Literary / Satire
Date Published: October
2016
Publisher:
JAM Publishing
Ruth Askew, a minor celebrity, is spouting some highly incompetent philosophy about the end of virtue. Con Manos, a journalist, is attempting to uncover a political scandal or two. Add some undistinguished members of City Council, an easy listening radio station, a disorganized charity, a prestigious Philadelphia newspaper, and any number of lawyers and other professional criminals. In Worthy Of This Great City the compelling stories of two stubborn individualists intertwine in a brisk, scathing satire that invites you to question everything you think you think about today's most discussed issues: populism and elitism, the possibility of truth, the reach of profound stupidity, and the limits of personal responsibility in these post-truth, morally uncertain times.
Author Bio
If you know my website and Twitter addresses
(asmikemiller.com and asmikemiller, respectively), you must realize Mike Miller
is only an author name. It's not a matter of privacy
or secrecy; anybody can find me with minimal effort. It's about keeping things
separate. My writing is about what appears on the page. It's not about my
personal politics or religion or history.
Worthy Of This Great City is a B-game book. I'm ambiguous about this, being
interested in money like most people, but I don't want to compete with a slick
professional cover or smooth editing so I've stuck to a sort of reasonable,
human middle ground. I value those things for what they are, of course, but I
see them as artifacts, part of a system of publishing that fought like hell for
a week's worth of shelf space, that fought to catch the eye, not the mind or
heart.
As my character Con Manos says: "It's a revolution, isn't it?" I say:
Why fight on the side of the enemy? Why imitate and thus perpetuate a business
model that stifles originality? Just to show you can? Unless, of course, you're
fighting to attract the eye, not the mind or heart.
I've played a joke with this novel - my first, incidentally. Played with the
idea of narration and who can be speaking after all. It's all very literary.
Contact Information
Website: asmikemiller.com
Twitter: @asmikemiller
Purchase Links
Q. What inspires
your writing?
A.
A lifelong search for the words I need. That’s a combination of enormous need
or ambition and an appreciation of language. Words are my power; I’m certain
that once I figure out the right ones,
juggle the concepts with sufficient expertise, I can master my life. It’s the
great quest, the great illusion.
Q. What is your
favorite thing about being a writer?
A.
Getting something right. Those breakthroughs when you see where you’ve been
going, when you understand what you’re been writing about all along.
Q. What is the
toughest part of being a writer?
A. The
waiting for ideas to come together. Waiting to move forward.
Q. If you could
not be writer, what would you do/be?
A. I think
I’d be working in fine arts or at least crafts. I love sculpting, painting.
Q. What would the
story of your life be entitled?
A. Forward
Q. What is your
favorite book of all time?
A.
Franny and Zooey. When I first read it as an adolescent I was astounded
that a book could express my private questions and concerns, could consider
such matters important in life and in literature. It set me off on a different
course, and for that I’m incredibly grateful.
Q. Which
character from ANY book are you most like?
A. Maybe
Alyosha from The Brother Karamozov. I’m hopeful, maybe naïve. I want to
believe. I want answers.
Q. What character
from all of your books
are you most like?
A.
Ruth Askew. I’m impulsive, proud, stumbling clumsily around looking for ideas
about God, all that. Like all of us, Ruth is essentially blind, eager to take
pride in her gifts but gifted at avoiding responsibility for her actions.
Q. Which book
would you love to take a weekend vacation inside of?
A. Lost
Horizon. Who wouldn’t want to be young forever?
Q. What is your
favorite season?
A. SUMMER!
I’d make an excellent beach bum.
Q. What inspired
your book cover(s)? Or what is your favorite book cover and why?
A.
Well, that’s a story, because I never wanted to put too much emphasis on the
externals, only on text. Covers ultimately have to do with brick-and-mortar
shelf space. So I used one of my own photographs, one that seemed to capture
the mystery and promise of City Hall’s corridors. It’s golden and beautiful and
makes for a cover everyone seems to hate, I assume because it isn’t what a
cover is supposed to be.
Q. Tell me
something funny that happened while on a book tour or while promoting your
book.
A.
I don’t know that it’s amusing funny, more curious, but I stopped doubting
myself. I could see from various critiques exactly what the reader did or did
not grasp of what is after all a very complex, layered work structured to read
easily. It can be appreciated simply as a satire or as philosophy or as a
commentary on narration and the novel. I think that’s correct, in a way. It
reflects the complexity of every living moment, and the ease with which we
necessarily ignore that marvelous complexity. Anyway, somewhere along the way
other people’s opinions stopped mattering to me, and as a typically insecure
writer I find that remarkable.
Q. Are you
working on something new?
A.
Yes. It’s about immigration law, a political asylum case, but I don’t want to
get into more detail because almost certainly everything will change. As in Worthy
of This Great City, the fact of the narrator is important. And again as in Worthy,
places and times sometimes move subtly, with no sharp edges but merely a shift
in influence.
Q. Anything you want to say to followers of this blog or
those that are just stopping by?
A. The novel is infinite; it’s a world of unexplored
possibilities of both structure and content deserving of constant serious
change, not pathetic tricks of cosmetics and inserted media. Text doesn’t need
to apologize. But I think we’re entering a new era where major publishing
houses produce mainstream, commercial products but also act as distributors,
and indie authors are as respected as indie filmmakers.
EXCERPT
from Worthy of This Great City:
Earlier that day, I lay in the
shade with only my bare toes exposed to the vicious sun, part of a modest
audience similarly disposed beneath the modest fringe of trees surrounding the
field. Light fell down through the foliage, thick victorious beams that described
powerful angles in their descent inside the usual breathtaking green cathedral.
Around me the grass was withered and compressed into a flattened mat over
ground still saturated from the previous night’s thunderstorms; everything
smelled of baking wet earth, sunscreen, and greasy event food. I don’t remember
any intrusive insects or even visible birds except for a couple of extremely
distant hawks, dull specks in the otherwise empty sky.
Another respectable scattering of
spectators occupied the baking field, most sprawled directly in front of the
small Camp Stage, true fans eagerly upright despite the merciless heat. So just
as expected, one of those perfectly innocent afternoons you buy with the
ticket, monotonous while deeply nourishing, readily absorbed through the whole
skin like childhood summers.
I didn’t know about the witches
yet, but they were out in force. Yeah, it’s a silly description but I don’t
know how else to capture the awful effect of those damn women. So they were
witches who’d been summoned by a highly demanding assembly of affluent
suburbanites, people accustomed to commanding natural forces. And while
arguably these were all benevolent females who only meant well, with witches
you never know how it’s going to turn out.
Every August for more than a
decade I’ve headed out to Schwenksville for this dependable throwback party.
And not precisely to enjoy the music, because although it commands my absolute
respect I find it too intense for everyday entertainment. It’s a kind of church
music, an unashamed church of humanity: pure sound, plaintive and honest,
twanging and rambunctious, dulcimer gentle. Fitting, then, for this late-summer
pagan rite in honor of righteousness, and I immerse myself in it to perform a
spiritual cleansing of sorts, processing across the fields from one rustic
venue to another, affirming a succession of bluegrass pickers and ballad
wailers and theatrical tellers of old tales. And it’s a mildly uncomfortable
ritual in another sense, but that’s because of the mostly undamaged people, the
one’s who wholeheartedly enjoy everything and applaud too often.
As with anything religious, there
are incredibly subversive undercurrents longing to manifest, easy to exploit by
those portending witches. Two of them performed that day, one with such tragic
skill and clarity it unintentionally aroused huge amounts of self-loathing and
subsequently resentment, at least in me. The second inspired a joy vigorous
enough to move the plot. And the third exerted an indirect but equally damning
influence courtesy of her own celebrity, her mere idea inciting a shaming
nostalgia. In fact it was dangerously stupid to speak her name aloud. All three
arrived wearing absolute certainty.
This current festival setting,
the Old Pool Farm, is perfectly suited to the occasion. There are wide fields
to accommodate the generous crowds, a nicely crisp and sparkly creek, and the
requisite gates and groves, all at a situation remote enough to evoke a wholly
separate culture despite easy proximity to the city. Although that’s not
difficult, because even today you only have to poke your nose outside the
nearer suburbs to spot a rusty silo on some decrepit farm with another of those
filthy black-and-white, diarrhea-spewing dairy cows leaning against a sagging wire
fence, its pelvis practically poking through its muddy hide. Peeling paint and
hay bales directly across the road from another mushrooming pretentious
development, a slum of dull, identical cheapjack townhouses. So despite the
fervent country claptrap the festival is essentially a metropolitan scene,
drawing a sophisticated crowd, and therefore in one sense condescending, an
insult.
Murmurs of anticipation brought
me up on my elbows to discover Hannah Lynch already onstage, a typically modest
entrance. I sat up and paid attention, catching sight of her inside an amiable
circle of probable musicians, a glimpse of her face and one thin shoulder
between competent-looking backs in cowboy or cotton work shirts, all of them
endlessly conversing there in surprisingly gentle voices.
Until finally they broke apart
and here she came gliding towards the front of the tiny platform, moving within
a reputation so illustrious it made her physical presence unlikely and you had
to struggle for it. A tiny bird of a woman, an elderly, fragile sparrow with
fine gray hair and hazel eyes and translucent skin, nodding to us and smiling
nicely with small unremarkable teeth while seating herself on a wooden folding
chair. She was dressed like good people, like a decent Christian farmwife in a
faded print skirt and cotton blouse of mixed pastels, pink and beige and blue.
Only with dangling silver jewelry to be noticed, since after all she was a
major star.
With this one unshakable article
of faith: that her famously quavering soprano was entirely unrelated to her own
ordinary self, more of an imposition or a trust, an undeserved gift from God
that in no way merited personal praise. So she has stated. And accordingly she
exuded genuine empathy with all of us waiting out there for her, straining
forward to better capture the spirit and stamina investing each word. A curve
of laughter lit her face, and there was grief there too, but nothing to
diminish that serene spirit.
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