The Cursive Son

Our son, Samson, has informed his mother that he won’t be living with us for much longer, on account of the fact he wants to be a famous magazine writer. According to our future National Magazine Awards winner, famous magazine writers don’t live with their mamas and papas and so we should prepare ourselves for his inevitable departure. Not bad from a four-and-a-half year-old.

Even in my darkest fears of how environments can shape a child’s pliable character, (hence my demands for raising Samson for the first two years of his life in a Skinner Box. See picture. Happy little dude ain’t he?), did I think that my eldest would want to follow in his father’s footsteps. I mean, I’ve had my share of acclaim, but famous? “We don’t set out to be famous,” I told him. “Look at your father. I’ve remained true to the integrity of my trade; I’m a nobody.” Why had fame taken root in his little unspoiled mind?

Seriously, though, before he leaves I need a word with him. It’s not his exodus that concerns me. At four-and-a-half he can work a computer, use the TV remote like Liberace, make himself food and use the John, so that’s not the issue. The issue is his choice of profession. Publishing? Why not boxing? Publishing! How about a job with Blackwater, or whatever it’s now called…something useful? Stop runaway Toyotas? But publishing!?

No doubt you’ve guessed from my last posting what I think about my industry. Bitterness, you might think? Ego dyspepsia? Slit my throat on my editor’s desk to have her not strike the meaning from my 600-word piece on window boxes? And yet, my dismay comes from a deeply vested connection to the wonders of bringing people entertaining reading material. I’ve been in this game since the mid-1980s and let me tell you, back then, journalism and life were joined at the hip. You were knee-deep in what you reported on. The office was just a place where you’d collect messages. Your desk and chair: placeholders for when you became too old for three-hour lunches and a belly full of hearsay. These days you’re expected to write from your desk, interview people via telephone, read a person’s or company’s web-site and press releases, and then for the atmosphere cobble together something plausible, because atmosphere can’t be fact-checked. Like the correspondents covering the Iraq War, we’re embedded…contained by our L-shaped desks and task chairs: publishing’s version of the couch potato.

As evidence of this shifting mindset, back in the early ‘90s, as chief photographer in Eastern Europe for Agence France Presse, I was away from my desk for more than a month. Returning to the cupboard-sized office I rented in Prague, I found my desk was completely obscured by a mountain of faxes sent by head office in Frankfurt wondering where the hell I'd gotten to. The pile was huge. A proverbial avalanche of queries. I put my arm in as deeply as I could and pulled out one coiled and yellowing message that read, “You’re Fired!” Luckily, a three-hour lunch and a belly full of hearsay at the local beer keller took the sting out from that one. My nose for a good story had me tagged as a loose canon, a roving renegade. Let’s hope the famous magazine writer in-waiting uses his nose more judiciously than his father?

As any parent would be, when their offspring has made such an inchoate proclamation, I’m curious to know what a famous magazine writer will pen in the future? By my calculations it will be around 2030, when he places his fingers on the keyboard in earnest. What will the briefs of those commissions be? Based on the way it’s going, I can guess; business to business marketorials on maximizing the click rates of your eNewsletter, 10 ways to make eye-contact with the boss, lists and countdowns on everything from vacation destinations to the top one hundred doctors specializing in treating ED in the Greater Boston area. Publishing, if it isn’t already, will be pure PR, delivering information with a view to reader consumerism. So, maybe Samson’s choice of being a famous magazine writer might instead, morph into becoming a famous copywriter?

If what he’s done to date is any measure of his writerly prowess, then he is well on his way. He has already authored his first book. It’s an untitled work and incorporates drawings, mixed media—by way of wildlife stickers that click when they’re depressed. I ghost wrote a couple of pages, but for the most part Samson’s diary is an original work that touches on his existential wanderings through Christmas, Moray eels and Robinson Crusoe. He’s not quite writing cursively and it appears at times he’s not even writing English, but he’s filling pages, which in today’s literary world can earn you a pretty penny.

If I had my druthers, would I prefer him to be a novelist rather than a scribe for hire in the always-fresh-never-staid world of editorial? You betcha. Would I wish him to have creative control and take it as far as his muses will allow? What father wouldn’t? Perhaps he senses this and wants to make me proud. It could answer this whole famous notion he has in his head? I should be careful. The whole parents’ and their unfulfilled dreams can impact their children to terrible effect. Take Michael Jackson: the epitome of tears before bedtime

In toying with the mark my son will leave on Western civilization, the idea of him writing the next Ulysses is sexy, though misguided. I love the way people say, “If Ulysses were written today, it would never get published.” True that. Though, not because the likes of Joyce aren’t around, they are. The Joyces of a hundred years on are less concerned with a parallel story of the most famous mythological journey of all time and a man’s wanderings through the streets of Dublin. Their schtick is more about posing fiction as fact...true stories of escaping Nazis and being raised by wolves in the Ukraine Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, or raised by gangbangers in South Los Angeles, when you're really a Valley girl Love and Consequences. The need to be famous can make your nose grow just like that. I know shouldn’t be bogging you down with this. Had Samson been raised in a Skinnerian box, tended to his earliest formations with rubber gloves bolted to the structure of his 24-month home, he’d be less susceptible to my influences and less of a slave to his innate desire to emulate them. Equally, Samson could have chosen a more benign trait of mine to follow, like taking enormously embarrassing mouthfuls of food, for instance. But publishing!? I know keeping children in a box seems a little off, but most parents are hip to the idea, no? What do think a crib is?

After his commanding declaration, I’ve been trying to get to grips with what both children will become. Standing by our kitchen island, recently, I looked over to the children’s dining table where my daughter, Amelia, valiantly drank juice from the air hole of her sippy cup while the contents streamed from the mouth piece onto the carpet, and then noticed the leaves at the bottom of my tea cup (That's a big fat James Frey whopper. I use tea bags). I wondered what they might tell regarding the fate of my two babes? Perhaps embracing Samson’s decision is what’s best? At the same time, I should prepare him for all that he is about to endure and enjoy. James Wright, the Pulitzer-prize winning poet, gave his son the sort of treatment that can only fortify a child’s quest for their dreams. Having read his son’s first poem, Wright said in an encouraging tone, “You’re a poet! Welcome to hell.” Notwithstanding, there is Samson's mother. I’m not sure if he’s considered Hope's wishes when it comes to his sallying off to some Paris commune of his own making. I get why this has to happen: the whole creative process and self-discovery thing, but mothers are mothers, especially one who already lives with a writer. She would no more want her son to leave home than to become a writer. And leaving home to become a writer, well, perhaps Wright’s commendation would work just as well in this instance: Samson, “Welcome to hell.” You've just broken your mother's heart. Given this, I wonder whether now is a good time to revisit the Skinner box idea with Hope? What better place from which to write from home?