"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -- Mark Twain

Yesterday I mentioned one of my favorite words: autodidact––basically, someone who is self-taught. I’m quite fond of the term because it captures the mojo of some of my favorite writers––staggering talents like Harlan Ellison and Charles Bukowski. Though both flirted with formal education, both ran contrary to anything relating to structured learning. (In case you’re wondering, that’s a fancy way of saying Bukowski dropped out and Ellison was thrown out).

That old-school, hard-luck, blue-collar everyman vibe never fails to fire me up about my own paltry scribblings. So I’m hoping I can pass a little of that enthusiasm along, because tomorrow I’m meeting with a job-shadow student from a local high school––an aspiring writer, I presume.

In years past, I’ve been known to occasionally upset the parents of my college interns by telling their kids to radically change their majors. So many times I’d meet with a student who is so deeply entrenched in one field of education––because of family pressure, financial expectation, whatever––but their actual dream is to do something else. And along the way, they’ve gelded that dream. Put it out to pasture. Crated it up and sent it off to the glue factory.

But tomorrow I actually get to meet with someone whose dream is still officially undeclared. Unencumbered. A rare day, indeed.

I’ll basically be telling him (or her) to become a literary Keith Richards––someone whose first and only job was pursing that original dream, minus the drugs, of course. And that college is fantastic, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of what you really want to do with your life.

Any words of advice for a high school student who wants to write?

Strange, pseudo-inspiring snippet for the day

Frank Zappa said it best: "Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts.”When total strangers find out that I’m a gosh-darned-soon-to-be-published author, they eventually end up asking about my educational background. The inference is usually that they’ve always wanted to write, but didn’t “go to school for that.” No English degree. They didn’t go to J-school. They didn’t drink heavily and move to Key West––that kind of thing.

Well, truth-be-told, neither did I. My degree is in art and design. My college classes involved understanding the subtle differences between burnt umber and burnt sienna. I drew sweaty naked people beneath hot studio lights. I didn’t write anything.

So despite the proliferation of MFA programs (which is an interesting discussion in and of itself), the fact remains that humans have been telling stories long before written languages even existed. Or even English degrees. It all starts **up here**. The rest is just desire.

With that in mind kids, the super-secret word for the day is: autodidact.

More on that tomorrow.

Celebrity Deathmatch: Paris Hilton vs. Anna Karenina

If there ever was a television show shallower than Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous it would have to be MTV’s Cribs––a show so vapid that it was bound to be a hit. Yes, it’s one of those guilty pleasures that everyone says they never watch, but we all know the truth, don’t we?

And of course, I’ve never seen it. Not even once. Ummm, okay, except for that one time when I lost my remote and the channel button was stuck on my TV and I was in a full-body cast and my eyelids were propped open with toothpicks like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. But that was it––just that one episode with Moby, where I’m convinced he said the only enlightening and culturally relevant thing ever spoken in eight seasons.

It was this: “Where are all the books?”

Leave it to a bald, nerdy guy with spectacles and a bus pass to point out ala the Emperor’s New Clothes that none of the homes ever shown on Cribs had even the slightest whiff of a bookshelf. Or as he put it, “Musicians...the proud, the few, the functionally illiterate...”

Mmmm…kinda gets you right there, dunnit?

Well, since I abhor that show and instead now spend all my free time watching My Super Sweet 16, I thought I’d point out that despite the intellectually anemic music channel (that doesn’t really even have music anymore) there are celebs that read.

In fact, they’re so passionate about certain books that they buy the film options themselves instead of leaving them to be gobbled up by the big studios.

A few notable book/celebrity marriages are:

Tom Cruise––Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold
Gillian Anderson––The Speed of Light, Elizabeth Rosner
Kanye West––Child of God, Lolita Files
Tobey Maguire––Money for Nothing, Edward, Ugel
Tom Hanks–– They Marched Into Sunlight, David Maraniss
Rosie O’Donnell––Riding The Bus With My Sister, Rachel Simon
Kevin Spacey––Memoir from Antproof Case, Mark Helprin
Sarah Michelle Gellar––Lottery, Patricia Wood
Joe Mantegna––Memories Are Made of This, Deana Martin
Owen Wilson––Hello to All That, John Falk
Johnny Depp––Happy Days, Laurent Graff
Bruce Willis––Tenkiller, Elmore Leonard
Madonna––Star Craving Mad, Elise Abrams Miller

And lastly, Daily Variety has reported that Paris Hilton just bought the rights to War & Peace, which she lovingly reads to her bichon frise, Leo, every night.

A king without a sword, a book without a title...

Good title? Bad title? You decide.I really, really, really need to come up with a title for this new book. I’m not sure what my major malfunction is. Heck, I had an easier time naming my children. I made it easy and named them all after relatives. Hmmm, let’s see, there’s Blender, Quetzalcoatl, Kokaine and my youngest son, Andy, Jr. (On a weirdly serious note, there was a baby born here last year on 7/7/07—her parents named her, you guessed it––Sevyn).

With HOTEL, the book started as a short story and then grew up. THE PANAMA HOTEL seemed to fit for a while, except that the hotel is set in Chinatown and has nothing to do with tropical countries or strong-armed dictators in need of Proactiv. So I came up with HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET, which seemed to work. It touched on the non-fiction hotel and also the emotional territory the novel swims around in.

But now I’ve got this new book.

My protagonists are young (again), so I thought I might be drifting into YA territory (again). But, I don’t think so (again). But it’s still somewhat nameless.

The first thought was RANDORI, which roughly means “chaos taker,” in Japanese. Then someone aptly suggested GAMAN, which means, “to endure,” and is actually more appropriate, but no less confusing. For now I’ve settled on THE DIVINE, which I am painfully aware will emote thoughts of Ya-Ya Sisterhoods and Dante’s Inferno.

Meanwhile, I’ve sketched out the next book, which, ta-da, I have the perfect title for.

If you’re a writer, do you come up with the title first? Or after? And if you’re not a writer (especially if you’re not a writer) what are some titles that jumped off the shelf at you?