The house is flooded with estrogen and I sit alone in my self-imposed exile, upstairs in my room. The annual “girls weekend” is upon us and unfortunately I have nowhere to hide this time. Every year they do this and every year I wonder why the hell they ever plan to do it again. I love women but I despise girls. They are catty, evil, illogical creatures that exist solely to cry and complain about everything. Where you have two, you may have peace. Where you have three or more, you have a den of bitchery that no group of men could ever conceive.
The sounds emanating from the festivities have me imagining the worst. The screaming and the laughing is to be expected but I honestly believe that they are down there with heavy construction equipment attempting to tear down the house. What the fuck else could explain all the banging and bumping? I am lucky, no THEY are lucky, that I am trying to stay out of the way this weekend because if I was downstairs and saw them banging on the walls and doors like I think I hear them doing, I would kill every damned one of them right where they stand. Next I would turn my rage on the “adults” that are allowing them to act like fucking morons.
I guess I just don’t understand girls. If it were a guys night I imagine it would include a little backyard football, a movie or two and a lot of stories about our exploits that were about three percent true. No structural damage to the home, no asinine mess for the host to clean up and if one of us stepped out of line, he’d be called out on it instead of one of us acting the drama queen and playing martyr. It’s like they live to whine. If they hate each other so much why do they keep hanging out? I just don’t get it.
So in my solitude I am finally getting some reading done. My computer is out in the common area and I consider anything beyond the threshold of my bedroom “occupied territory”. There’s only so much television I can endure and I need a break from working on the laptop because that’s all I seem to do recently. So I finally get back to the books. And of course, I come across something that makes me want to write. Immediately. So I break out the laptop and here I sit spewing out all my little problems for you to sort out. Here is my latest concern.
I am consuming a book that is a collection of short works and essays on the non-belief in god. I picked it up because aside from the standard authors that I have read over and over like Sagan, Einstein, Freud and Marx it also had some modern authors like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. (You can always tell the new from the old by the need of first names…) There were also a bunch of names I had not read before. So I am skipping through this book and I read two passages by different authors that made me pause and give serious consideration to the following: Does the author name affect the credulity of the work? And that answer being a resounding “YES”, why can’t the work stand on its own?
Imagine if you will that I am a writer. Imagine I write a horror novel and that I submit it to Doubleday Press for publication. Further imagine that somehow my cover sheet was somehow swapped with the cover sheet for a new Stephen King submission sitting on the same desk. I know the imagination is wearing thin here but go with me on this, this is simply an academic exercise… So the slush reader gets both stories and reads through them both. I propose that it is not only possible but probable that whatever I have written will get published or at least a re-draft order simply because it had Stephen King’s name on it while (based on what he has been churning out in the last two decades) whatever he had written would get a rejection simply because it has my “non” name on it. The work will not stand on its own in either case. Some of the world’s best works are probably sitting on the bottom of some editor’s drawer because the author is a nobody.
Back to my original problem… I read one article and I was impressed. It was a well known name (I’ll tell you in a minute) and I was aware but reminded at just how scathing this author got at times. The second piece I read almost made me weep. It was as if it were written in personal correspondence and addressed directly to me. Every word of it rang true to me as if I had written the words myself. That author is also known but I fear not as respected a name among “the general public”. That’s when I realized that this piece would not be taken serious when read by the public if it had the author’s name on it. If I were to juxtapose the author names on the two pieces I had just read, I’ll bet I see this second piece circulated as one of those obnoxious e-mails you people are always sending around.
The author of the first piece was Mark Twain. If you put his name on any damned thing, it suddenly becomes “worthy” of reading. His article was very good even if dated by his language. Considering the era in which it was written it was MUCH more adversarial that the second article. The second author was Penn Jillette (yes, that Penn, of Penn & Teller fame). I am an avid fan of Penn and have read and watched anything I can find on him. He is a fascinating guy and I use him as my answer to the very BBC-esque question, “If you could pick anybody alive, who would you like to spend an evening with?” I would describe him as a “professional skeptic” and an incredible speaker. As with any hero-worship I attempt to destroy the idol by beating them with their own game. As he cries out for logic and truth I watch for him to slip up and use the same tricks he is rallying against and just when I think I hear one, he acknowledges it and exposes it for what it is. If he’s full of shit, he’s got me fooled. He is diligent and honest and most of all a free-thinker. Most of this is unknown to most of the world who think of Penn Jillette as a charlatan because he does stage magic. He has a Vegas show where he tells you “pick a card, any card” and that is the extent of the general public’s image of him.
So this beautiful passage on the freedom of non-belief is immediately discounted before it is read solely because the author is someone you don’t know. Worse than unknown, the author is someone you have heard of but don’t respect as a writer. If I put Mark Twain’s name on Penn’s article, I guarantee it would be given more of the respect it deserves.
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