barry, funnier than Daniel
Schorr, kinder than P.J. O’Rourke and generally more
rational than Hunter S. Thompson, at least in my lucid
moments. And what kind of recognition have I received? Am I
toasted as the Juvenal of the Internet, even by the twenty
or so surviving Latin majors who can recollect who Juvenal
was? Have I been asked to write tirades for Time, The
New Yorker or Birdwatcher’s Digest? Have I been
invited to bandy witticisms with Curtis Sliwa and Courtney
Love on "Politically Incorrect"? Has William F.
Buckley cajoled me into skiing with him and J. Kenneth
Galbraith at Gstaad? Has an Armenian ever been King of
Sweden?
Oh, I’ve received scores of generous notes from my
readers, all of them laudatory except for one mildly irate
e-mail from the marketing VP at my former workplace. The
problem is that most of my readers are isolated cynics like
me, with no connections among the tastemaking elite -- the
elusive literary/journalistic/weekend-in-the-Hamptons/brunch-at-Norman-Mailer’s
crowd. I have no instinct for ingratiating myself with the
sort of people who attend literary soir
e.
If I did know them, they’d undoubtedly disparage my taste
in books or coffee beans. They’d take one look at my shoes
and dismiss me as a pre-postmodern bourgeois arriviste who
still believes, pathetically of course, that William Saroyan
was a great writer. That’s fine with me. Let the
tastemakers abandon me to my cynical solitude, eyes and mind
straining to grind out a few more pages of willfully pungent
prose. Let me rant and I’m happy. But I have to admit it
also helps to be read.
Meanwhile, time is sneaking away like a deadbeat business
partner, as it frequently does just when you need it most.
By the time Ring Lardner and F. Scott Fitzgerald were my age
they were already coffin fodder. Vintage humorist Robert
Benchley had just another five or six years left before his
fatal nosebleed. By now my reputation should have extended
beyond my immediate family, friends, website visitors and a
few hundred charitable organizations that have me pegged as
an easy mark for their telephone agents; I should have been
at least as famous as Henry Beard or Dotson Rader, or that
fellow who wrote those Politically Correct Bedtime Stories
-- what was his name?
What’s especially alarming is that I’m even more
obscure than the tofu-eating, sandal-shod authors listed in
ads for various literary magazines. You’ve seen those ads,
no doubt: "Our noted contributors include Sara Hilfish,
Christopher L. Citron, Louise Middlemouse, J. V. Dandolini,
Mark Shuttlebin, Annie Crumb and Niamh O’Bhardhain."
It’s as if we’re supposed to greet each name with a
knowing nod of appreciation; you can be sure no literary
tofu-eaters would nod appreciatively at the sight of my
name. If I’m less famous than writers like these, I might
as well go back to writing catalog descriptions of personal
organizer formats.
How is any writer supposed to make a reputation when at
least 47,815 nameless competitors are simultaneously
thrashing in the water, scrambling for a chance to be yanked
onto the literary life-raft? You’re looking at the biggest
obstacle for any writer today, other than the traditional
lack of talent. The Internet has provided a multitude of
pulpits for the world’s unknown scribes, easing the sting
of obscurity by allowing anyone equipped with an ego and
minimal computer skills to reach an audience. But in an age
when everyone can be an author, how does anyone get noticed?
Instead of just 47,815 undiscovered writers flapping and
flailing in the water, we’re probably looking at a
thousand times 47,815.
Juvenal and his contemporaries didn’t face such
staggering odds. If I had been writing in the first or
second century A.D., generations of Latin students probably
would have been snickering over my tirades as a refreshing
antidote to all those dusty and obligatory passages from the
Aeneid. I know they’d have relished "Flesh and
Mortality," "On Eating Our Fellow-Creatures,"
"A Bug’s Death" and "What’s Left for
Men?" Diligent pedagogues would have compiled annotated
scholarly editions of my work, carefully demarcating the
mercurial Early Tirades, the lyrically brooding Middle
Tirades and the doddering Late Tirades. Ambitious Ph.D.
students would have written solemn monographs on "Rick
Bayan and the Role of the Cynic as Adversarial Commentator
in the Culture of Celebrity," with an average of 14
footnotes per page. If you looked hard enough in your Barnes
& Noble, you’d have been able to find Bayan: The
Complete Tirades in a smart black Penguin paperback,
complete with 30-page introduction by Moses Hadas.
Other historical eras would have held even greater
opportunities. If I had been scribbling away in an
eighth-century French monastery, for example, I’d have
been hailed as the dominant Western humorist of the Dark
Ages -- with no serious rivals between the fall of Rome and
the eleventh-century mini-Renaissance that brought us
Abelard and Heloise. Not that I’d have been any more
brilliant than I am now... I simply would have stood out
from the crowd because virtually everyone else was busy
digging peat, threshing grain and waiting for their last
teeth to fall out. A middling mind always benefits from a
lack of competition.
If I had been crafting my tirades here in the States
circa 1820, I might have been lionized by the British as a
hardy specimen from the literary frontier. I'd have worn a
buckskin jacket and a coonskin cap; essayist Charles Lamb
would have toasted my health at a Christmas dinner in my
honor; upon my triumphant return, Washington Irving would
have invited me over to his home by the Hudson, there to
chortle merrily over our successes. With Poe, Hawthorne,
Emerson and Melville still mere fetuses of their future
selves, Irving and I would have had the American literary
scene locked up for a decade or so -- more than enough time
to make my way into the schoolbooks and merit my own Library
of America edition 170 years later.
I could have been born in Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania,
too -- what sublime possibilities there! Those Eastern
Europeans appreciate their writers like nobody else on the
planet, possibly because of the scarcity factor: wayward
authors used to be devoured like blintzes by the Communist
authorities. Once liberated, the Czechs even elected a
writer as their chieftain, something that could never happen
in our unabashedly philistine republic; imagine George W.
Bush being trounced by John Updike or Joyce Carol Oates.
Yes, if I had been a writer in a small Eastern European
nation, my Cynic’s Dictionary and tirades would
have so delighted my countrymen that I’d have been honored
with a postage stamp by now. (It might have been a stamp
commemorating my execution, but at this point I’d take my
chances.) And of course, the smaller the country, the
greater the odds of one’s likeness eventually appearing on
a stamp. Miniature nations like Andorra have probably
immortalized prominent shepherds and taxidermists.
Let’s face it: America is just too confoundedly vast
for most of us to entertain any hope of recognition. How can
we win attention when thousands of smart competitors are
break-dancing all around us? We probably need to split up
the country into a few hundred petty kingdoms,
principalities and duchies, like Germany before the Bismarck
era. Then more of us might stand a reasonable chance of
appearing on postage stamps.
I don’t mean to grumble incessantly about my lack of
recognition; after all, I’ve had my brush with fame: the
makers of my favorite game, Trivial Pursuit, recently based
a couple of questions on definitions from The Cynic’s
Dictionary -- without any hectoring on my part. But you
can’t blame me if I hanker for some palpable appreciation
of these fifty tirades. I know YOU appreciate me, and I
appreciate your appreciation. But I still wonder what it
takes to get noticed by a few influential publications, like
The New York Review of Books, Harper's or Men’s
Health. I don’t want to be reading "12 Surefire
Self-Promotion Tips for Aspiring Satirists" in Writer’s
Digest when I’m sixty; I’d prefer an attack of the
gout. It does look as if I might have to follow one surefire
tip, though I’ve been trying to avoid it: Be sure to send
your work at some point to an actual editor. What a
humiliating prospect!
All struggling writers, humiliated or not, should ask
themselves fearlessly if they have the vision and verbal
prowess to move minds... and if they’re willing to endure
the vexations of a writer’s life to reach those minds. I
often wonder if I’m a dinosaur, an ambitious but outmoded
creature foraging for palm fronds in a landscape suddenly
grown stark and chilly. I belong to the lost tradition of
the whimsical middlebrow essayist, without the
"edge" or the distancing irony that fashionable
postmodern editors find so appealing. Does anyone still read
Joseph Addison or G.K. Chesterton in the age of Suck.com?
The odds are increasingly slim that I’ll be discovered by
a wider audience; the odds are even slimmer that I’ll
eventually merit a black-covered Penguin paperback of my Complete
Tirades -- assuming that books still have covers then,
or that we still publish books at all.
But don’t weep for me, good reader. I’m happy if my
tirades have brought the consolation of merry commiseration
into your life. Whether a writer has thirty readers or
thirty million, he communicates with just one mind at a
time. I’m content to spin my tirades on this electronic
web, and I don’t intend to stop unless I run out of ideas
or suddenly find myself elected president of Latvia --
whichever comes first.
