The ancient tarts of rue St. Denis and the Marcel Proust of tennis elbow

MONDAY, JUNE 2, 2015
The Weekly Screed (#722)

The ancient tarts of rue St. Denis
and the Marcel Proust of tennis elbow

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — One of my favorite Paris expeditions starts in the heart of the city and heads due north on rue St. Denis. This venerable street isn’t one of the great city’s many fashionable thoroughfares. It’s long and narrow, bustling with activity, lined with shirttail businesses, wholesale dealers, tchotchke purveyors, crumbling churches, Irish pubs, dive bars, neighborhood diners, tabacs, cafés, lottery windows, sex shops, and here and there a peep show.

Along the way, it’s not surprising — but it can be startling — to encounter, leaning heavily against a doorjamb, the reincarnation of Irma La Douce. Except, well, she got older. And wider. She’s of a certain age that’s hard to judge beneath the vaudeville makeup and platinum wig. She’s melon-breasted in a sagging tube top that would — you wish — cover her tummy but doesn’t. Her miniskirt is too short, her heels too tall. Her tattoos have all gone purple, matching eerily the varicose veins visible through her tattered mesh stockings. Her air is coolly professional, although a little frightening. The unprepared tourist, seeing her suddenly loom outward from the facade, tends to stagger off the curb, giving her ample berth. Treating this reaction as a sort of amorous spasm, she cocks a massive hip, peels a Gauloise from her sticky lips and squeezes out a come-hither smirk.

Having traversed rue St. Denis many times, I’m accustomed to steering past Irma with barely a glance. But my attitude softened last month when, in a span of ten days, I set forth to hawk my novels at three local “author events” in Wisconsin. At each venue, I was provided with a table. The room was large. My literary wares were sprawled before me. Strangers milled, exuding a general air of reluctance. Whenever one drew close enough to read my titles, I bounced welcomingly to my feet, striving to lure them into my orbit and seduce them with my prose. And I began to feel like — and understand — the aged Irmas of rue St. Denis.

Because my potential readers, like tourists off the beaten path in darkest Paris, recoiled with ill-concealed alarm and veered awkwardly out of range — toward the next author, or the refreshments, or straight for the parking lot.

But I exaggerate. Not everyone made me feel like a superannuated tart. To many, I was more like a used-car dealer with a lot full of Nash Ramblers and International Harvester Travel-Alls. At the grand debut of an elderly residence called Brookdale, I was one of two featured authors. The other was a vivacious YouTube star named Ann. We each had a big table, piled with our books, in the obligatory large room. By and by, a curious couple dodged Ann and settled in front of my pile. I stood. The woman said, “So, tell us about your books.”

I did so, offering a lively oral synopsis of each, making a joke or two, injecting plugs about readers’ (favorable) reactions. I even enlisted Nancy — my sidekick for the day — to validate my pitch. We babbled on together for several minutes. The man seemed blithely illiterate but the wife paged through each book with an air of curiosity, nodding along with my monolog. A live one, I surmised.

But no. After all that, the woman curled a lip, dropped my novel, turned on a heel and said, “Well, those aren’t the sort of books we’re interested in.”

To her husband’s credit, he looked back once, shrugging apologetically.

The pain in my ankle was, I figure, the way a tire feels, after it’s been kicked.

Through several “book fair” experiences, I’ve come to appreciate the impact of self-publishing on the accessibility of authorship. Among maybe a hundred writers I encountered at these recent shows, all but a few are self-published, with books well-designed, professionally printed and — in many cases — accompanied by rudimentary marketing materials. Vanity presses have evolved into slick, affordable print-on-demand (POD) book-packaging mills — and authors are breeding like hamsters.
Online POD publishing enables almost anyone with a cherished personal story to become an author whose work looks presentable enough to spread all over a table at a book fair in Oshkosh. The topics among my colleagues tended heavily toward sentimental memoirs full of family anecdotes and farm nostalgia, how-to manuals, pet stories and cozy murder mysteries set in smalltown Wisconsin.

At an “author showcase” in West Bend, my neighbor, Jackie, displayed two novels that she referred to as “senior citizen chick lit.” I wanted to whisper that she might want to think up a pitch-line less likely to drive away readers in droves. But I didn’t have the heart. She was a sweetheart (and she bought two of my books).
On my other side, Mary was selling a children’s book about her late poodle. She wrote it, and hired a good illustrator, because little Cuddles (not his real name) was just the most lovable pet she ever had, and she couldn’t figure out why several major publishers weren’t captivated by the premise of a cute-pooch kids’ book.

Again, I didn’t have the heart (nor did her saintly husband, who was with her) to tell Mary she’d have a better shot with publishers if she’d written about, say, an autistic poodle sociopath who creeps away from his doghouse under cover of darkness, abducts sleeping babies and eats them for a midnight snack.

One of the goldmines for online vanity publishers is disease books. Anyone who has lost a loved one to a terrible illness or has survived a mortal trauma has a powerful emotional stake in the experience. The urge to tell the tale is hard to resist — especially when you can get it out, a copy at a time, in a five-by-nine paperback with a shiny cover and your name in 72-point Helvetica Bold.

At all my book fairs, I was surrounded by moving chronicles of brave battles and miraculous recoveries. The most moving story, however, emerged inadvertently from a humble non-author who paused at my table. As we talked, she revealed that she had pancreatic cancer. I tried a positive spin, noting that there had been progress lately in treating this virulent killer. But the lady assured me that, no, her doctors couldn’t do that stuff — or anything else to save her. She was dying and she was doing so unexceptionally. Writing it up would be a waste of ink.

She moved on, stoically, and picked up Mary’s poodle book.

Among the medical nostalgics at West Bend was a curmudgeonly killjoy who shuffled about restlessly in a windbreaker marked with the legend “Tendinitis Survivor.” He was remarkable in many ways, first because he had perceived — perhaps brilliantly — that a case of tendinitis was worthy of an entire book. I’ve had tendinitis in two shoulders, an elbow and a knee, but never felt the tiniest urge to write about it. Here was a failure of both imagination and memory. After the annoying joint pain had passed — which it does, eventually — I forgot about it.

But not this guy. He remembered, he was bitter, and he vented, in 70,000 words or more. And he stayed bitter. Among all the Irmas on display, he was by far the crankiest. Here was another point of amazement, probably because I was a little haunted by that serene and cerebral lady whose pancreas was quietly, swiftly stealing her life.

I thought, Jesus, if the worst thing that ever happened to that grouchy old fart was a case of tennis elbow, he should be the happiest author in the whole show.