(Michael Martone, Dinty Moore, Elena Passarello, Sue William Silverman) Four memoirists discuss the possibilities, pitfalls, giddy pleasures, and pesky legal problems that can arise from using celebrities as context and metaphor in creative nonfiction. Though the idea goes back to The Divine Comedy, and Dante’s version of Virgil, the negotiation between truth and fantasy can be much trickier in nonfiction. The panelists will discuss incorporating figures such as Pat Boone, Richard Nixon, Dan Quayle, and (the artist formerly known as) Prince as “characters” in their nonfiction books and essays.

Published Date: September 16, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Michael Martone, DTE Moore, Elena Ello, and Sue William Silverman. You'll now hear DTE Moore provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:33):

My name is DTE w Moore. Welcome. The plan today is all four of us will speak, discuss, perhaps demonstrate what we're theming this panel around, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a second, and we're certainly going to leave time for you to disagree with us, attack us, ed Hominin, ask questions, give your other favorite examples of works of nonfiction that perhaps do what we're talking about. But thank you all for coming in. What a big room. It's a little disconcerting.

Speaker 2 (00:01:11):

It's okay. So I'm going to introduce all three panelists and myself I guess first, and then we'll go on to my left. Your right. Elena Ello is the author of, let me Clear My Throat, a collection of essays in which she asks readers whether it is okay or not for her to clear her throat. No, I'm sorry, I misunderstood. It's a series of brilliant essays exploring the human voice. In all its many iterations. She happens to have one of the most expressive voices I've ever heard at a reading, and if you haven't heard her read Find a Time Machine. Go back to nine o'clock last night. Moto e Ramen Noodle Shop in Saki House. Just do it because she's amazing. You can tell I didn't get these out of the program. Sue Williams Silverman is the author of three memoirs, a poetry collection and a tremendous craft book, fearless Confessions. For years, she has been secretly obsessed with the 1960s pop star Pat Boone, but the Secret is out of the closet, her latest memoir of the Pat Boone Fan Club. My life as a white Anglo-Saxon Jew is not only amazing and fun and deep and moving, but it's also for sale right now. Also in about an hour at the University of Nebraska book table, Michael Martone needs no introduction,

Speaker 2 (00:02:43):

But he deserves one. Michael was voted the best dressed man at a w p for six years running.

Speaker 2 (00:02:52):

He has written so many wonderful books across and enter and around genres, including most four For a quarter, he enjoys being drunk dial texted by his son's friends and he is indeed a champion. Dint w Moore is deathly afraid of polar bears. My idea in proposing this panel was to explore the possibilities, pitfalls, giddy pleasures, and possibly pesky legal problems involved in using celebrities as characters in creative nonfiction. For my part of this discussion though, I'm interested not just in how we use celebrities as characters in nonfiction, how we characterize them by describing their flesh and blood human characteristics. If that is all we're up to, it actually doesn't matter whether the person who shows up in our essay or memoir is famous or not famous, we are obligated as nonfiction to offer an accurate view of the person, their physical presence, their behavior, their odd snort of laughter, an honest account albeit through the lens of our own experience.

Speaker 2 (00:03:57):

What fascinates me the most is when we use celebrities, entertainers, politicians, sports stars, famous animals, Charlie Manson as an objective correlative. If you haven't heard that phrase since high school, let me refresh your memory. An objective correlative is a literary term referring to a symbolic article, let's say yellow wallpaper or a talking raven or a bank of darkening clouds. The objective correlative is used in literature to provide access to traditionally inexpressible concepts such as an emotion or state of mind. T s Eliot didn't invent the term, but he did popularize it by mentioning it in an essay on Hamlet quoting Elliot. Now, the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative. In other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion, such that when external facts are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

Speaker 2 (00:04:58):

You can find objective correlatives throughout the literary cannon, the lighthouse in Virginia wolfs the lighthouse, the coffin, and William Faulkners as I lay dying the sword sword Excalibur throughout the King Arthur legend. But how can people, real not fictional people act as an objective correlative? I would argue that the idea goes back at least as far as the Divine Comedy and Dante's version of Virgil. Don Delio, of course uses Oswald Babe, Ruth, Jade, GU Hoover, and many other notable figures as symbols in his novels, but nonfiction. What got me thinking about this was an essay entitled Breastfeeding Dick Cheney by Sonya Huber first published in Creative nonfiction in 2011 at the heart of the essay, and it's a wonderful, wonderful essay despite the fact that the title cracks me up too. At the heart of the essay is a Buddhist visualization technique, one where the meditator, in this case, Sonia Huber, is challenged to visualize her worst enemy as her child.

Speaker 2 (00:06:00):

Well, Huber believes in the importance of breastfeeding and if Dick Cheney were her child, you see where this leads. I emailed her last week to ask her about how Cheney ended up playing such a major role in her essay and she wrote back quoting Sonya Huber. Well, I actually wasn't planning on writing this essay until the magazine called for essays about anger. I had really wanted to get a piece in the magazine, so in some ways, my Cheney ambition provided the initial fuel. That's part of what is surprising about the essay that she wrote. Instead of listing everything she hates about Dick Cheney, though there is plenty, she finds a startling number of these parallels between the former vice president and herself, his childhood, her childhood, his college years, her college years, his ambition, her ambition. Here I am quoting Sonya Huber again, someone asked me where this essay came from and I answered surprising even myself that I was so angry at a lot of other things going on in my life that I couldn't yet write about.

Speaker 2 (00:06:59):

So I needed to write about anger because I was swimming in a sea of it and I needed a huge hook like Cheney to hang it on. Huber's unexpected essay relies on Cheney, not just as a hook, but as an objective, correlative as a huge hook that embodies or serves as a symbolic article in this case for anger just in seeing his name on the page. We as readers bring, or many of us do, at least those of us dedicated liberals who read literary magazines, we bring our associations with Cheney are emotional reactions to his words, his face, his action, and those reactions are the fuel that fires the origin. The engine of Huber's essay. In 2008, I published a memoir titled Between Panic and Desire Dick Nixon, former President Richard M. Nixon, but I prefer to call him Dick, shows up naturally in the memoir because one of my earliest memories in the book revolves around the Kennedy presidency, and I remember well my childhood perception of Nixon's evil self trying to win the presidency out from under my hero Jack.

Speaker 2 (00:08:03):

Much of the book revolves around my college years when Nixon was president and then Watergate and disgrace and resignation, but I consciously use Nixon too as an objective. Correlative though to be entirely clear, I wasn't thinking that or using that term when I was working on the book. What I was aware of was that many of my readers would have instant associations with the name Nixon, paranoia, disgust, distrust, pity, revulsion to name just a few. So Nixon strings throughout the book, as does his daughter Tricia, and the paranoia that ran deep during the Vietnam Watergate years. And this allows me to use the reader's responses, emotional reactions to open, I hope, into a deeper examination and exploration of what it means to be a human being who lived through those events. I'll close with a question. One I don't know the answer to. When does the correlative that is not a lighthouse or a raven, but a real person cease to function?

Speaker 2 (00:09:01):

When do people's emotional reactions to Nixon, to Cheney, to Ringo Star become too debilitated? Who is Dan Quail? My students ask when I talk about Michael Marone's wonderful book, Pence's, the thoughts of Dan Quail. How Soon Until they say, who is Dick Nixon? Who is Dick Cheney, the Beatles? Weren't they a band of some sort? Shakespeare's work today needs elaborate footnotes, identifying real kings and historical battles that today's reader probably does not recognize easily the is that what will be needed for the work we are discussing up here today? Will Pat Boone need to be footnoted in Sue Silverman's memoir? Well, let's hope so. That means someone is still reading us. We should all be so lucky. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:09:54):

I love when a panelist ends his contribution with a question because it feels like a trapeze artist sort of, and I just want to grab it and that question is so beautiful. I think when we write about celebrity, you get asked that a lot by editors and readers. Are you sure you want to include Taylor Swift? Are you sure anyone's going to know Taylor Swift? You want this book to be forever? My answer of course is I don't care if the book is forever. I had to make the thing that I had to make. But thank you D and hi everybody. So I'm really excited to be a part of this panel because it has memoirist in the title. It's like memoirist discussing celebrity, and I don't write memoir. I've never really written anything from personal experience, and so it's really fun to pretend to be a memoirist for a couple hours.

Speaker 3 (00:10:43):

I just think you guys are so cool and people pay a lot of attention to you, so it's nice. I think one of the reasons that I don't write memoir has a lot to do with why I write almost exclusively about celebrities, and it's because it's that I'm afraid of people. I'm afraid of real people, I'm afraid of all of you. I'm very afraid of myself. So celebrities provide an interesting way to sort of talk about people. I think people usually help an essay get made. People like to have people in their essays, so they're not all about architecture or something. I know that people often say that a book sells if there's a human face on the cover. So the people that I chose to write, I choose to write about most of the time, and the entities are entities of celebrity where the work has sort of been halfway done by the contemporary reader at least early on.

Speaker 3 (00:11:30):

Another thing that I'm really afraid of is success, and I think that that also ties into why I like to write about celebrity because I think trying to encapsulate the real person that is behind the idea of a celebrity like Taylor Swift or Nick Cave or DTI Moore is a doomed enterprise, right? I'm not talking about a person when I talk about Beyonce, I'm talking about myself in some ways, and I'm probably talking about all of you, but I'm certainly not talking about a young woman who was born in Houston, Texas in 1983 or whenever she was born, sorry, queen Bee. I don't know when your birthday is, somebody Google it. And so for me, those are the introductory impulses for writing about celebrity, the fear of people and the interest in exploring the essay as an exercise in doom of not success. I think that's the reason that I'm particularly drawn to writing the most inaccessible celebrities as possible. Not necessarily ones that I could like the mayor of my town that I could go interview, but someone who is long dead, someone who is very much in themselves an inexpressible concept, something where I know that the reader is not going to get what she wants out of the piece and neither am I, and we can sort of enjoy that work together.

Speaker 3 (00:12:55):

It's like a Steven Wright monologue. It's just so depressing. But for me, I find that really liberating and super fun. I will never write the James Kaplan biography of Frank Sinatra, but I will in a doomed way try to use Sinatra to talk about ideas in people. And I find that very liberating. I just have three kind of categories of celebrity doom that I like to write about and I thought I'd outline them for you quite quickly and then just tell you a little bit an essay that I've written and how it's approached that it shouldn't take too long, and then the real memoirists can take the stage. So maybe this is the same for many of you in here, but the first piece about celebrity that really grilled my cheese was I say that so much that I don't even know that it's a joke anymore, grilled my cheese. My students are like, God, stop saying that.

Speaker 3 (00:13:48):

I say this in workshop all the time, does anybody smell what I'm stepping in? And it's completely lost all meaning much like a celebrity. Anyway, so the first essay about celebrity that I really enjoyed is Frank Sinatra has a cold. I don't know if you remember, I'm sure most of us know this. I encountered it in maybe 1999, 2000. Esquire Magazine actually had it as a pullout. It was like If the magazine is this big, there was one of those little pullouts about the size of a perfume sample, and it said the best essay ever written. And so I was like, I think it was in a doctor's office and something. So I just ripped it out and I was like, I'm about to read the best essay that's ever been written. I was quite young, I was not old enough to drink yet, don't do the math.

Speaker 3 (00:14:30):

And I went home and I sat down. Here we go. And I was shocked at how much of a failure that essay was. I'm sure most of us know, I don't want to waste your time by recounting it too much, but Gates Elise never gets to meet Frank Sinatra, really. He just follows him around and watches other people interact with him for like a week. And he sees in the background the woman that carries his wigs in a suitcase. And yeah, Frank Sinatra wore a wig and watching his daughter record and making sure she gets home safely, but the writer and the subject are never around each other and what Frank Sinatra did so beautifully, and of course when I was 19 and I read this, I was like, what the hell? I thought I was going to get all this insight. I thought this was going to be a tell all bio that this is the best essay ever written.

Speaker 3 (00:15:16):

And then I realized that what was so beautiful about it was the way that this writer shaded in the negative space around the celebrity and something appeared a character. I don't know what, maybe a person, maybe Frank Sinatra in a way, but we'll never know. And so I've been really interested in doing that kind of work and that kind of doomed enterprise. So in the style of Gate to Lease, I think he does three things with Frank Sinatra and I'm only able to do one per essay. I think Frank Sinatra for him was a lost celebrity. I think he was a too big to be real celebrity, and I think he was a sticky celebrity. And so I'll just quickly outline what those three types of celebrity writing do for me. I love writing about a celebrity that we cannot access usually because they're dead or because all of the footage that we have of them is through hearsay.

Speaker 3 (00:16:15):

It sort of brings out the non-existent investigative journalist in me. I like to do my homework and figure out what evidence I have that could be used as negative space to talk about that person. And so the reader then sees me not achieving a profile but headbutting up against the wall of the profile. The most challenging one that I ever did for this was this essay that I wrote on Judy Garland called Judy Judy. Judy, where she had a concert at Carnegie Hall about 50 years ago. It was one of her two comeback concerts. It was in 1963, and people have a hard time describing the visceral effect it had on the people that were in that concert and the effect that it had on the listening public. When that record came out, it was the first record by a woman to go platinum. It made her the greatest entertainer in show business when a year earlier she was so sick, she was having pounds and pounds of fluid drained from her body, and they thought she was just dead literally.

Speaker 3 (00:17:14):

And her career was dead, and nobody really knows what happened there. They've remastered the concert footage so that you can in some ways hear, but for a long time, all people had was this kind of grainy record of a woman singing in and out of tune, and you knew that the reality of what made her a star was lost. There's a tiny super eight footage of this concert, and as somebody who was not alive in 1963, I knew that that magic was going to be forever gone. So I wanted to make a piece about that concert and see if I could pull what was lost back the world. And in doing it, I found out that it was an essay about other things, architecture and childbirth. But yeah, she's an example of a lost celebrity. I also have essays on the Castrati. We have no idea really what they sounded like, but they were the gods of Italian opera.

Speaker 3 (00:18:07):

We have one footage of one Castrato singing, but he wasn't even famous and he was quite old and he was really more of an alto than anything. But the Castrati revolutionized both performance and composition in the 18th century and 17th century. So I really enjoyed trying to understand that celebrity from this extreme distance. Second type of nonfiction celebrity writing that I find really energizing and helpful is it really connects to Dante's idea of the Inex expressive concept, A too big to be real celebrity. And maybe they're all like this. Maybe Pat Boone is like this, and maybe the mayor that I was talking about is all like this, but ones where there is no such thing as the person as who they are. I most recently did this for an anthology that's coming out about Monta Never give yourself an essay task based on a pun, but they want Pat Madden, who I think is here or he was here.

Speaker 3 (00:19:06):

He was like, oh, no, Elena's reading. Then he left. But he said, Hey, everybody pick a title of an essay by Monta and write a new essay about it. And I saw that all the cool kids took all the good titles. And so I showed up and there was three things left and one was Apology for Raymond Seban, and I don't know anybody named Raymond Seban. So I picked ceremony of the interview of Princes, and I thought I would write about Prince the God of Minneapolis. So then I was like, uhoh, what do I do? I cannot write about this man. He's not real. Even if he walked in right now, I know he lives like 20 miles from here. I don't know what would happen. I don't know what I would do. And all we get from Prince are these amazing pockets of playing basketball with Dave Chappelle and showing up on the new girl and revolutionizing the American pop sound, having one of the first number one rock songs that doesn't have a bass in it.

Speaker 3 (00:19:57):

He's just these sort of disparate elements of crazy. And then of course, he's terrible in interviews. He refuses. He contradicts himself constantly. I think he's downright Ian. So for that, I think so. So maybe he's more of a sticky concept than he is a too big to be real celebrity. But so for that piece, I read 30 years of Prince Interviews. I was living alone at the time. I had a stack this big and a cat on my lap and gained 11 pounds. And I then wrote this piece. I smooshed them all together into one gigantic how to interview Prince and tried to just take all of the contradictory things that he required and put them all together. And when it was over, I realized I didn't give you any impression of who Prince is. I just sort of showed you the way that Prince Dodges character and I was going to read from it, but maybe I'll just move on because I'm rambling.

Speaker 3 (00:20:59):

If you ever want to hear about it, buy me a beer and I'll tell you all about it. And then the last one, and this is my favorite one, and I think it's probably the one that's very close to what DTI was saying, is the sticky Celebrity Writing project. It's when you pick a celebrity that you care about, not so much because he or she or they are a person you want to unpack or get behind or connect yourself to, which is very valid. But because you think they will carry a concept, a metaphorical concept that means something to you, like if you want to write about violence, maybe it's better to find a violent celebrity and have them carry that weight for you, the facts of their life or the facts of what's been reported about their life. You could write about Mike Tyson or this baited bear that was so famous that he took tickets away from William Shakespeare in 1601 and was probably alive when Hamlet was first performed at the Globe, and he was next door.

Speaker 3 (00:21:51):

And that was where I found 10 years after I read Frank Sinatra has a cold, my Frank Sinatra essay. Frank Sinatra for me is along with Marlon Brando, the quintessential American voice of the 20th century, because he's so not amazing as a vocalist. He's a man of limits. And I think that's what the American voice is all about, establishing limits and pushing those limits, not being a diva or a virtuoso or like the castrati, but sort of pushing the songbook inside of the parameters of themselves, which is a terrible, I just said that, and I watched your guys' eyes glaze over when I said that. So that's why you need someone like Frank Sinatra, because I say pushing something of the American songbook, blah, blah, blah, fart fart. And you're like, whatever. When's lunch. But when I tell you that in 1939, Frank Sinatra, who couldn't read a note of music, supposedly wrote a 75 cent 30 page booklet called How to Sing like Frank Sinatra.

Speaker 3 (00:22:48):

And then I take that thing and use each page of the essay as an entrance point into it, both an aspect of his life and then an aspect of popular music talking about Smokey Robinson, Frank Sinatra's relationship with Ava Gardner and the Circle the Mouth makes in a Frank Sinatra. Well, now I'm talking about real strange, interesting motion driven things instead of just saying the quintessential American moment. And for me, that is the most freeing and the most exciting way that an essayist, maybe not so much someone who works in memoir, but that an essayist drives a car of a celebrity into whatever tree he or she wants to drive it. Anyway, and let me just close with a couple other examples of people who do this and much more successfully than I do in a lot of respects. Hilton Owls, I don't know. He's the theater critic for the New Yorker, a l s.

Speaker 3 (00:23:44):

He also is a essayist. He's got a book out with McSweeney's called White Girls that really grills my jeans, and he has an entire essay in which he speaks in the first person as Louise Brooks, but he's very much writing about himself. He's got an essay on Prince that kicks my Princess essay's ass, but it's not in the Montana anthology. And also a really fascinating piece on Richard Pryor. I always like to bring non nonfiction things into the room. So here's two playwrights that you might check out. Michel Marr, m i c k l e m a h e r. Hopefully I spelled that right, takes transcripts of the vice presidential debate between Dick Cheney and whoever Dick Cheney was up with that was moderated by. And then for some reason, it's like for him, it's moderated by John Baer and he puts them in a room together and uses in a play. So you're sitting in a theater watching this happen, and it turns into this grudge match while they're using sort the transcript of this debate. And so the celebrities are doing this work while the actors are doing this. Other work related to that is a playwright named Lucas Nath, h n a t h, who has this beautiful play on celebrity that involves Walt Disney having a sort of O C D meeting to plan his own funeral. So please check those out and thank you very much for listening.

Speaker 4 (00:25:13):

Thank you. And thank you DTI for organizing this panel. The title of my section is called The Daily Mirror, looking at celebrities, seeing ourselves, Kim Kardashian, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake. How do celebrities achieve pop culture status? What elevates a celebrity to the Mount Olympus of fame? They are for better or worse, a part of the sight geist. These people are famous because we make them famous, but why? What do they mean to us? When I was growing up, one celebrity profoundly shaped my life, and that's what I explore in my memoir, the Pat Boone Fan Club. My life is a white Anglo-Saxon Jew. So Pat Boone is or was a 1960s pop music idol who sold millions of albums. He had his own TV show, he started movies, and he was sort of the shiny white buck shoes to Elvis Presley's funky blue suede shoes.

Speaker 4 (00:26:18):

And Pat Boone sang about love letters in the sand while the king rocked the jailhouse. So while I love Pat Boone's music, my crush on him went much deeper and in encompassed the squeaky clean elements of his public image because my Jewish father mis loved me and because Pat Boone also known as a devout Christian, offered a perfect image of safety and goodness. He was the father I imagined rather than the father that I had. So basically, I wanted Pat Boone to adopt me, and in many ways I still do. So in my memoir, using Pat Boone as a metaphor, I examine my desire to pass as Christian, not only as a reaction to my father, but also as a wish to belong to and fit into the waspy suburb in which I lived.

Speaker 4 (00:27:18):

So in the memoir, I write about three separate times that I meet my idol when his image became real. And so for a writer, this is sort of like having one of your metaphors suddenly sort of leap up off of the page. So first, as a teenager, I attended his TV show in Manhattan where I got his autograph years later, which would be more or less recently, I happened to see a newspaper article announcing a Pat Boone concert at a megachurch near where I live, and I attended because who knows if I actually managed to meet him again, maybe I'd be able to write an essay about it. And that is exactly what happened after the concert. I sneaked backstage to find him, and I mean, basically I stalked him, but I prefer to use the word sneaked, but I totally stalked him. And this is a very condensed scene from the book.

Speaker 4 (00:28:18):

So Pat Boone and another man are just opening a door farther down the corridor, and I yell Pat Boone, I push past the assistant until I stand right in front of Pat Boone in his white shirt, white pants, white shoes. And I say, growing up, you saved my life. Then I'm telling him about my father, what happened with my father, and that it was he Pat Boone. Just knowing he existed kept me going. Just seeing his photographs and magazines, his music, all of it helped me stay alive and that he represented. But what word do I use? Safety, holiness, purity. Pat Boone has taken a step back away from me.

Speaker 4 (00:29:05):

Am I acting like a crazy woman? Am I the first woman who ever pursued him to confess that her father wants to hurt her and that he, pat Boone represented hope, just thinking that one day he might. Well, I'm glad to know that I did something good. Pat Boone says that I helped someone. You did. I say you were everything, your family, your daughter's here. Then I gave him a letter that I'd written. This will explain how I felt. I'll write back to you. He says, after I read it remarkably, he did write back and we exchanged emails and books. I sent him my first book about growing up in an incestuous family and my second book about sex addiction. And he sent me his books that he had written about faith and God.

Speaker 4 (00:30:02):

One of them was titled The Miracle of Prayer, and I actually read it, nevermind that I really am a kind of Jewish atheist, liberal democrat, whatever. And anyway, so then about a year or so after that, he emailed that he was going to be back in Michigan to give a Christmas concert, which to my Jewish heart was yes, a Christmas concert. And he invited me to come to the concert and meet with him backstage after it was over and it was going to be near Detroit, he arranged for me to meet him in the green room so that we could sort of have a real conversation when I didn't actually have to stalk him.

Speaker 4 (00:30:45):

But it was at the second meeting with him, or actually third, that the need I had for him to be a safe ideal father really came closest to being realized. And here's another excerpt from the book, pat Boone points to the velvet Flower embroidered on my lavender jacket at home. He says, hanging on my wall, I have a photograph of a flower growing up through concrete, he adds like you your childhood, you are like a flower growing up through concrete. So although he obviously never did adopt me, he did see me, if not literally as a daughter then in a way that my own father should have seen me, but had not.

Speaker 4 (00:31:37):

And it was only after I met Pat Boone in person that the title essay, and then subsequently that entire memoir was born. So really, I mean, if I hadn't stalked him in that first concert, the whole book would not exist. But despite these personal encounters, I write about Pat Boone more metaphorically than literally. In that sense, the book isn't so much about Pat Boone per se. Rather it's about what Pat Boone means to me. Now in the book, I also write about how other celebrities have impacted my life, but these are celebrities that I've not met, such as in the essay Prepositioning, John Travolta, and another about a celebrity who in fact is a robot named Crow who is star of the TV show, mystery Science Theater, 3000. Does anybody know that TV show? Well, I am absolutely smitten by Crow, and the fact that the show is off the air, I have nightmares like Where Is Crow?

Speaker 4 (00:32:47):

I mean, I really miss him. So in addition to Pat Boone, yes, I've had a crush on John Travolta and a robot, which either I have no taste at all or I don't know, or I need 30 more years of therapy. But as with Pat Boone and Travolta and Crow the Robot, I use them metaphorically as well. So the book then is a collection of linked essays, mostly based on pop culture that all examine from different vantage points, my rather quirky approach towards seeking a sense of identity and belonging and spirituality. Or as the subtitle says, my life is a white Anglo-Saxon Jew. So celebrities, real or robotic, I think speak to an emptiness, a longing which isn't always filled in the real world. Our real lives, since we don't truly know these people, we make them into anything we want. We project our hopes and desires onto them, and in this way, celebrities become our metaphoric fathers or lovers or mothers or best friends or pets. And as writers, if we pay attention to what any given celebrity means to us, we are able to write entire essays or even books. So if you have a crush on a celebrity, ask yourself, what does this celebrity embody? What does this celebrity mean to you? If you write about it, you'll find out. Thank you.

Speaker 5 (00:34:36):

Hello, everybody. You can hear okay. Okay, good. And yes, all hail gay TOIs, and I have my white shoes on there. I'm going to do a paper here called Cease and Desist and sort of approach this from the boundary of fiction in fact, and how fiction in fact interact in a legalistic way and it's legalistic, so we'll get through it quickly, cease and desist. I have always said one hasn't lived until one has received a cease and desist letter, also known as an infringement letter or a demand letter. The mixed freight consists of the law firm's name tattooed at the top of the warm Tim panic page. I have been in receipt of such letters twice, once for invasion of privacy and once for infringing trademark, but I'm hoping for the trifecta of literary cnds, the violation of copyright. It's only a matter of time as I've now published a story, the Sex Lives of Fantastic four in which I borrow Marvel comic book characters as my own Marvel's copyrights are now owned by Disney that is trademarked, who for all intents and purposes is the Moore door of copyright enforcement.

Speaker 5 (00:36:07):

But just to be safe, this opening also utilizes a line from Donald Bartle may without attribution and of course cites more door as well without paying any fees, a pause to receive any servers at this juncture. No moving on. Copyright in its violation is a story for another day. I would recommend Louis Hyde's fine book Common as heir if you are interested in the subject, tracing the history of the copyright up to the present paradoxical moment where we writers have never before enjoyed such legal protection of our intellectual property, while at the same time are possessed with such technical savvy to get around any such barriers. Now, what is more on the agenda today is the first of the triumvirate, the invasion of privacy for which I was not so much in receipt of a cease and desist order from the lawyers of a person whose privacy I had violated, but from my own publisher's, lawyers who when vetting my book, memoed, a cease and desist in all due diligence in the anticipation of legal intervention by a subject once the book was published and privacy was then violated.

Speaker 5 (00:37:34):

But before we get there, I want to meditate for a moment on what I call the inoculation clause that is better known as the disclaimer, which attaches itself now to media of all types. Have you ever employed an inoculation clause? Do you know the clause? I mean, here's an example. This is a work of fiction names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead love. That one or actual events is purely coincidental. This is a standard clause. It's not copyrighted, I think, ready for you to cut and paste. I love all parts of books that we usually don't give much thought to. Table of contents, dedication pages, copyright pages, headers, footers, acknowledgements, flap copies, bio notes and blurbs. Check out Kevin Jackson's interesting book, invisible Forms, a Guide to Literary Curiosity, St.

Speaker 5 (00:38:43):

Martin's 1999 for a discussion of the asteroid band of writing that orbits the gas giant of the body. Copy. The book does not include sadly, a discussion of the inoculation clause, but my hasty research attempting to find its origin did turn up something interesting. I actually always trace it back to Look, Homeward Wolf knew that the book was going to excite a lot of people in Asheville, North Carolina, and the inoculation clause was sort of sent out there to try to keep tamp that down. And that's everything I found out while reading The clause suggested it was deployed as a wishful charm and legal prophylactic against libel and not so much privacy violation. In any case, it turns out the spell is not much good. In either case, it doesn't work. It won't stop a suit, it won't ward off a cease and desist or actual action, but it might mitigate the damage once one is sued.

Speaker 5 (00:39:48):

But that too is another story. My story, the one that raised alarms in the vetting of those lawyers was a fiction fiction in the form of a monologue delivered by a world famous I thought. Swimmer Mark Spitz, who knows Mark Spits Now, I mean, it is that problem that's already come up of using a character off the shelf, say, but what is the expiration date on that fame? So you know Mark Spitz. So I used Mark Spitz, the swimmer, mark Spitz. My fear going into the project, a book filled with monologues delivered by many famous and real Hoosiers was that they were armed for libel more than they were libel for libel that I might be open to an action because I was monkeying around and thereby damaging someone's famous reputation, or as we now say, brand with malice of forethought that's liable. I not only hurt the person or his or her reputation, but also it was my motive to do so.

Speaker 5 (00:41:01):

You will note that the disclaimer's first line of defense is to declare a work of fiction. In my case, thinking in terms of liable, I even established a subtitle on the book, alive and Dead in Indiana as Stories and Elsewhere as Fictions. The first lesson is just by calling something of something a fiction does not for lawyers or the law matter in terms of libel or invasion of privacy. Change the name, dye the hair, add 20 pounds to the character, it doesn't matter. Anyone can sue. It is easy to do so. And if a complainant feels that the fictional character is based on him or her, well, there's not only dramatic action, but also actual action that can be had. There are two things that prevent an invasion of privacy case difficult to be brought First, if you are dead, you have no right to privacy.

Speaker 5 (00:42:02):

And second, if you are famous, you have in essence given up your right to privacy when you trade yourself as a public person. Movie stars, politicians can't call foul in the media once they have used that very same media to create the characters that they are with Mark Spitz, I found that I was in a delicious paradox. I had imagined the swimmer now years after his Olympic triumph practicing dentistry in Venice, California. I selected that profession for Mark Spitz. He was really a real estate investor because most people I knew who knew of Mark spits when asked what they thought he had become, they thought he'd become a dentist after he retired from swimming. Interesting. The meme had circulated and had taken home hold because spits had appeared on a Bob Hope special in the role of a dentist in a skit as he had just recently enrolled in the Indiana University Dental School post swimming.

Speaker 5 (00:43:13):

In reality, he never attended dental school, but the idea that a famous swimmer was now a dentist held sway in a public imagination for a particular amount of time. Did any of you knowing Mark Spitz now think he was a dentist? I totally thought he was. Yeah. Yeah, completely not real. That's a fiction. He never attended dental school, but the idea that the famous winner was now a dentist held sway in the public imagination for some time in the story, I hedged my bet. I didn't name the famous ex swimmer now dentist. So Mark Spitz was never named. Instead, at one point he says to a patient, say my name into the bowl,

Speaker 5 (00:44:04):

When the lawyers ceasing and Desisting said, I would have to cut this story for fear of privacy invasion, I said, first, this is a fiction. How can I invade the invade the privacy and rights of a fictional character to which they responded with fact fiction doesn't matter. And then went on to say, we believe this character, mark Spitz, and that he is no longer famous enough to be immune from taking action. A whole later interesting argument about that constitute or what would constitute a public figure famous enough. The joke was they believed this character was Mark Spitz because he was a dentist.

Speaker 5 (00:44:57):

But I said, mark Spitz is not a dentist. That is a fiction. I mean, I said a real fiction that everyone believes is the truth. It doesn't matter. They said it doesn't matter because these matters are not an issue of statute, statute, but of law that is litigated at individual trial. And the way it goes depends upon the judge, the lawyers, and the particular waffle and the current zeitgeist. For me, mark Spitz could be seen behind my disguise of fiction, and he was no longer famous enough to be allergic to the right of privacy. The story was to be deleted from the collection, and it was, but wait, there's one more recourse, and that is to gain his permission to use him as a character in my fiction. I could ask his permission. I ask his permission. Well, my lawyers talked with his lawyers and he said no. So I ceased and I desisted, thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:46:22):

I don't know if any of you have read BU's new book, but I'm curious now if she had an inoculation clause. And I'm going to make one other dumb comment, but it's true. I'm writing a book about religion now. So I spent Easter weekend at the American Atheist Conference in Memphis, Tennessee Easter weekend. The atheists know how to give it back and the creator and one of the actors from Mystery Science 3000, that's what they do now. They do standup at atheist conventions. So you don't want to be a Christian. I wonder if anybody out there has a question, comment, an example, something you'd like to have us explore. And I'm going to repeat the questions because the a w P is recording this. I guess

Speaker 6 (00:47:13):

I heard you read yesterday, it was a great reading, but for the first two minutes I thought, did you really have that experience with Nelson Alre or

Speaker 2 (00:47:26):

In 1977, I was a college senior University of Pittsburgh, go Panthers, Panthers. And I was the student escort for Nelson Ren and wanted, and I was excited and I could not imagine what excitement we would have, and he said he wanted to go buy some boxer shorts. So yes, that's nonfiction. Thank you. So the question is hypothetically though, I guess it isn't hypothetical. If you knew a celebrity before they became a celebrity, you went to high school with Prince. I did. What are the legal ramifications of talking about their private lives before their lives became so public? And I don't know if you know this, but right after dental school, Michael Martone got his legal degree. Any ideas on this?

Speaker 5 (00:48:25):

Well, legally I don't think that that matters as far as invasion of privacy. If the person is famous at the point of the publication, there's no way there's an action for privacy because that person is famous. Now, even though you may have known that person at a time in both your lives when that wasn't the case, but at the time, I mean what's litigated or what's talked about is the publication, the invasion happens with you bringing public another story of a person's life. I found it incredibly, I mean, I knew about libel where you're actually using a person either famous or not famous. I mean, that's the other case. The famous person still has recourse to libel because you are using his reputation or her reputation against what he or she has worked so hard to actually create. But privacy is another thing that completely took me by surprise, and it does have to do with the way the world is at that particular time.

Speaker 5 (00:49:34):

Another example from that book was a monologue delivered by Colonel Sanders, who was a real person, but he was dead giving up his right of privacy. But in the monologue, he says to his wife, goodbye, I'll see you later. And she says, goodbye, take care of yourselves. And the lawyer flag that and said, can you substantiate that she said this? And I said, no, I cannot substantiate. She said, they said, cut that line. So it isn't a matter of having them be in a bad light, it's just a matter of actually putting words in the mouths of people. Without their permission, you've invaded their privacy. So

Speaker 2 (00:50:19):

You may need to consult an actual attorney who works in

Speaker 5 (00:50:24):

Publishing. The other thing about this is all of, I mean, if you're a fiction writer and you used your sister and if the sister's pissed at you, yeah, anybody can bring suit. I mean, that's the one really sort of frightening thing. But really don't stay up at night thinking about that because it's very rare that it happens, especially I think with privacy. But sometimes one case can get the entire publishing or lawyers really nervous about that because there's two rights, the right of your free expression and the right of our privacy. Lemme

Speaker 7 (00:51:03):

Give you an example. One of the characters

Speaker 2 (00:51:07):

Who, I'll repeat the question for the audio. Somebody named Redacted did something that action redacted that the gentleman in the room is wondering, can he write about that? Because this someone is actually quite a celebrity right now.

Speaker 5 (00:51:29):

But the other part of that is if, remember the lawyer did ask me, can you substantiate? She said this, I mean, again, they were taking a fiction and moving it into a kind of nonfiction sourced way. That's one way. And the other way through that is if you could ask permission from that person, then that's fine too.

Speaker 2 (00:51:50):

I just want to underscore

Speaker 4 (00:51:50):

One other thing is to write about a celebrity who really isn't a celebrity anymore, but really still wants to be a celebrity. And I mean, pat Boone is so thankful that anybody is even thinking about him. He said something to me like, gosh, my name is actually on a book and it's so heartbreaking and beautiful. The only people who are talking about Pat Boone now are like at a w p or wherever. I'm not all together at all in praise of Pat Boone. I mean, I say some things about him that really he wouldn't like, but he's read the book and he's just so grateful that he would never consider suing me. I mean, gosh, somebody still caress about me. So that's your other option. So if

Speaker 7 (00:52:44):

You write about a famous person who was famous but is now dead, then do you have to worry about their estate or their family?

Speaker 5 (00:52:55):

Do you have to worry about the estate of a dead person suing? No, I mean not for privacy. Again, trademark. Now, an estate will come after you, but not the right of privacy.

Speaker 2 (00:53:07):

If you were to write that Colonel Harlan Sanders put poison in the chicken, then yeah, that

Speaker 5 (00:53:15):

Would, yeah, right, for libel. But

Speaker 2 (00:53:17):

Yeah, certainly if what you write is going to cause a person or especially a large, major, large, a major American corporation to lose money, then the lawyers might knock on your door. But I want to underscore what Michael said. It almost never happens,

Speaker 5 (00:53:34):

And also it almost never happens. And when it does happen, it can break either way because it depends also on what's happening in the larger culture at that time. The famous case is Miss Wyoming v penthouse in which a Miss Wyoming who was blonde and a baton twirler showed up in a story in penthouse, and she brought suits saying, I believe this person is me. And they did this without doing that. And penthouse said, no, it's not you. It's somebody we made up, just happened to have blonde hair and was a baton twirler. And she proved, or she argued in court that in fact, this was based on me. Then there are just as many cases where someone said, I believe this character is based on me. When the court said, no, we don't believe it. So it's not a hard and fast law. It's always going to be argued, and it just depends on the way it's going at the time. Because the other right is incredibly important too. Our ability to the right of free expression

Speaker 2 (00:54:44):

In the stripe shirt, we'll get to the front rows too.

Speaker 6 (00:54:48):

If you are writing a piece, character daydreaming about a real, real famous person A, but daydreaming and daydreaming,

Speaker 5 (00:54:58):

Well, we're into sort of second order imagination of Famous, again, I didn't go into it, but I thought that was an interesting thing in my particular time with the lawyers, which is the designation, and again, it's something that has to be litigated. The designation that Mark Spitz was a famous person, but now is not famous enough. And so you brought up the idea that there's sort of second tier and first tier fame. I think that's interesting question that we live in this culture that makes a distinction between the public and the private. But again, there's no hard and fast rule. It's all I'd say go ahead and do it, because that's our job as writers, is to find where that boundary is. And as DTE said, the pushback will come if you do hit a nerve at a particular time, but you shouldn't in anticipation of that ever stop yourself from if that's where the story is going or where you want to go.

Speaker 5 (00:56:04):

Then I thought when I wrote this, I, oh, don't do that because everyone will get really nervous and really cease and desist orders. It's great to get one. It really is. I mean, because somebody's reading something, you don't get stuff back, but you just have to remember that the law reads in a different way. I mean, just the same thing with those lawyers made no distinction. And here at a w P, we argue all the time, nonfiction, fiction, no distinction. This thing, we're going to fact check this. Whether we call it a fiction or not, or not, that's interesting to me. It won't stop me from actually doing it. But I'm now what more engaged in the play of doing this because I've had this experience.

Speaker 2 (00:56:53):

Two things quickly. One is we welcome questions that aren't about fine points of legal litigation. Secondly, the more Michael talks, the more I realize in my books and published essays, I've done everything that we're not supposed to do and nobody's ever come after me. Trisha Nixon shows up in a ridiculous way in my book that uses Dick Nixon and Trisha's very much alive, and the lawyers probably should have taken that chapter out, but I don't know. It's an odd judgment call

Speaker 5 (00:57:25):

To deflect just a little bit away from that, I wanted to mention a book. Does anyone know Leo Brody's Frenzy of Renno, which is a literary history of the Emergence of fame? He contends that The first famous celebrity is Alexander the Great,