I am interviewed by a fellow blogger

Brook Syers has published his interview with me on his blog, available here:

http://brooksyers.blogspot.com/p/author-interviews.html

Here's a sneak preview of the interview:

Tell us a little about yourself? Perhaps something not many people know?

I am an author and wildly successful nudist living in San Diego, California. My romantic novels have been described by literary critics as “‘The Notebook’ meets ‘Cannibal Holocaust’”.

In 2004, I was granted knighthood by the Basque Republic, becoming Sir David J. Schmidt for the following three years. (The title was stripped from me by the United Nations Council on Fallacious Royal Families in 2007.) After I was elected to the San Diego City Council in 2008, I spent my single term in office lobbying extensively for punctuation reform, pushing to have the period officially replaced with the obsolete, whimsical punctuation mark of the “fleur-de-lis”. In addition to these accomplishments, I also founded the yearly charitable event, “Race for a Cure to Spontaneous Human Combustion”.

I have been devoting an increasing amount of time to writing and research, ever since my physician informed me that I suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

What made you want to become a writer?

In all seriousness, our increasingly illiterate society inspired me to do so.

More precisely, the recent explosion of bad writing is what inspired my two recently published parody novels. I’ve been freelancing for more than ten years, but my most recent satirical projects—Pirates of the Danube and The Baron Rides Again—were written as a direct reaction to the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon.

A friend of mine was reading the Fifty Shades trilogy last summer, and she brought one of the books out at a party. I took a look at it, and just found it to be spectacularly bad. Not just artless storytelling or dimensionless characters, but criminally bad writing. I felt like it was assaulting all of my senses, like every page of this book was carpet-bombing my brain with grammatical errors. And then my friend told me these books had become extremely popular.  

I am not offended by the fact that an erotica novel is popular. I am not shocked by the content matter of Fifty Shades, or the fact that the books deal with sadomasochism and bondage. Heck, I wasn’t even shocked when my parish priest told me he was into sadomasochism. (Although I was perplexed that he chose to tell me while I was in the middle of my confession.) I’m an open-minded fellow. What offends me, though, is the fact that such a poorly written book can become popular. The book doesn’t read like an erotic tale of any sort—it feels like a third grader took a break from reading Hop on Pop and sat down to write a story about “people making boom boom”.

This was the birth of Pirates of the Danube. I endeavored to jump on the bandwagon, and write the most ridiculous and anachronistic romance-erotica tale imaginable....

TO READ THE FULL INTERVIEW, CLICK HERE.

My book is banned in the Middle East

A friend who is living in the Middle East and attempted to download my book, Pirates of the Danube, during the free e-book giveaway, sent this to me.
Click the image to see it in full size:

Check out the message in green on the right side of the screen.

Apparently, I've joined the proud annals of banned books. I can only imagine that, someday in the near future, people will be smuggling bootleg copies of this book in their underpants across borders, as Soviet citizens used to do with the Bible.

Just bad enough to not be good

Pop Literature in the 21st Century


[NOTE: This was originally posted on the blog, "Are We There Yet?" To see the original blog post, please visit this link:]
http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/2013/03/just-bad-enough-to-not-be-good.html

* * * *

“Hikaru kumo o tsukinuke furai a wei.”

-Japanese folk saying. Translation: “Rice must be cooked just right—neither too hard nor too soft. This is the manifestation of perfection.”

I’ll be frank with you, dear reader—I am an avid collector of bad literature.

I am a literary crap enthusiast. Like the young Joseph Smith in upstate New York, I take my proverbial shovel in hand and head out into the woods, searching for those golden tablets of text that are a cut above the rest. There is a unique quality to exceptionally bad writing: if it crosses a certain threshold, it suddenly becomes immensely fun to read. I feel that the scale of “good to bad writing” is not a continuum; rather, it is horseshoe shaped, with good and bad nearly meeting at the bottom. Some books are so bad that they are able to jump that synapse and cross over into Awesome Territory.

One such book was a little gem I stumbled upon last year titled “Leave the Wine Glass Lay”. A friend of mine met the author in person—he came to her unannounced, like the Angel Moroni, to tell her about his literary opus. The author assured my friend, with a self-important air about him, that his book would be “the next big thing”. She went online and checked the book’s description on Amazon—and then immediately sent me an e-mail marked urgent, with a link and the comment, “you have to buy this book”.

As soon as I read the Amazon synopsis of “Leave the Wine Glass Lay”, I knew that I had struck gold.

Three things stuck out to me:

1. The modifier “all kinds of” is used twice in the first paragraph of the description. The main character, a powerful wizard, has “all kinds of magical powers” and encounters “all kinds of characters”.

2. By the second paragraph, we already have a full fledged cluster-eff of pronouns.

“He befriends a 10-yr-old child, Laden, who finds the Evil Wine Glass at the seashore and invites him and his family to dinner along with his friends.”

Whose family? Whose friends? Which he is who? Zuh?

3. The author went to the trouble of writing a quote of recommendation for himself. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of anybody to attribute this quote to. All we have, at the end of the book’s description, is this:

“This story is unlike any other and author Jackie O Brien is truly unique by writing this story.”

I should note: that quote is also on the back cover of the book itself. In the print version, however, the author was nice enough to add some quotation marks—but still no person to whom the compliment is attributed. The punctuation itself appears to beg of us, “Come on, guys, honest, somebody said that. Look—there’s punctuation marks around it!”

That’s right, dear reader—I purchased this book.

And it was worth every penny. It truly was so bad that it became amazing. Where to begin? Well, how about at the beginning. Seriously, the first sentence of the book already has major verb tense confusion:

“I am the wizard Translucence and the year was 1503.”

The punctuation is devil-may-care and haphazard, as are the spelling and grammar. “Its” and “it’s” are used interchangeably, as are “they’re”, “there” and “their”. At several points throughout the book, the author appears to have forgotten what he’d already said—or lost the ability to scroll up on his word processor—and inserts sudden interjections like, “oh, but did I mention”, and “oh, I forgot to say such-and-such”. Some words are inexplicably capitalized, only to be written lowercase later in the text.

The descriptive language is just as avant garde in nature. This is one of my favorite quotes:

"Another enchantment, I instantly thought as the veins on my neck puffed in horror."

I have no idea what “neck veins puffing in horror” looks like, but I imagine something akin to a bullfrog when threatened.

And the story itself. Oh, dear, sweet Lord, the story. It jumps around, introducing plot developments suddenly and without warning. The entire thing appears to have been written in one sitting, the author overcome with the white heat of drunken inspiration. “Leave the Wine Glass Lay” truly jumps the gap between good and bad, moving with Nietzschean boldness into that netherworld beyond good and evil.

But oh, did I mention that “Leave the Wine Glass Lay” wasn’t the initial book I came here to discuss, dear reader? No, the book that truly makes my neck veins puff up in horror is none other than “Fifty Shades of Grey”.

* * * *

The above-quoted Japanese proverb illustrates the ideal of perfection—something that walks that delicate balance between hard and soft, undercooked and overcooked—in Japanese culture. It is my opinion that the same principle applies to something that is of poor quality. For writing to be truly bad, it can’t be overly bad, like Jackie O Brien’s book of wizardly adventures. His book is too bad to really even be considered bad, in my opinion. Nay, I believe that truly bad writing must be just bad enough to frustrate the reader without amusing him/her.

Enter “Fifty Shades of Grey”, stage left.

The most infuriating thing about the entire “Fifty Shades” trilogy is that it walks that delicate, Japanese line of balance and equilibrium. It is not nearly good enough to be worth reading. However, it is not quite bad enough to be entertaining. “Fifty Shades” is just bad enough to be truly bad writing—drab, poorly constructed, unsophisticated. Its badness is, well—grey.

I am reminded of M. Scott Peck’s description of evil as “gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring”. [People of the Lie, p. 264.] And of C. S. Lewis’s depiction of Hell as a gray, drizzly English city with nothing particularly interesting about it. True evil is not exciting or interesting—it is uncreative and pedestrian.

Perhaps more infuriating than its mundane badness, however, is the fact that people pay money for “Fifty Shades”. At least “Leave the Wine Glass Lay” has been left “laying” on the shelf. E. L. James’s erotica stories have become a cultural phenomenon, sparking a mini-industry of merchandise, knock-offs, parodies, late night talk show references, and even involving the participation of Gilbert Gottfried.

Well, if you can’t beat them, join them. 

I decided to climb on board the sticky, dubiously-stained bandwagon of the “Fifty Shades” phenomenon and write a satirical work of my own. My book, “Pirates of the Danube”, is not a direct parody of the S & M trilogy per se, however; rather, it is an homage to an entire genre of rambling romance-erotica tales. It is part “Fifty Shades”, part Harlequin romance, part “Leave the Wine Glass Lay”, and 100% awesome.

And it will be available for free this weekend. See here for details.

-David J. Schmidt

*One note on the Japanese proverb quoted above:

I wasn’t able to find the actual folk proverb, so I just inserted a quote from the opening credits to the Japanese cartoon Dragonball Z instead. But I swear, that proverb about properly cooked rice exists somewhere in Japan—a real Japanese man told it to me once, while he shared a bottle of vodka with me in southern Russia. But that’s a different story for a different time.

Please check out the blog "are we there yet", where this was originally published. You shan't regret it.

http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/ 

Rape in the Congo

Love in the 21st Century

[This blog was also published on Jo Bryant's blog, and on "Reader's Entertainment". To see the guest posts, click the links below:]

http://jobryantnz.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/rape-in-the-congo-love-in-the-21st-century/

http://www.readersentertainment.com/blog/2013/love-in-the-21st-century-by-david-j-schmidt/

- - - -

I open up my e-mail inbox one morning to find that the first message on the list bears the following title:

“THIS MONDAY—RAPE IN THE CONGO!”

Of course, after I open the e-mail, I realize that it comes from an activist group that is inviting me to a special event where they will screen a documentary about some humanitarian crisis in Africa.

But the first thought that came to my head, when I saw that email, was this:

Who can afford a plane ticket to the Congo in this economy? Much less stomach all the raping?

I blame “Fifty Shades of Grey” for this.

In part, I hold the “Fifty Shades” phenomenon responsible because, in this day and age, violent sex is on everybody’s minds. It’s all the vogue. It seems that no matter where we turn lately, bruises are the coolest new thing to wear. Bella wakes up after her wedding night with Edward Cullen to find her body bruised and sore, and she is filled with love for her new husband. Anastasia meets a man who tells her he wants to put metal projectiles inside of her, and she instantly falls for him. “You had me at ‘projectiles’,” she says.

It used to be, the violence was at least kept subtle and implicit in films and books. You watch one of these old black and white movies from the 1940’s, and sure, the men do a lot of tough talking, but they keep it classy for the most part. I recently watched “Double Indemnity”, a film noir from 1944. Sure, the main character is always pulling women around by the upper arm to get them to go along with him, as if they had no sense of agency of their own, or were incapable of responding to a simple, verbal “hey, come over here please”. Sure, the lead male has a habit of fiercely shaking his love interest by the shoulders as a prelude to kissing her.

But at least nobody is waking up with bruises in the morning, or having metal balls put inside their nether-regions.

In the 21^st Century, on the other hand, we have Twilight and Fifty Shades.

We have Edward Cullen, a husband who is “special” and “magical” and sparkles in the sunlight—and, because he is special and magical and sparkly, his wife is forced to cut off all contact with her friends and family once she marries him. Because nothing says “loving relationship” like a man who won’t let you call your dad on the phone.

We have Christian Grey, who makes you sign a contract regulating when you can touch yourself, who monitors what you eat meticulously.

All that’s missing is for Christian Grey and Edward Cullen to sex their respective lovers to the tune of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” like Julia Roberts’ evil husband in “Sleeping with the Enemy”.

But this isn’t the only problem I blame on the “Fifty Shades” phenomenon.

I also hold “Fifty Shades” and its kin responsible for my confusion. My misunderstanding of the aforementioned email—and the vagueness of the email’s title itself—are the direct result of these books, as they have normalized imprecise language. More than the bizarre sexual practices, the poor syntax is, perhaps, the most disturbing thing about the whole “Fifty Shades” series.

The Congo isn’t the only thing being raped these days—the entire English language takes a beating when something like “Fifty Shades” becomes popularized.

Every time Christian Grey says a phrase like “thank fuck”—as if Fuck were some commonly accepted deity to whom we offer thanks and praise—I feel as if King Leopold of Belgium is marching his troops into the pristine wilderness of the English language, rampaging through the countryside and mining the soil of our language for blood diamonds.

Every time E. L. James carpet bombs her narrative with ubiquitous ellipses, raining down a maelstrom of fire on the punctuation, I feel the English language shrivel up and die inside.

Every time her main character says “oh my”; with every non sequitur in the plot development, with every nonsensical metaphor and simile, the defenseless English language is ravaged like a nation being colonized.

In the face of such devastation, I did the only thing any sensible person would do—I launched a counterattack, via parody. My novella, “Pirates of the Danube”, is a work of comic farce which satirizes the entire lot of barely-legible erotic and romance stories which have taken us by storm. It is humanity’s last stand, in the face of almost certain literary demise.

And it will be free this weekend.

* * * *

"Pirates of the Danube" will be free for download on Kindle this weekend, March 23 and 24. See the book in the Kindle store for details. 

Now please, do yourself a favor and go check out Jo Bryant's lovely blog. She is awesome, and she is an Aussie - Kiwi, making her exponentially more awesome.

And feel free to check out Reader's Entertainment for more book-related juiciness. 

Ghost Hunting: Slave Graveyard in Georgia

We pull up in front of a small Baptist church off the main road, just outside of Athens, Georgia. My brother leads us through some thick brush into the woods behind the parking lot. At the edge of the woods, there are a couple of modern gravestones.

We walk further into the woods. The last light of twilight is on the horizon.

Standing amidst the dark trees, we notice nothing out of the ordinary…at first. If you take a closer look at the ground, however, you will see them.

The graves. Where the slaves were buried.

They are barely recognizable—shallow depressions in the earth, just the size of a human body. All these years later, the earth still sinks down over the final resting places of these people. An unmarked flat stone has been placed at the head of each grave, the only manmade marker the tombs have received.

As we stand amidst the ancient stones and cold pine trees, my brother explains how he found out about the slave graveyard.

Third Farewell Letter to the Pope

One last letter to Pope Benedict before he leaves the Vatican...

February 28, 2013

His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI

Apostolic Palace

00120 Vatican City

Most Holy Father:

I’m sorry to bother you again. Before you leave office, though, I want to get your opinion on a matter which has been weighing heavy on my soul. I have been in a major crisis of conscience regarding my subscription to Playboy magazine, and I would like your Papal input on the subject.

The thing is this—I subscribe to Playboy primarily for the articles.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t find women attractive, or that I’m “light in the loafers”, to borrow a phrase from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Oh, no, Holy Father—I’m all man.

It’s just that most of the time, the editors of this fine magazine simply don’t select models who are of my particular taste. Take the current February – March 2013 issue, for instance. The only major nude photo spreads are (1) the Playmate of the Month, and (2) a special pictorial devoted to lingerie. Now this particular Playmate, although pretty enough, is just too busty for my liking. I realize, of course, how ironic it is for a man to purchase a Playboy magazine and then complain about finding a busty woman therein. Sort of like going to a water park and complaining about getting wet, I suppose. But what can I say—I try to live in a Biblical manner. Last time I checked, my Bible quotes Song of Solomon as saying, “Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit.” (Verse 7:7) An average cluster of palm fruit weighs approximately 350 grams—a modest handful, and a far cry from the ridiculous D-cups which “Candi” is sporting in this month’s issue of Playboy.

To add insult to injury, the only other full spread of photos was a series devoted to lingerie. Lingerie. Seriously, Your Holiness, do you think I pay $5.99 for an issue of Playboy magazine to see lingerie? Why would I do that, when I can send away for a Victoria’s Secret catalogue for free, just by emailing them and telling them I am a woman named “Davida Schmidt”, and now I’m getting credit card offers for “Davida” in the mail as well and I’m thinking of applying for one, because—honestly, in this economy—who can afford to not commit credit fraud?

As if that weren’t enough, Holy Father, the myopic editors of Playboy have insisted, during the past few decades, on giving a disproportionate amount of attention to top-heavy blondes, to the exclusion of other physiognomies. I assume this is related to the personal preferences of Mr. Heffner. I don’t know if Your Holiness was ever unfortunate enough to see the reality TV show, “The Girls Next Door”, but if you do—you’ll notice that all three of Hef’s “girlfriends” look exactly alike. I feel it’s safe to assume that you will share in my outrage, given the Church’s firm stance against human cloning. I feel, in addition, that the lopsided representation of blonde, white females in the magazine is a slap in the face of the beautiful diversity inherent in creation. (Genesis 1:31)

However, the reason for my crisis of conscience is this—I fear that, by not giving proper attention to the photographic content of the magazine, I may be disrespecting the hard work of the models. As the Church specified in Mater et Magistra, n. 34, the right to work is a fundamental right. Your predecessor, John Paul II, further emphasised the dignity of all work in Laborem Exercens, Part IV. I fear that, by purchasing Playboy magazine primarily for its literary content, I may be in violation of the Social Doctrine of the Church by failing to adequately appreciate the contribution of the models’ work to this publication.

Is this wrong, Holy Father, to purchase a magazine exclusively for one element of said publication? Should I cancel my Playboy subscription if I am not going to give sufficient attention to the photographs therein? Shall I stick solely with my current New Yorker subscription? I’ll admit, there are parts of the New Yorker that I never pay attention to, either—the “what’s going on in New York” section at the beginning of every issue, and the Financial News section. But come on, Your Holiness—I cannot imagine a more boring thing to read in all of creation (including the original Dead Sea Scrolls). Why, God Himself wouldn’t have the patience to slog through one of those East Coast economists’ treatises on the recession.

I look forward to receiving your guidance on this Playboy issue. If Your Holiness feels it best that I give equal attention to every section of the magazine, I promise to do so, on my honor. As former principal of Brigham Young University, Karl G. Maeser, said, “stand me on the floor and draw a chalk line around me and have me give my word of honor never to cross it. Can I get out of the circle? No. Never! I’d die first!” It is my sole interest to do right by Your Holiness, by Mother Church, and by the hard-working young ladies who model for Playboy magazine.

I wish you all the best in the future and on the golf course,

David Schmidt

P.S. I heard on the news that the brown leather shoes you will be wearing from now on were given to you in the city of León, Guanajuato, Mexico. I went there for Christmas vacation a year ago. Isn’t it great? By the way, you didn’t happen to find a set of car keys with a bottle opener on them while you were in León, did you? I was pretty drunk most of the week—my girlfriend had just left me—so I think I misplaced the keys in a moment of inebriated grief.  

My second letter to the Pope

Making the most of these last days of Pope Benedict XVI's tenure, I sent His Holiness a letter asking for yet another favor...

* * * *

26 February 2013

His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI

Apostolic Palace

00120 Vatican City

Most Holy Father:

It’s me again. I would like to, first and foremost, congratulate you for amending the conclave law of the Vatican, in order to allow for the College of Cardinals to gather sooner than usual. I imagine that this must be a time of great personal transition for you. I feel that I partially understand what you are going through, Your Holiness. I have been undergoing several changes and transitions in my life as well, the most recent of which is this: not long ago, I finally renewed my subscription to Playboy magazine.

I have long been a subscriber to this fine publication—for nearly as much time as I have been a confirmed Catholic, in fact. I allowed my subscription to go fallow, however, neglecting it like the field of thorns in the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:3-10). After much unnecessary dillying and dallying, I finally renewed said Playboy subscription this year, in an effort to get my act together and to stop “forsaking my first love” (Revelations 2:4). I had been looking forward to reading the article on “The Wintering of the Arab Spring” in this month’s issue—as well as a reprinted interview with Hunter S. Thompson—so I brought my new issue of Playboy with me to my apartment’s laundry room last night while washing clothes.

I soon realized, however, that I had not brought enough quarters to dry my load of laundry. I left the magazine on top of one of the dryers and walked back down the hall towards my apartment to get more change. You can imagine my shock and dismay, Holy Father, when I returned to the laundry room to find that my beloved Playboy magazine was missing!

Why am I telling you all this, you may ask? I’m glad you asked, Your Holiness. I was wondering if you could possibly mention my missing Playboy in your next Papal Nuncio—preferably before you leave office—and make the culprit give me my magazine back. 

You see, I’m pretty sure most of the people who live in my apartment building are Catholic. There’s a sizeable Latino population in our complex. I’m fairly certain they’re all Catholic, since I haven’t heard any of that “Alabaré, alabaré, alabaré” Hallelujah music blaring from any of their apartment doors. There are some Russians who I think are Eastern Orthodox, but that’s close enough to Catholic that they probably have to listen to what you say as well. There is this one African-American family that I think is Southern Baptist, so it wouldn’t matter what the Pope says to them…but it would be racist to just assume that “the Black guy did it”, so we’ll go ahead and cross them off the list of suspects entirely. Then there is this one family from Ethiopia or Somalia or one of those pirate-countries. I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, Holy Father—I don’t know what the hell religion they are. But apart from the Somal-iopians, most of my fellow tenants are members of our beloved Mother Church. So they have to do whatever you say.

I really was looking forward to reading the March 2013 issue of Playboy, Holy Father. I barely had enough time to flip through and read a couple of the hilarious Gaham Wilson cartoons before the magazine was ripped from my clutches forever. I’m not going to lie to you—I honestly am one of those people who “get Playboy for the articles”. Especially this month’s edition—the centerfold is just a little too busty for my personal taste, and she has something weird going on with her teeth.

Please, Your Holiness, find it in your heart to call out the offending pornography-thief during your next Nuncio. It shouldn’t take long—just mention that one of our brother (or—Heaven forbid—sister!) Catholics who lives at such-and-such address has stolen a Playboy magazine that doesn’t belong to them, and could they please give it back to David, or else. Please feel free to say it in your native German tongue, if you feel it will give an extra little forceful, authoritarian “oomph” to your admonishment. I’m certain that, when the offending party hears Your Holiness say, “Du musst das Magazin abgeben!” they will be trembling in their Catholic boots!

I appreciate your help in retrieving my missing literature. Whoever the Peeping Tom or Tomasina is who secretly watched me carry the Playboy into the laundry room—and then had the gall to brazenly steal an unsuspecting Catholic’s nudie magazine—will be sorry they ever tangled with the likes of Your Holiness!

With Warmest Genuflections,

David Schmidt