What if you promoted all day but never actually wrote anything?
Journalist Dennis Cass asks that question, and promotes his book at the same time in a bit of web video genius-ness. As I pointed out earlier today, more and more of the book promotion process is falling into the lap of the writer--so this sad-but-true-video is only going to get sadder and truer.
Over at the New York Observer, got the literary blogosphere in a tizzy today by writing: "it’s not crazy at all to feel bad for the young male writers of our time, despite all they have done to us with their books. There are these legends that loom; all women, all terrifying. (Norman Mailer, sad to say, belongs to 1968, and that was so long ago already.)"
As a sort-of-young man writing in this young-men besotted world, I only have one piece of advice for anybody worried about that article. Read Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night. He had Vietnam and a divided Democratic Party; we have the Iraq War and another fractured political scene.
1968 wasn't so long ago. It's not about the quality of the men, it's about good writers meeting their historical moment. The next few troubled years will give all us literary men and women plenty to write about.
