Several years ago Paul ( the writer of my Dads biography "The Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown")
Posted this comment about his feelings of the Biography project which stated his reasons for "throwing up his hands and walking away from the project ( after working on it for six years). I think that it is time to reinvestigate those words and actions.
Here is what he had to say with my current responses... in red..
"by Linda Brown » Mon Apr 08, 2013 5:53 pm
Paul Schatzkin posted this unexpectedly on January 12, 2009.
I have never publically adequately responded to the words that he drafted here but now after a proper span of time has passed I feel I have the right and yes, even the obligation to put my thoughts out there too. Paul has made sure that he has sunken beneath the radar for any of the various Forums considering Dad. Convenient for him, but in many ways I feel that he has much to actually answer for....He had responsibilities when he took on my Dads Biography which I think he treated shabbily.And perhaps its time to come to terms with some of those....Anyway.... these are his words, with my response to him in red,bold italics.
Post-Mortem on an Exercise in Futility
You cannot tell the world that somebody they've never heard of is important if you cannot tell them why.
( WHAT? Thats an interesting concept. After six years of painstaking research how could you possibly come to the conclusion that Townsend Brown was an NOT important individual, worthy of a properly written Biography? What happened to your passionate pleas to me as you were "selling" your abilities as a professional biographer?) Someday I will edit in your exact words here so that others can see how passionate you were about writing a proper biography... NOT about the science but about the man and those who surrounded him.
That is the conclusion I arrived at over this past weekend after receiving a message from a literary agent who spent the past six weeks reviewing the material I submitted late last year in the hope of finding representation -- and ultimately an actual publisher -- for a book I have been researching and writing for very nearly six years.
The book is (or would have been) Defying Gravity: The Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown, which I once whimsically described as "the biography of a man whose story cannot be told." I might have been better served if I'd recognized the truth in that whimsy sooner. And YET you sent six years doing that and now you are trying to write that you should have seen that it was an impossible chore from the beginning????
Townsend Brown discovered an anomalous electrical effect -- known now as the "Biefeld-Brown Effect " -- as a teenager in the 1920's. The effect is regarded in some unorthodox scientific circles as an "anti-gravity" effect, though Brown himself never much cared for that terminology. The effect was heralded at the time as the physical evidence of Albert Einstein's Unified Field Theory, the proof of a connection between electricity and gravity not unlike the symbiotic relationship between electricity and magnetism. It has since become regarded variously as the manifestation of "zero point energy," as proof that there really is an "aether," and has been given credit for enabling every science fiction fantasy from inter-dimensional communication to time travel. Since engaging this enterprise, I've had my own hand in extending some of those fantasies. You have had a hand in something Paul....extending the knowledge or further supressing it.????????? I am not sure yet which it has been.But you can be sure that I will find out.
But the truth is, all we really know about Townsend Brown is that he spent one half of his life engaged in classified military research, and the other half of his life conducting covert intelligence operations designed in part to conceal the classified research. That is really the entire 80 years of Townsend Brown's life boiled down into a single sentence. Beyond that, we really dunno crap.
Note to all of you reading this I think this was the most hurtful statement that Paul Schatzkin would choose to write and of course I took it very personally. He had come to me when I had put all of my Dads information and story away.... was content to leave it hidden... he encouraged me to open that trunk and to begin a long memory trail journey that was difficult and constantly emotionally draining and painful to me ..I put it all on the line for Paul and assisted him on a daily basis...I THOUGHT that we were both focused on digging up all of the little details that would make this Biography a piece of work that we both would be proud of. Both of us put all of that effort in the manuscript that you finally completed Paul.. 600 pages......of "stuff" that we DID know. What you said here was flippant, dismissive and ignorant. It begs the response.... (which needs to be looked into on a future date) " If you " don't know crap".... after all of this work Paul..... what was it that you were searching for in the first place that remained out of your reach? What were you REALLY after that you did not get?
Nevertheless, drawing largely on information supplied by my own "covert" sources, I managed to forge my way through the "first draft" of a manuscript last March.
" Drawing largely???? On information from your " covert sources"..... who told you WHAT Paul.?.. If you are speaking of " Morgan " and "Mr. Twigsnapper" I know for a fact that they specialized in directing you to look in certain areas so that you could uncover obscure material that was however already in the publics view. Those men gave you " short cuts" to information that you could verify on your own. Who ARE your covert sources Paul? You don't actually name them. Perhaps you had OTHERS that you were working with that you have not named.
The intent of that first draft was to simply find some path through the mercurial material. I was not really sure what the true essence of the story was, but I decided in the fall of 2005 that if I just started the work, the thematic heart of it would eventually materialize.
Note here folks that Paul and I started communicating in 2002.... signed our contract in 2003.... and here he admits that he didn't even start writing until the fall of 2005. I can look up on my shelf and see binders and binders filled with Emails that I sent him filled with family facts and memories.....all flowing in one direction and with the thought that I was helping the man do a decent job.... which he had told me... and continued to stress.... that he was capable of doing.
It's hard to tell sometimes when you are neck deep in wishful thinking. Yes, well I can be faulted for that too. regarding you. A
fter completing a voluminous (nearly 600 page!) first draft and taking a few months to get some distance from material, last summer I compiled a detailed book proposal. This is the reverse of the usual procedure; It is more customary to write a proposal first, secure an advance, and THEN write the book. But because I felt I needed to write the book before I would be able to effectively convey what it is about, I put that cart in front of the horse. That might be when I started seriously "pushing" in the absence of any "pull."
Now carefully read what the man has said here. Whose fault was that? HE was the one who decided to reverse the process. HE was the one who decided that the book needed to be written before he could understand it! This is the man who presented himself to me as a professional writer. Is this the way a professional plots his course?
Once the proposal was finished, I slowly and methodically began submitting query letters to a carefully culled list of literary agents whose past experience commended them for this particular and unusual project. More than half the the queries generated no response at all; most of the other half replied that the material was not right for them. Two agents requested to see the full proposal
I don't know why that seemed to trouble him. " Gone with the Wind" was rejected 99 times before it was published. What did he expect?
The first agent who read the full proposal arrived at this conclusion: "The proposal didnât work for me â I had trouble following Brownâs story and couldnât see how the book would convince a skeptical readership to take the story seriously enough to sustain [the] narrative." That was not exactly the first time I'd gotten that sort of feedback.
The agent said " I had trouble following Browns story." Whose fault is that?. If he couldn't follow the story Paul should have realized that the man was saying.... point blank... "it was poorly written! "And even Paul writes " That was not exactly the first time I had gotten that sort of feedback."
Hello Paul. What is wrong here?
But, you know, in any creative endeavor, you're not supposed to listen to the critics
( YES Paul.... You ARE supposed to listen)
or take their rejections to heart. You're just supposed to, in the words of Townsend Brown himself, "go forth." So I persisted through the fall, sending queries and receiving rejections. Finally, in November, another agent -- we'll call him "P.R." -- wrote back that he felt the project "shows promise" and asked for the full proposal. He also asked for a period of up to five weeks to consider the material exclusively, meaning no more queries submitted or proposals sent out. I agreed to wait until the first full week of the New Year to hear if P.R. wanted to take the project on.
And what did you do during that time Paul? I remember saying to you that I didn't think that you should give one agent that kind of time with an exclusive situation.... that you should be sending the manuscript out repeatedly to others until he asked you to take it off the market and supplied you with a contract. It was YOU who decided to put all of OUR eggs in this one basket.
The exclusive period gave me a lot of time to think about where I am with this project -- how much time I've put into it, how I feel about the material, how I feel about its future prospects. And, rightly or wrongly, I found myself putting a lot of stock in the response of this one agent ( .NOW...lets just read his list of excuses).
Coming as all this was on the cusp of a New Year, I began to recognize in myself a high level of exhaustion from pushing on this string: if there wasn't some indication from the larger Universe that somebody besides myself and a handful of others was interested in this story, I didn't think I had the will to persist any longer. I needed some kind of "pull" on the other side of my "push."
How do you all translate that? I translate that he wanted someone else to step in here and do his work for him. He was tired. He wanted to quit.
Last Friday, the last day of the exclusive period, the prospect of some kind of "pull" pretty much evaporated when P.R. finally wrote back. The essence of the response is embodied in the opening paragraph:
*"The promise is there, the possibility is there, but there is no meat on the bones ... there is still no detail as to what he actually did discover."
And again I have to wonder. Suddenly.... this ONE agent has turned Paul down because the book does not disclose whatever it was in the black that Townsend Brown DID discover. What Paul has done here is blame someone else for what he was doing.... I believe that somehow Paul had turned his search from writing a story about the man.... and his family ( the story that he had convinced me that he was capable of writing) into a search for the hidden technology. And not finding it.... He quit. Somebody out there give me a different analysis..... Please....
And that, I have concluded, is the end of that. Exit stage left.
It's funny how suddenly the truth glares out at me. "No meat on the bones" is all he needed to say. The simple fact is: in one, in ten, in a hundred or six hundred pages, we still don't know "what he actually did discover." The book is, as Ralph Kramden might say, "a mere bag of shells." And, I must finally admit, a bag of empty shells at that. And I need to remind Paul once again of his own words..it was not the science that we were going to be writing about.....
There may indeed be a pearl in there somewhere, but I must now confess that I have been unable to find it.
The "Pearl" I believe was what Paul had already accomplished in those 600 pages but he could not see it. It was right in front of his face.... waiting to be properly and professionally finished.
In lieu of that kernel of truth, I have conjured substitutes. I built a shell around a non-existent story using a firmer narrative of related characters. I injected my own story, using the metaphor of falling down a rabbit hole.
I am not sure what he is talking about here....." conjured substitutes? Does he mean the story that he trespassed into telling.... the love story between "Morgan " and me that he lifted from my contributions..( is that the " firmer narrative" that he is talking about here?????.. all the time telling me that he would edit those sections out in the rewrite? Is that what makes the book fail in his mind?
Months and months ago I actually wrote to Paul and told him that if he felt that his " departure" into writing about " other characters ( Me.... "Morgan"... Mr. Twigsnapper) in any way actually diminished his book from the hard and fast Biography that he started out to write.( and that he had a contract with me for) ..that was his dream to write...... that I would be very pleased to help him " Put things right". That of course would mean removing the book from the publics view.... rewriting it severely.... taking out all mention of my personal interaction with the red headed kid that he chose to call " Morgan".... removing anything personal from me or even stories about Mr. Twigsnapper........leaving ONLY the information that he had written about my Dads life and career. pulled from public records and scientific material and other sources.
I did tell him in that same message that I believed that he had written the best Biography of Dad in existence at that time....and I hope that he realized that my offer to help him rewrite the book ( The Parallel Universe of T. Townsend Brown) was motivated by wanting to see him succeed in the role that he had dreamed for himself....
Paul did respond... by first thanking me for the comment about his writing the "best Biography out there"....... but then by saying that he was unwilling AT THAT TIME to revisit the subject of the life of T. Townsend Brown. So thats where it sits currently.
But in six years I have not found the bottom to this rabbit-hole, and I have grown endlessly weary of the falling --along with various forms of psychological abuse I've had to endure during the fall. But I know how to stop the abuse. I just did.
I have wondered ,of course, what he meant by " psychological abuse" Am I the only one?
In all this time, I insisted to myself that I could fabricate some way to tell this story. It was really all up to me, I told myself. And If I could not tell the actual story, then I'd tell the story of trying to tell the story. But the story of telling a story only works if the first story is actually told. Which, in this case, it is not. And whose fault? and WHY wasn't it properly told?
I spoke at length last week with a mentor of sorts who has stood by my side through this whole undertaking; this was Thursday, the day before I received the letter from P.R. In the course of describing my growing ambivalence, and my need for some form of "external validation," I came up with an interesting metaphor: As a writer, I imagine myself to be a cannon; my secret desire is that my material will prove to be a cannon ball, which, upon launching, will land somewhere and have some kind of an impact. I think that's all any artist asks for.
I am not sure that Paul really understands why a writer writes. Is it to make an "impact?"
What kind of IMPACT? What was Paul thinking that he could accomplish.... and why did his " mentor" have anything really to say about all of this? Who was his mentor? Someone he says had " stood by my side through this whole undertaking". Now thats alot invested doncha think? For an outsider.
But for as long as I've been working on this story, I have avoided the realization that has now weighs heavily on me: This story is not a cannonball. It's mush. I've tried to wrap the mush up in a more solid shell. But absent a clear grasp of "what he actually did discover," this agent has seen the mush for exactly what it is, and now I simply must face that reality.
The " reality I believe that Paul is having to face here is that he was unable to provide the agent with a well written story. It has to be someone elses fault. He didn't want to go to the trouble of the rewrite... a computer glitch had wiped away some of his footnotes.... it was just alot of work to do the professional job that he had promised me that he could do. It was just easier to quit.
I have indulged myself for entirely too long in the belief that by the sheer force of my will, by the "scheming of my ego," or by some manner of clever verbal alchemy, I could turn this narrative mush into solid iron. This agent has done me an enormous favor, by simply and effectively demonstrating for me the power of my own self-delusion.
He gave you an open door Paul.... which you were looking for..... and you took it.
I know that there are some of you reading this who are surprised and disappointed -- if not downright outraged -- by this conclusion.
Surprised? Yes! Of course we were. So many of us had gone on this trail with you for years. We encouraged you Paul....you gave us no warning before you closed down the Forum and posted this piece of.... whatever this is.
Sure, there are alternatives. I could persist in my persistence. I could continue working on a revised draft. I could edit and proofread and self-publish.
What made you turn against doing that?
But the first draft is already "out there," circulating in unknown ways through the cyber-ether. And the inescapable fact of the matter is that there is not any amount of re-writing that is going to reveal any more than what has already been told, what has already been launched into the firmament
. You mean to try to tell me Paul that you quit because you did not know enough......yet now.....nothing more can ever be revealed? That what YOU have put out there is all there is to know about T. Townsend Brown? You make no sense.
Maybe the sadder fact here is that I have reached the limit of my own faith
( there is the truth)
in the power or appeal of this material. I know what some of you are probably thinking, that I'm copping out, giving up, throwing in the towel, pulling the plug. And maybe you're right. But like I said, absent some "pull" on the other side, I've pushed all I can.
And I can accept that. Disappointing as it is because I had great expectations for your abilities Paul...There is no tug boat making its way to you.... You would have had to do it on your own. You could not.
Maybe it's unreasonable to expect an agent or publisher to believe in material that I have myself lost faith in.
( Absolutely! What do you mean MAYBE?)
I can't expect somebody else to believe in material that I don't believe in myself.
(positively)
The bottom line is: I don't believe in the material because I really don't know how much of it to believe. I've wrestled with that conundrum long enough. The passion is unrewarded, the effort is unrewarding, and there is little to add
. I agree.
I put on 20 pounds sitting down every morning for 2-1/2 years with coffee and dark chocolate; that was the glue that kept my fanny in the chair long enough to cobble together nearly 600 pages of mush.. In the past few months, I've paid closer attention to my diet and shed the extra weight. Now maybe it's likewise time to jettison the rest of the baggage -- the baggage I've been hauling around inside my head.
Best to start the new year with a clean slate."
Yes.... I think that you were ultimately quite right. Best for you and best for the people who continue to be interested in Townsend Brown.**********************************************************************************************************
[A few days later he made arrangements to self publish that 600 " bag of shells" and I guess that I was supposed to settle for that?. Not going to happen. Linda
Linda Brown
Linda Brown
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