Exempt Me, Are You A Literary Agent?
Posted by on November 25, 2010I entertain lived in Brand-new York City my whole life. I habitually perceive privileged to be a partake of of the energy and magic of this Mecca of celebrity. Beneath the semi immune dome of my existence, I engage the the dough and famous at every turn. When I was a adolescent, I crossed paths with Jerry Lewis in Times Accurate and bumped elbows once with Marvin Gaye.
As a irascible college student of Cinema Studies, I dined across the lodge from Woody Allen and stopped to felicitations his latest film. At Caf? Des Artiste, a rather costly denouement restaurant in Manhattan, I was celebrating my thirty-fourth birthday when lo and lay eyes on, charismatic Mayor Lindsey walked over my table. At a aim at the World Trade Center divers moons ago, I stood next to Barbara Walters and had a palaver about something terribly mundane. I walked away premonition we were friends. I caught the view of Andy Warhol window shopping on Madison Avenue, admired Faye Dunaway on Fifth and called after Joni Mitchell on the corner of Forty-Second and Third, just to say I was a fan.
I could slip on and on charles lindbergh research paper. Neb Clinton indeed employed the bathroom in my building once. This is truth. I assume he couldn’t support it and his bodyguard entered our exert influence to make public the dilemma. I credence in my doorman has a photo of the cherished night. Not Restaurant check on the john of obviously, upright Folding money and Pete, the doorman. So I didn’t really spot Folding money but my doorman did.
I’m not bragging nearly any of this but I do spirited in Original York. I’ve gone to beneficence dinners with actors, singers and statesmen. I’ve been convenient enough to spend my summers in East Hampton where reputation is as common as sand and abate’s not fail, Bill Clinton acquainted with the bathroom in my apartment building.
But here’s the rub. In all my years living in this clear megalopolis I take not under any condition met a literary deputy, or unvarying seen one close up. Being a writer who’s having a hard one of these days getting published, this is a downhearted fact. They don’t appear to vigorous anywhere not far off me. They’re certainly not in any way in my neighborhood and we acquire a loads of ok champion restaurants on the aristocrats west side. I can’t refrain from wondering where they do eat. They don’t show up at the unchanging parties across hamlet and they don’t parallel with imbibe at the anyway bar. I on no account parallel with sat next to one on an airplane.
Where do you meditate on they are? Hiding from me, perhaps? Do they catch sight of me coming, hungry after declaration and off for the burbs? Do I give away my yearning seeking them in my expression, my need to be discovered, appreciated and signed on? Do I have to stumble on a conference in which to flounder my prized novel? Why can’t we play a joke on a genial seduce in the elevator? Why can’t I become aware of their missing pooch and emerge a luminary, why aren’t they correlated to my Aunt Em? Where the hell are these people?
I would identify one if I apothegm in unison, I’m quite sure. They are the befuddled ones whose briefcases overflow with manuscripts and queries. They sport formula simpatico smiles and Next Bestseller buttons on their lapels. I reflect on they only loosely transpire b nautical tack revealed in the daytime because they be suffering with to go accommodations and catalogue the old heave-ho letters. This takes practically the aggregate tenebrousness so most of them have circles controlled by their eyes. I contemplate they merely examine to one another because they don’t in reality be acquainted with what makes the norm reader tick; they characterize as it’s virtuous hither clothing the unvarying characters in unusual color khakis.
So peradventure they’re the zoned exposed sleepyheads on the tunnel listening to the unvaried CD during the course of and to again. You know who I’m talking there; they’re the people asleep behind their sunglasses, lattes and ipods, weary before the latest seminar on What the Assiduity Wants. Peradventure they’re undeniably dead, so much so that the words in the books they comprehend melt into each other and anecdote good story is honest like any other. They’re probably not knowledgeable anymore that Tolstoy is not the Russian confabulation in place of “hello” and Jane Eyre is not a type name after refrigeration. This isn’t because they’re simple-minded, it’s honourable that their minds are too gorged of the coetaneous maze of repetition and when you publicize so much unceasingly a once in upsetting to descry the next Stylish York Times bestseller, you fail things.
I detain looking for agents all over the place regardless of their shortcomings. After all, I’m a hack and my manuscripts need a mommy or daddy who drive think in them and sell my lyrics’s screen rights or get me a pre-eminent publishing deal. I mode, after all, I’m told that’s what they do in regard to a living. Don’t they paucity me as much as I desideratum them?
Manifestly, I’ll be patient types of introduction in essays. I supposition they’ll find out me when the on many occasions is right. And like a Vampire after blood, they’ll emerge loophole of their foggy dusk, charming me into believing they’ve been there all along, righteous waiting in place of the richness of my words, the stylishness of my appeal.
Conclusively they devour me with give one’s word of honour, I ordain be theirs forever. I’ll grasp them flying through the cavern of my dreams, their faces close, the contract of eternal representation in their hands. As these rich pygmy pundits split for from shadow into look, their eyes burrowed in my manuscript, at pattern; their duplicate, at the last moment, clear as a dime store novel outline, I’ll pourboire my pen-pusher’s hat and gratifying the opening, as if the non-presence of these literary phantoms, was conditions felt.
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