Jeremy Blachman's Weblog: 2012

Yesterday's Panel

Well, none of you came!  Or, if you did, you didn't say hello.  It's okay, I wouldn't have gone either if I wasn't on the panel.  I understand.  Based on my blog reader e-mails this week, there's a good chance you live in Turkey anyway.  But you missed a fine panel.  I think it went well, and I'm even convinced that no one realized that for about a minute at some point, while one of the other panelists was talking, I completely zoned out thinking about something else and only came back to attention when the moderator said my name and asked me a question.  I'd estimate about 30 or 35 people showed up -- they sat around the perimeter of the room and the panelists stood at the front, leaning against a very uncomfortable piece of furniture.  By a show of hands, it seemed like the vast majority of people in the room were lawyers, and many were aspiring writers.  I sold a good number of books, which made my publisher happy.  And while I was signing books at the end, I accidentally knocked over a glass of red wine someone had left on the table.  Amazingly, the glass didn't break.  Even more amazingly, I blocked the fall of the wine almost completely, so it only landed on my pants and the floor, and missed everyone else.  My pants are at the dry cleaners.  Should their efforts fail, The Gap probably still has a few pairs left.  My publisher gave me a case of books to take to the event -- that's 24 books.  I needed to sell at least a few, because 24 books are pretty much too heavy for me to comfortably carry.  I made it okay with the carton from my publisher's office at 23rd and 5th to the event at 27th and Lexington, but I was very glad to have fewer to carry back with me.

The other panelists were more lawyer than me.  One of them, Gretchen Rubin, who clerked for Justice O'Connor , has a blog called "The Happiness Project" where she's writing about the year she's spending testing out the principles and ideas in a bunch of books about happiness.  I've read a bunch of the happiness books (and blogged about them).  I can't figure out why Gretchen's happiness blog is as compelling as it is, and I'm afraid it might be for the wrong reasons.  When I first looked at it, I ended up reading a good portion of the archives, and really had to force myself to stop.  That doesn't happen much, especially with blogs.  I think I was mostly just surprised at how earnest the blog is.  How genuinely she seems to be taking on the project of incorporating all of these happiness principles into her life.  There's no cynicism there.  And maybe it's a comment on the state of the world today that the lack of cynicism seemed so unusual to me while reading it.  Like, if I was testing out happiness theories, and writing about it, I'd probably spend most of my time talking about how I think most of it is useless gobbledygook.  But maybe that's why I cry myself to sleep at night.  No, I'm kidding, I don't.  Well, usually.  And I'd like to think there are lots of people more cynical than I am about the state of the world.  In any case, Gretchen's blog: worth taking a look.

A bunch of the audience questions at the panel were about blogging and blogs... how to start a blog (easy!), what the best blog service to use is (honestly, having used both Blogger and Typepad, I think they're both pretty good and wouldn't necessarily tell someone to choose one over the other... Typepad's a lot more customizable, but Blogger's completely free... but they're both fine, I have few if any complaints), whether to blog about work (maybe not, if you like your job more than your blog, but if not...).  The moderator (who was really terrific, and has a website here) sent the panelists a list of topics to think about beforehand, just a general guide to what she was thinking she'd ask about.  I think it might be sort of interesting to write up my answers to those in a blog post -- not necessarily exactly what I said at the panel, since I can't remember what I said, but just so you can feel like you were there, even though none of you came.

But I'm heading to dinner with a friend, so I'll do that later tonight or tomorrow.  I know, so exciting.  In any case, panel was good, and I feel like the more of these kinds of things I do, the more comfortable I get, which is a good thing.  I felt like I did an okay job and wasn't as ridiculously terrible as I kind of fear I'll be whenever I have to do something like this.  Even got approached afterwards about a speaking gig elsewhere, which is flattering and looks like the chance to discuss it will get me a free lunch at Balthazar -- so I can't complain.

Panel Tonight

Just a reminder to anyone interested: I'm on a panel tonight with some other lawyer-writers (although they are a lot more "lawyer" than I am, obviously...) talking about writing and our books and whatever else the moderator asks us....  I just received word that my mom and stepdad and grandma are probably coming, which should *finally* give me some credibility when I tell them I'm not very good at these sorts of things... :)  I'll have some copies of the book to sign and sell, five bucks off the cover price. 

Details: Stone Creek Bar and Lounge (140 E. 27th St. btwn 3rd/Lex Aves), 7:30 tonight.  Say hello if you come.  I'll give a recap tomorrow.

For Your Consideration

I generally like Christopher Guest's movies.  This one wasn't that funny.  This review gets it pretty much spot on.   If you're going to satirize Hollywood, at least have some sort of point of view, some basis in reality.  The "Home For Purim" scenes -- the movie-within-the-movie -- are amusing, but the rest of it just sort of falls flat.  The New York Times review says all this too.

Canadian?

I completely missed the ball on advertising his free book giveaway, but if you're looking to go to law school, and you're Canadian, this guy has a pretty useful site and a book called "So You Want To Be A Lawyer, Eh?" that you might want to check out.

Essay Contest from American College of Trial Lawyers

I got an e-mail asking me to publicize this, and it seems worthwhile, so in case anyone's interested:

The American College of Trial Lawyers (ACTL), one of the premier professional organizations composed of the best trial lawyers in the U.S. and Canada, announces its sponsorship of an essay contest for law students on the topic of “Judicial Independence and the Separation of Powers Doctrine.”  The contest’s first place and second place winners will receive cash prizes of $10,000 and $5,000, respectively.  The contest is open to all students at law schools in the United States (including those studying for their J.D., L.L.M, or other graduate degrees).  Essays, which should be approximately 5,000 words, are due by March 1, 2007 and can be submitted by e-mail at essaycontest@actl.com. For more information, visit www.actl.com.

Happy Thanksgiving

Just wanted to wish anyone reading this a Happy Thanksgiving.  I'm thankful for lots of things, but among them is that there's still some people finding it worth it to check back in here every few days and read what I'm writing.  This has been a pretty eventful year for me.  Last Thanksgiving I think I was about two-thirds through my book draft.  And I guess I had just gotten my bar exam results.  That seems like a long time ago. 

This post is probably as good of an excuse as any to quickly update what's going on with non-blog stuff in my life.  A lot of my energy lately has been on the Anonymous Lawyer television pilot script.  A second draft of the script is done and in other people's hands as of Tuesday afternoon.  Best case scenario would be that the people who make these kinds of decisions decide that they want to film the pilot, which would put it in contention for a spot on the television schedule in the fall (I think most networks film about 12 comedy pilots for 2-4 spots).  Other scenarios are that they decide they don't want to film it, and I think that would most likely be the end of the road for the project, or they decide they want some more changes to the script before they make that decision.  Hopefully I'll hear soon.  The whole thing has been a pretty cool process.

My mom is doing well.  She's undergoing chemotherapy treatments, one day every 3 weeks, and she'll be up to #4 out of 8 in another week.  She's been able to go to work and side effects have been pretty minimal, aside from hair loss, which apparently doesn't happen to most patients with this kind of chemotherapy but she's been an outlier.  Blood work is all coming back good and doctors seem pleased and unconcerned, so that's all good.

I'm playing around with another novel, not about the law, but I'm not ready to say anything about it until I write more than 20 pages and until someone besides me decides it's worth continuing.  We'll see what happens.  I'm not convinced I've got enough to say for another book until I do some more interesting things in real life, but I'm playing around with some ideas and I'll see what happens.

I'm on a panel next Wednesday, the 29th, at 7:30 PM at Stone Creek Bar and Lounge (27th Street between Lexington and 3rd Avenue).  The panel is about lawyers-turned-writers and there's more information here.  It's free.  I met with the moderator last week to do some preliminary talking about myself, so she has some idea what kind of stuff to ask me about.  I think the other panelists have done this a lot more than I have, so you should come to see the difference between someone who's good at these things and someone who finds them scary.  When I met with the moderator, she started talking about how I could probably make some money speaking at law schools or corporate conferences and places like that about how to blog, going from law school to being a writer, whatever, stuff like that.  Which mostly made me think the barriers to entry for this kind of stuff must be pretty low if I've done enough to make money talking about myself.  It almost makes me want to write a book about that industry, if it's as silly as it seems like it might be.  Part of me feels like if I was really thinking about this in a smart way, I would absolutely be hustling to find speaking gigs wherever I could -- law schools, law firms, business conferences, whatever -- to push the book, to push my name out there, to get free trips to mid-sized cities I would not otherwise visit, so that I could eat alone in chain restaurants attached to budget hotels -- whatever it is people do these things for.  And the other part of me, besides not feeling like I really have all that much to say in that kind of forum, as opposed to on paper somewhere, can't imagine wanting to actually spend my days doing this.  Yet I feel like so many people would absolutely pursue those kinds of things and be thrilled about it.  I think, in part, I've been spoiled by my very bizarre path to book deal, and don't fully appreciate the self-promoting lengths that most people have to go to in order to be able to make a living doing this stuff, and that's it's not that they want to go speak places for fun but because they have to in order to support the writing, and to build the audience they need.  Then again, I've written more on the Internet than they have, and maybe, for me, this is a better way to do it that although it seems to me that it's easier and much less work and energy, to a lot of people doing it this way would be harder.

Where was I... oh, the event.  Yeah, come if you want, and if I don't know you, come up to me and say hello.  I'll be signing books, and convinced my publisher to give me a carton of 24 books to sell there, $20 each ($5 off the cover price).

Anyway....  Happy Thanksgiving.  I'm excited for the smoked turkey my cousin is bringing, from a real turkey smokehouse (that's not the right word... farm?  ranch?  I dunno) near her house in Pennsylvania.

Book Thoughts: American Bee

Picked up "American Bee" because I really liked the movie "Spellbound."  Spellbound focused on the 1999 National Spelling Bee.  American Bee focuses on the 2004 and 2005 Bees, with some long digressions about the history of the spelling bee, and the history of spelling.  The book can't entirely decide what it wants to focus on, and the different parts feel a little disjointed -- the sections about the history of the English language, and the history of the spelling bee are okay but Bill Bryson has covered the English language history better in "The Mother Tongue" and "Made in America" (and in fact Bryson is listed in the bibliography here).  There are some chapters about past winners of the Bee, but most of the ones he interviewed are currently employed by the Bee in some capacity, so it didn't seem all that representative, and the selection seemed driven more by ease of access than by which ones would have the most interesting stories.  The best part of the book are the chapters about five 2005 contestants, followed by a description of the 2005 Bee, so we can see how they did... but this is basically only the last third of the book.  These profiled kids are as interesting as the ones in Spellbound, but this book doesn't really live up to the movie.  It's very repetitive -- the author mentions the same facts (Aliya wears her sister's red sweatshirt for good luck, some other girl's parents bought her a horse just for making it to the National Bee, etc) over and over again, and sometimes it feels like paragraphs (about the diversity of the Bee, about the nervousness of the contestants onstage, about the camaraderie between the contestants in the lobby of the hotel) have been lifted from earlier in the book and repasted.  I also got tired of sentences like these: "Apple-cheeked Jack Ausick nails fretum like the word is used constantly in his hometown back in Montana" and "Kerry Close spells otiosity like she knows it cold...."  I know it must be hard to come up with ways to describe people spelling words correctly while varying up the sentences but he used the word "like" so many times, and, no, he didn't spell the word fire like his house was on fire.  He just spelled the word.  Nevertheless, interesting book and it passed the "Did I finish it at home instead of waiting for the next subway ride?" test, which is a standard not that many books meet.

Book Thoughts: You're Lucky You're Funny

Phil Rosenthal is the creator and executive producer of "Everybody Loves Raymond."  The book is about what you'd expect his book would be about.  How he ended up writing for television, how "Everybody Loves Raymond" ended up on the air, and a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff from it's nine-year hugely successful run.  If you want to be Phil Rosenthal -- and how could anyone not? -- this is a great book.  Rosenthal's a terrific writer.  It's very funny, and feels awfully authentic and honest, to a much greater extent than I expected it to.  Rosenthal comes off as a very genuine guy, who's certainly talented and was very fortunate with the show's unbelievable success.  The book's great.

One laugh-out-loud passage toward the very end of the book, Rosenthal talking about being on Inside The Actors Studio with the entire cast:

When [James Lipton] got to me, with the question [from the Bernard Pivot questionnaire Lipton asks all of his guests], "What sound or noise do you hate?" I responded, "Bernard Pivot." ... Mr. Lipton went to the next card and asked, "When you arrive in Heaven, what would you like God to say to you?"  I said, "You can go back, but send up James Lipton."  This was all, understandably, edited out of the broadcast.

Larry King Doesn't Use The Internet

Amusing bit from Larry King Live -- video here.

Last night CNN’s Larry King confessed to Roseanne Barr that he’s never used the Internet. King expressed doubt that the Internet was a viable political medium because “there’s 80 billion things on it.” When Barr said she liked the Internet, King acknowledged that “I’ve never done it, never gone searching.”

Barr said King would love the internet if he tried it. King replied, “I wouldn’t love it. What do you punch little buttons and things?”

WSJ Online

I've got a piece up on the Wall Street Journal Online about the changes to the Harvard 1L curriculum... nothing serious.  Here's the WSJ Law Blog post about it.  To read the full piece, I believe you need a WSJ password, but shoot me an e-mail and I'll e-mail you a copy.

OJ Simpson

If you haven't been paying attention to the news for the past 24 hours or so, apparently OJ Simpson is coming out with a book called "If I Did It," and there'll be an accompanying Fox News interview, "OJ Simpson: If I Did It, Here's How It Happened."  Variety article here, and AP story about reaction from the publishing industry here.  This sounds like a joke, and it seems pretty extraordinary that it's not.

Other new books hitting the bookshelves this winter:

Michael Jackson: "If I Touched Them, Here's What It Felt Like."
Mark Foley: "If I Had Sex With Underage Pages, Here Are Pictures."
and the book the Bush administration has been hoping for, Saddam Hussein's "If I Had Weapons Of Mass Destruction, Here's Where They're Hidden."

Borat, Joe Morgan, and Doctors on TV

Just a few links I thought were cool

...an article about the Romanian villagers at the beginning of the Borat movie and how they're upset the movie exploited them.  It's a really interesting article, totally worth reading... "Mr Tudorache, a deeply religious grandfather who lost his arm in an accident, was one of those who feels most humiliated. For one scene, a rubber sex toy in the shape of a fist was attached to the stump of his missing arm - but he had no idea what it was."

...an interview with one of the authors of the baseball blog Fire Joe Morgan, part of a terrific series on Scout.com interviewing "25 outstanding and diverse individuals across the game of baseball," including Roger Clemens, Dale Murphy, and the wife of Mariners manager Mike Hargrove.  Uh, yeah, that last one is less interesting than the others.

...LA Times article about medicine on TV and how shows have been trying to get things right.  It's a long article, but worth reading.

Book Thoughts: Confederacy of Silence

Publishers Weekly does a better job summarizing than I can do:

With no prospects for employment after his Ivy League graduation in 1988, Rubin, a 21-year-old Jewish New Yorker, accepted a job as a reporter in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. At the Greenwood Commonwealth Rubin covered sports and local news, wrote obituaries and features and photographed "local color." He also followed the short, happy career of Handy T. Campbell, an African-American high school quarterback from the projects and this story forms the core of the book. Rubin believed Campbell's prowess on the gridiron would parallel Rubin's own promise in the newsroom. But after a year wrestling with his conscience for not decrying abhorrent attitudes and behavior he encountered in the bigoted bigwigs of Leflore County, Rubin fled. Six years later, he returned to Greenwood to understand how the star athlete (now an Ole Miss dropout) and an accomplice could find themselves indicted for the murder of a local UPS man rumored to be bisexual. Rubin focuses the latter part of his book on the sleazy maneuverings of college recruiters and coaches, the investigation into the victim's death, and the prosecution of the trial, which provides the book's frisson. The narrative benefits from Rubin's perceptive observations, but it is his emotional investment in the story that coheres the book's two halves: a memoir of a watershed year in his life and the sordid, convoluted tale of a gross miscarriage of justice. A grittier depiction of the New Old South than Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, to which it will undoubtedly be compared, Rubin's memoir exposes the racial polarity of the Delta in clear, effective prose.

My friend Matt recommended this book to me.  His last recommendation, The Omnivore's Dilemma, was terrific, so I made sure to follow this one too.  The Mississippi Board of Tourism is probably not giving this book away to entice people to visit.  I've never been to Mississippi.  Or Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, West Virginia, or South Carolina.  I spent a weekend in Raleigh once, but that's not really the Old South in the same way that semi-rural Mississippi is.   The Amazon reviewers are mixed on the accuracy of this book.  Some people love it and some think Rubin was too naive and doesn't have his facts right.  I got caught up in the story and couldn't put the book down.  Even when it started dealing with high school football.  I feel like I'm becoming a high school football fan without ever having seen a game.  This book, Michael Lewis's book, and the terrific "Friday Night Lights" on TV.  I can't review a book like this.  I have nothing to add beyond the Amazon reviews that already exist.  I read it, cover to cover, and liked it.  You can probably tell by the description if you'd like it too.  That's all I've got....

Book Thoughts: "'Hello,' Lied the Agent" and "Artistic Differences"

"'Hello,' Lied the Agent" is a diary of a couple of years in the TV development cycle by a TV writer with a deal at a studio.  This is the kind of book that I feel pretty uncompelled to blog about.  I read all of these books.  Phil Rosenthal's book about his experiences creating/producing Everybody Loves Raymond is waiting for me at the library.  The executive producer of pretty much anything could write a book and I'm going to read it out of professional interest, just in case there's anything in there that can make me smarter about how this stuff works.  There's nothing wrong with "'Hello,' Lied the Agent" except that the title is annoying to type because of the quotation marks.  I think the author probably spends a little too much energy writing about how worried he is that this tell-all book will ruin any chance he has to continue working in the business, because I didn't think he wrote anything so terrible that anyone would be surprised by.   Lots of conference calls, lots of rewrites, it's a perfectly worthwhile book if this is something you want to do for a living.  I could have done without the reprints of Variety articles and newspaper pieces about the most recent television season and which pilots got picked up, but too much sidebar material isn't a fatal flaw.  His experiences tracked the kinds of things I can imagine from my limited exposure with the Anonymous Lawyer stuff.

There's a footnote early in the book about two other books by TV writers that are worth reading:  Conversations With My Agent, by Rob Long, which I blogged about a couple of years ago and enjoyed a lot, enough that I bought another copy and gave it as a gift to a TV-writer friend; and Artistic Differences, a novel by Charlie Hauck, who wrote for Frasier and Home Improvement.  Just finished reading Hauck's book, which was written in 1993 but still seems pretty relevant to today.  The novel elements aren't the reason to read -- it's just another book about this TV writing stuff.  I enjoyed it, but if you don't care about this stuff, I don't know that you have to read it.  But it was good, and I got into it in a way I usually can't with novels.  So there's a recommendation for you.

Stranger Than Fiction

Okay, the premise doesn't make any logical sense, the ending is disappointingly weak, and if it's trying to impart any life lessons, they're overly simplistic and cliched.  But I really liked Stranger Than Fiction.  I just saw it, in a theater about as crowded as you'd expect it to be at 11:50 on Saturday morning, and left the theater thinking it was really terrific.  A good amount of funny, but also really satisfying to watch, really well-crafted and delicate and thoughtful.  Will Ferrell is terrific.  There's a lot of The Truman Show in this movie, the same kind of high-concept plot that defies ordinary logic but can end up working anyway, in the right hands.  This is what Click tried to be but didn't quite succeed.  I liked Click, but this is a much, much better movie than Click.  It's completely mainstream, with hardly an edge, perhaps the polar opposite of Borat on some kind of comedy continuum that runs from,I don't know, understated to slapstick.  I laughed during Borat.  But, for me, this was an awful lot more satisfying.  Despite the disappointing ending.  I'm pretty much on board with Roger Ebert's review here.  Some more positive stuff from Rotten Tomatoes here and here.  Or you can read the best of the flip-side view -- persuasive, but I still liked the movie -- over here and here.

Minor detail spoiler: One of the characters reveals at one point during the movie that she went to Harvard Law School but dropped out after realizing she was spending more time baking cookies for her study group than studying, and she was getting Ds.  I was able to ignore the logical fuzziness in most of the film, but I was completely unable to buy anything about this.  No one gets Ds.  :)