And You Save on Postage, Too...

My friend Larry writes for money. So from time to time, he gets hits from readers who want him to write for free. Here's one from Dave that popped up in the weekend email:

hello mr. block, I'm a sophomore at xxx. My class is doing a project on the books they picked to read. My book was Hitman, by you of course. I have to answer seven questions about you so here they are;

1. How long have you been writing?
2. How did you sell your first book?
3. Do you ever write with other people?
4. Do you work at home?
5. Do your friends help you write?
6. Have you made any friends by being a writer?
7. Rate your job honestly from 1 to 10.

Thank you for your time and if you don't write back I can understand.

Thank you again.

Always happy to lend a hand to budding talent, Larry responds:

Dave, here's a suggestion which will simplify your life and mine, and at the
same time help prepare you to write fiction:

Make up the answers yourself.

Cheers,

Lawrence Block

Kudos to Larry

I see that Larry Block, friend of my youth, has made the Telegraph list of 50 great crime writers (link). Hard earned and well deserved, I say. Best way I can tell, Larry has never had a blockbuster hit. But if winning is showing up, he richly deserves all the credit he can get. By all appearances, Block is the guy who slugs it out every day (although I believe he uses a yellow pad*).

His novels probably count as noir, but they can be darkly funny--he has a knack for the devastating one liner--and for a guy who keeps such low company, he shows a real streak of compassion--not to mention a lifelong love affair with Manhattan. You read Simenon for Paris, Donna Leon for Venice; read Block for a wry post-Batman overview of his favorite city.

An interesting, if not entirely typical, place to start, would be with Small Town, his Valentine to the Manhattan after 9/11 (link). Then again, maybe not; maybe try instead Eight Million Ways to Die, one of the Matt Scudder series: it gets 18-out-of-20 five-star Amazon reviews (link). Amazing to me, my current research even turned up a link to Mona, which I think may be Larry's first grownup work (link). I first read it in an Army barracks at the now-long-defunct Fort Slocum in Long Island Sound, not long after we had separately decamped from Antioch College, back around 1960. It has a shocker ending that stood my hair on end.

Wiki has a remarkably sympathetic and thorough exposition (link), including a hilarious shot of a pulp cover from the 60s. Block's own website is here.
---
*Wrong. An impeccable source says he uses a MacBook, sometimes an Imac.

Most of our Fathers were Mothers

Larry Block has a novel called A Long Line of Dead People, as in "I am descended from a long line of dead people." But who are our ancestors? Mostly women? Or mostly men?

Trick question. The answer is not 50-50. The point is that sexual intercourse is a competitive sport, and over history, most men never got their jersey. Roy F. Baumeister expands on the point:

True, about half the people who ever lived were women, but that’s not the question. We’re asking about all the people who ever lived who have a descendant living today. Or, put another way, yes, every baby has both a mother and a father, but some of those parents had multiple children.

Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.

I think this difference is the single most underappreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.

All this is from a fascinating article called "Is There Anything Good About Men?" and with a title like that, you may be able to guess the answer (link). Hint: think Six Sigma.

H/T: Prerna Mankad at FP (link).

In Which I Get One Up on Socrates

I remember noticing when I had outlived Keats (26) Shelley (29), Charlie Parker (34), Mozart (35), Byron (36), Pascal (39), Shakespeare (52)—even Thomas Chatterton (17).

Now I have outlived Socrates (70): I turn 71 today The computer programmers would remind me that I am now in my seventy-second year, having started at t=0. The mathematicians would say that t→n. I’m closing on Goethe (83), Sophocles (90) and Irving Berlin (101).

Socrates, readying himself to to drink the hemlock at 70, said it didn’t matter all that much because he was going to die soon anyway. I don’t share his cheerful insouciance, but I must say that so far I have had almost unspeakable good luck. I have dodged almost every important bullet on the health front (so far). I’ve got a nice wife who treats me with indulgence. I’m proud of my kids and delighted by my grandchildren. I’ve got interesting work to do, when I do it—indeed, I had better shut up now, lest I tempt fate.

I’m not at all disposed to give a final accounting just yet, but if pressed, I suppose I could draw up a trial balance. In the church of my childhood, we used to say: we have done the things we ought not to have done, and we have left undone the things we ought to have done. Guilty on all counts, your honor, at least in a general way. We Presbyterians didn’t fancy being too specific about our sins, and I’d just as well not make an allocution. I don’t think I have committed any major crimes in life, unless you count being one of those rich Americans (or unless you count being male).

I surely have committed any number of acts of unkindness or inconsideration, and when the blood sugar is down at three o’clock in the morning, I can actually make myself pretty blue over some Dumb Thing I did to somebody 30 years ago. I usually remind myself that it’s past caring now: the victim has probably long since closed the books on the matter, writing me off as a clown or a jerk. If I met them again and tried to apologize today, they’d probably try to run away (“Waiter! Check, please!”—or perhaps worse, “Security!”).

I suspect my main concern is that St. Peter, scrutinizing his clipboard, will say “I just don’t see anything very interesting in your resumé” Well, St. Peter can take his time—maybe it will look better later. Meanwhile I will abide by the insight of the guy in the Larry Block novel—the one who said that “any day above ground is a good day.” And, from the Oxford Book of Ages, a few comparisons for item #71:

A man who has settled his opinions does not love to have the tranquillity of his convictions disturbed; and at seventy-one it is time to be in earnest.

--Samuel Johnson,
A Journey to the Western Islands (1773)

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not, but I am getting old and soon I shall remember only the latter.

--Mark Twain (of course), letter to A.B. Paine

[I wonder what the neighbors thought of this next one:]

You think it horrible that Lust and Rage
Should dance attendance upon my old age.
They were not such a plague when I was young.
What else have I to spur me into song?

--W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley,December 1936

[And surely the best possible epigraph for 71:]

In July, when I bury my nose in a hazel bush, I feel fifteen years old again. It’s good! It smells of love!

--Corot, still feeling the compulsion
to go into the country and paint, 1867

--All the above from the Oxford Book of Ages
Chosen by Anthony and Sally Sampson (1985)