Jane Genova: Speechwriter - Ghostwriter

$645K - A real steal in Greenwich, CT

The joke is still Greenwich, Connecticut.  And THE NEW YORK TIMES, like most of the elite institutions, has missed it.  In the "Real Estate" section, the NYT has a two-page article on the great bargains to be had now in that tony town.  Property can be purchased for - what a steal - $645,000.

For those who get the joke, an under $15 read, and a fast one, is my novel "The Fat Guy From Greenwich."  It even has the scoop on Greenwich Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, how the help hates the employers, and the Catholic Mafia.

That Communion Dress: Now it seems to scream soft porn

I used to get all worked up about Communion Dresses as lead-ins to the craving for a wedding dress. 

After all, a Catholic Baby Boomer, my experience at Seton Hill College, Greensburg, Pennsylvania [1963-67] was mostly about which one of my classmates [place was all-women] received an engagement ring.  Such a ring was a prerequisite to getting the dress.  Of course, we all longed for the dress.  The worst of the roly-poly type would diet for the dress and the big day. 

On that day, the supposed happiest of our lives [next to being admitted to Seton Hill], the women and the unlucky guys who were set up for a life working for GM and a mortgage for a single family house in Troy, Michigan, along with a cottage up north, would receive the Catholic sacrament of matrimony.   Clever conditioning: The Communion Dress.

Now, I see the situation is or has gotten much more pernicious to females.  Turn to this site for Communion Dresses.  The tone seems to communicate soft porn.  There are, and I quoting from the sales copy verbatim:

• Serena First Communion Dress $159.95
• Grace First Communion Dress [marked down] to $79.95
• Amber's First Communion Dress $139.95
• Corinne First Communion Dress [marked down] $89.95.

My renewed interest in Communion Dresses came from my stalking Facebook this holiday season.  The social network has replaced Christmas cards.  There a reader of this blog who also came of age in Jersey City, New Jersey Jackie Wisner had posted a photo of herself in, yes,  her Communion Dress. 

Christmas over, New Year's Eve the next major holiday, Wisner more recently posted a blurb about a party.  Miffed that she had not invited me, I sent her a stern friend-note that if she wanted to stay buddy-buddy she would send me her Communion Dress.  An extreme shorty, I could probably wear it.  Haven't grown much since that day I made my own first communion in St. Boniface Church [no longer called that, Wisner informed me] in downtown Jersey City.  I have never felt that special since.  My white veil, prayer book, and pocketbook were also treasures.

Hey, Wisner:  Do you have any of that other paraphernalia in your basement in Maryland?

Update:

The owner of the First Communion Website Janice Lennon sent this email Download Communiondress.  It contended this post was "slanderous."  It also requested that I remove the link to its site from this post Download Communiondress. 

I disagree that this post is slanderous.  Please see my syndicated blog http://lawandmore.typepad.com.  I have been covering legal issues for years.  Those include bloggers's rights and protections.  In the mid 1980s I attended Harvard Law School.

I will not remove it, despite Ms. Lennon's statement that " ... we will defend with all legal options."  Should I be shaking in my boots and doing some serious time throwing up dinner? 

Actually, I perceive Ms. Lennon's email as bordering on harassment.   It might also be bordering or actually crossing the line on free speech, that is, the First Amendment.  The real issue might be if I should defend my right to free speech with all the legal options.   See, I'm a streetfighter from the meanest of streets in Jersey CityDownload CUsersjasneDocumentsjg.

FYI, here is the white paper I published on the subject of the futility of taking legal action on "slander" on the web Download Digitaldefamationcopy.  But, free speech is another kettle of fish.

I will seize this high-profile opportunity to promote my ironic novel which focuses on Catholicism specifically but, more generally, all religions.

2010 shaping up to be good year for my biz - damn it

When Dominick Dunne was renting a tiny room in the YMCA and writing a book that would be his comeback, he was happy.  Probably the happiest in his life of the typical walking wounded.  After all, he started out being beaten into deafness by his physician father who couldn't accept the reality that his offspring was "different."

Dunne noted that happy time whenever he covered those heady Hollywood years, his fall because of drugs and arrogance, and his return to being a well-paid man about town.  It's in our nature, as emotional cripples, to have our comfort zone in sweet suffering.   When penning his book, Dunne was in high angst.  He had no idea if it would prove to be any kind of ticket, never mind a ticket back to money and fame.  At at dinner party Tina Brown, then hot, instructed him to create a book out of his courtroom experience at the trial of his daughter's murderer. 

Not that I'm anything near where Dunne had been or where he was heading.  But I not where I had been: Struggling to just not off myself while I made a living, any kind of living to support my animal companions.  After years of earning way too much in executive communications, I too had taken a mighty tumble, mostly my own fault, as is usually the case Download Geezerguts.

Where I am is, and this undoes the best of us wounded, successful in ghostwriting, novel-writing, and social media.  We are our sweet suffering.  Without it the angst of navigating among the normal [FOBs call them "earth people"] can overwhelm.  My  most happy time was when I was doing a survival job in loss prevention at inner-city Bridgeport, Connecticut Home Dept.  My euphoria was so obvious that the store manager took me aside and mandated that I rejoin the Creative Class.  He followed that up with a phone call to my home.

Andre Agassi seems to be one of us.  His autobiography is a delightful journey through inner conflict, self-hate, and extreme shock at success.

Dobbs's Head - Media Matters Takes Credit For That

The media world is in flux, so it stands to reason that its traditional watchdogs are also.  The one exception to that is Media Matters.  It remains a solid, relatively well-funded multi-media nonprofit organization whose mission is to monitor and correct conservative information in the press.

According to Felix Gillette in THE NEW YORK OBSERVER, Media Matters is taking credit for bouncing Lou Dobbs off his show on CNN.  This required, notes Gillette, "years of epic criticism."  When you can serve up a head like that or at least claim to have been in the loop, your influence and power increase exponentially.  And that will probably attract much for funding.

Actually the group is thriving.  It employs about 70 and the pay is good.  Its columnist Eric Boehlert earns $121,900.  

Given their success with Dobbs, who The Dilenschneider Group is now representing, they are planning to bring in another head soon enough.

Craigslist's Help-Wanted: Not Constrained by Branding

Brandname organizations and individuals usually don't post their help-wanted on Craigslist.  That leaves the door wide wide wide open for scams, attempts to pick  brains without intending to compensate us, ridiculous pricing, and lack of knowledge on their part about what is needed.   As much as we might consider branding a bit of smoke and mirrors, it does serve a purpose in ensuring credibility, a certain quality of integrity, and predictability in how enterprise or individual behaves.

In fact, branding has shaped our expectations of how a client or employer will comport themselves.  And, without it all hell can break loose.  The loosers are usually those seeking assignments or a job.  Those who placed the ad have already gotten plenty in the way of information, feedback, and even free samples of work done.  It's my hunch that they never intended to spend a dime. 

I have dropped Craigslist entirely.  They are plenty of other sites where help wanted is listed and those are dominated by recognizable brand names suchs as Hartford Hospital or Hewlett-Packet.  They include the state's jobs site, Journalismjobs.com, Mediabistro.com, Monster.com, Careerbuilders.com, Linkedin.com, and Hotjobs.com.  Some of the best postings are on the organization's own website.  Last weekend I answered an ad for speechwriting services on Politico.com.  You bet I recognized the name of the trade association.

Folks advertising work opportunities on Craigslist could find that sooner than later no one responses.  People are realizing the game is brain theft or some kind of amateur hour that costs us our time any way.

Bad Botox Day for Ivana Trump?

Ivana Trump got escorted out of first class on an airplane flight and into the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Department.  Maybe it was just a bad botox day for her or maybe she's just too old to put up with kids.

Long story short, little ones were being little ones, running up and down first class.  TMZ reports, "Trump allegedly started hurling curse words in front of the hyper tykes ... and when flight attendants tried to calm her down, she flipped out even more."  Not the right affect for life in the air in a terrorist era.

2010: Will Capitalism be alleged to be a public nuisance, major corporations sued?

Those 12 barking dogs down the street, those coal emissions from TVA facilities, and lead paint in older housing -all of these have been alleged to constitute or contribute to a "public nuisance."  In 2010, with Everyman and Inside the Beltway types rip-roaring mad at Wall Street and business, capitalism may join the list. 

Essentially, public nuisance dates back to merrie ole England and was a perk of the King.  It was there to remove obstacles to the king's pleasure or that of his subjects.  That could have been a fallen tree blocking the key horse trail or a robber plundering the people.

In states embarking on lawsuits against capitalism, the largest corporations in the U.S., ranging from GE to IBM, could be selected as representative defendants.  This was how it played out when Sherwin-Williams fell into that dark hole in the lead paint public nuisance litigation Download Statev.LeadIndustriesAssoc.,Inc.  That ordeal isn't over.  A lead paint public nuisance complaint is pending in California Download H031540.

There is mega money in public nuisance lawsuits.  Indeed, an unintended side effective of such a monster tort, just as with World War II, could be pulling the U.S. out of a steep downturn.  Moreover, the awards for each state in which the litigation is conducted could significantly redistribute wealth.  That's what some Millennials, badly scarred by the Great Recession, see as reasonable.  Yeah, a toned-down version of Marx could be back Download PRWebrelease.  On the other side of all this could be a hybrid capitalism.

Starving law firms would welcome the assignments and newbie JDs, saddled with $90K student-loan debt, would settle into years of work.  See, no one has a handle on what "public nuisance" is.  I found that out when I live-blogged the Rhode Island lead paint public nuisance trial 11/1/05 to 2/22/06 [see that on this blog under "legal."].  The difficulty of the concept to juries and the media motivated me to publish this ebook against public nuisance Download Publicnuisancevoodoo.  Since then I have re-thought the utility of this most ambiguous legal concept. 

Like segregation, capitalism has become a source of shame.  The only way to change that is through the courts, just as the strategists in the civil rights movement figured out.

 

January 1, 2010 - Is "it" over?

 They should have flown in the elite FBI from "Criminal Minds" to figure out what the "it" was.  All we experienced and really knew about the "it" was that the force was alien and was changing us.  As the decade of the "it" winds down, all we wonder is if the worst is over. 

Spencer Reed and Aaron Hotchner would likely write a report explaining the phenomenon as a gradual then an accelerating loss of certainty - or our belief that such an entity existed.  That's when financial markets expert Nassim Taleb became famous and it was for documenting the impossibility of knowing as well as predicting.  His "Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan" are distributed like the Bible used to be.  Should they be put in drawers in hotel rooms there might be fewer suicides.

Reed and Hotchner would also add that, no, the worst was not over.  Once innocence is lost and we recognize that we human tribes just weave together soothing narratives we live only in the not-knowing.

The positive side to that, Taleb might conclude, is that we're more open to the opportunities in life.  According to Taleb, the lion's share of success is the result of luck.  He adds, though, that the more he subscribed to such thinking the more lucky and therefore the more successful he became.

During the "it" I broke open Download Geezerguts.  To what?  To the reality that we just don't know, often not even that we don't know.  So, it's wise to observe, as my shaman Amy Karnilowicz [860-216-5116, family.therapist@comcast.net] recommended, to rely on that animal part of ourselves known as instinct, as my psychic MaryAnn Kremer [732-840-7611] advised, and enjoy the ironic incongruities, as David Letterman is laughing his way to the bank doing.

Menshen tracht und Gott Lacht, yeah, man plans and the gods laugh.

"Things come together. Things fall apart. Things come together and fall apart again," Pema Chodron

If we put any stock in the teachings of Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, then we're unlikely to wish any one any kind of new year. 

Chodron is famous for her philosophy of no ending to problems such as losses, setbacks, betrayals and simple disappointment.  She reinforces that in the May 2009 edition of SHAMBHALA SUN's special section "Wisdom for Difficult Times."

Chodron declares that she does not believe that a specific ending to a difficult time ends anything.  For her, those kinds of things come together.  Then they will come apart, again and again. Things come together, again and again.  

Healing comes, she says, "from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy." Well, I'm a Western relative newbie in Eastern philosophy.  But I have decided to try living life with its tragedies and times of peace a la Chodron. 

That's because my black cat Jason has congestive heart failure.  He could die tonight or a night like this in another year.  Chodron's kind of healing would entail opening myself to the process of preparing for the loss, the actual loss, the hole in my heart and in my animal family back at home afterward, and then some light shining down the hole.  

Historically, loss had roughed every part of me up - brutally.  This time I'm  going to stick with the Chodron way.

Promise:  I will tell you if losing an animal companion can be made less an emotional tsunami.

J.M. Coetzee - Another author being destroyed by himself

J.M. Coetzee's novel "Disgraced" was such genius.  Left-over acquaintances from my doctoral studies in the humanities, clients who read fiction, and book-store personnel couldn't stop talking to me about how Coetzee captured every human trait from arrogance to despair. 

Then, bit by bit, like so many gifted literary figures, Coetzee began destroying himself.  His fictional output started becoming too cerebral.  Guess the guy has his comfort zone in his head.  Then there have been what Jonathan Dee calls in THE NEW YORK TIMES Coetzee's "genre-bending autobiographies."  The most recent, and one Dee reviews in the NYT, is "Summertime."  Beats me, and maybe Dee, where all this is going.

Has Coetzee fallen in love with this thoughts and words, just as Narcissist fell in love with his image?  Wally Lamb seems to have fallen in love with his past and his more recent activities coaching writing in a correctional facility.  His two books of fiction don't measure up to his earlier "She Came UnDone" and "I Know This Much Is True." And Joyce Carol Oates seemingly could love nothing but writing.

Why does this happen?  How can it be prevented?  I ask because, at age 64, I have finally become a "writer."  I don't want to blow whatever I am able to make of this.