I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas - Lewis Black [1]
Right. Like I had been devoting all of my spare time to coming up with a concept for a book that would keep me chained to my desk for the next year, pining for a real life that was just outside my window.
“Not a one,” I replied happily. “Besides, I thought I’d brought book publishing to its knees with my last one. Ever since that book came out, your industry has been in a tailspin.”
“Really?” he asked. “I thought that was the recession and the shifting technological landscape.” (Yes, he really does talk like that.) “Did you cause those, too? By the way, can I have your breadstick?”
“No. I want it. Besides, nobody reads anymore. People have no time for that kind of stuff. What’s important now is a constant flow of vital information that one can access instantaneously. You know, like who has a new blog”—Christ, I hate that word—“or a new sex tape for sale.”
“Are you sure you want that breadstick?”
“For crying out loud, no one wants a whole book of thoughts or some fictional flight of fantasy,” I continue as I crunch on a breadstick I don’t want. “People want things in real time. They want to know where to eat, to shop, to drink. They want it to be close. They want to know how to fucking get there. And if the phone would tell them who to fuck, they’d go and fuck them, and I mean that on all levels of the word. And they want to know right now, not by chapter 7. It could be too late by then. For God’s sake, there are Twitter books. How can that even be? But it is. We are getting to the point where authors won’t even have to write, THEY’LL INSTALL A CHIP IN THEIR HEADS AND THEN YOU CAN GO TO WHOEVER GETS THE TECHNOLOGY FIRST AND THEN YOU CAN JUST LISTEN TO THE BOOK AS THE AUTHOR THINKS IT! TALK TO ME AGAIN ABOUT A BOOK WHEN YOU HAVE A CHIP INSTALLED IN THIS !”
I punctuated my point by pounding my head, which actually quieted the voices in my head for a minute or two.
“Are you finished?” my editor asked quietly.
“You’re the one who’s finished.”
“Did you hurt yourself ?” he pressed on. “Do I need to call somebody?”
“What are you, a Boy Scout? No, I don’t need anybody called.”
“You insist on pounding your head like that, you’re going to do damage. More damage than you’ve already done, I mean,” he added.
“Never mind. It’s like a pinball machine up there. I’m just whacking it to get it out of the tilt mode.”
“I have an idea,” he said.
“An idea? Are you kidding me? Seriously. Ideas are the next thing to go. We are moving rapidly into a world of ideacons. They’re like those stupid emoticons, only they pretend to express an idea. Just like you don’t have to feel the emotion, pretty soon you won’t have to be bothered by thinking, either.”
“That’s good. Save it for the page.”
“The page? Are you talking about paper? You’re killing me here. It’s all going to be on a screen.”
“It’s still a book.”
“What book?”
“The one you should write about Christmas.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind? A Christmas book based on all the memories I don’t have of it, because, lest you forget, I am a Jew.”
“Lewis, Dickens was a Jew.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“He wanted to be.”
“Not at Christmastime, he didn’t.”
“That’s your book.”
“That’s not a book. It’s barely a sentence.” The voices in my head were starting to clear their throats again.
“Glenn Beck wrote a Christmas book.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. Called what? Santa’s a Tubby Socialist, where Glenn analyzes why a fat man—dressed in red, no less—distributes gifts to every single child to teach them the heinous act of sharing? I’ve got news for you: Santa doesn’t bring anything for the Jewish kids, because they already worship a Socialist God of their own. I’m sure Glenn’s even got a chapter about how President Obama believes in Santa more than the country he may or may not have been born in.”
“Not even close, Lewis. But if Glenn Beck can write a book for Christmas, so can you.”
“And as every mom used to say, ‘If Glenn jumped off a roof, would you?’ ”
“Well, if I could