A Writer’s Stressful Life on the Road

You think being a president is stressful these days? Try being an author. Harry Shearer is, and he’s doing pretty well at it, no thanks to Amazon.com. At least not the Saturday our local Renaissance boy was hawking his book on National Public Radio.

A favorite game of authors is checking the Seattle company’s applause meter to gauge their public appearances. If the public gives a thumbs up, there’s an immediate spike in sales at Amazon.com. That was what Shearer was expecting a couple of weeks ago after shilling his second book of political satire, “It’s the Stupidity, Stupid: Why (Some) People Hate Clinton and Why the Rest of Us Have to Watch” (Ballantine).

Instead, “something awful happened,” Shearer told us over arugula at Locanda Veneta on West Third Street. “My book--which was until a couple of days before Amazon-priced at $16.95-but-for-you-$11.87--was suddenly priced at $55. And I’m going nuts. I call the person--you can talk to a real human--and the real person goes, ‘Harry Shearer, is that really you? What a thrill.’ And I said, ‘Besides being thrilled, can you fix this?’ ‘Oh, that’s the order department. They’re not here on weekends.’ ‘Well, today’s the day the interview ran. People aren’t going to write on their refrigerator, ‘Go to Amazon Monday.’

“You think everything is in place, and everything’s going fine, and suddenly Amazon.com decides your book is priced at $55, which would make it the most expensive dollar-per-page book since the Gutenberg Bible.” Amazon reduced the book’s price on Monday.

It’s a teeny-weeny book, a mere 94 under-sized pages even with charts and lists like “Some Things and People It’s Still Safe to Hate,” which includes contemporary horrors like airline food and “charts and lists inserted into small books just to pad them out, usually at the editor’s insistence.”

Not that we’re knocking it. But, hey, we don’t fix cars. Unlike the “Car Talk” guys who threw down the gauntlet when Shearer was cruising through a public radio station in Boston recently.

“I was doing a book interview, and I wandered into the cafeteria looking for a phone and suddenly--too late--I hear this recognizably Bostonian voice from the other end of the table. ‘So you’re as big a jerk as you think we are.’ To which I replied by leaving the room. That’s not my favorite form of discourse--the schoolyard epithet throwing.”

Kids, don’t try book tours at home. When Shearer isn’t avoiding fisticuffs with public radio hooligans, he’s making use of his tour time by explaining why some of Clinton’s enemies hate him with such gusto.

“Class, sex and race are the most incendiary elements in this society, but of all of them, I think race is the most incendiary. It arouses the most florid emotions, and you can’t get around the fact that for a Southern white president, this guy--although he hasn’t done anything in a policy way that has particularly benefited African Americans--he actually has African American friends. He’s appointed them to high positions in his administration. If the House managers hadn’t rescued themselves from the brink, two of the three witnesses they would have called in the impeachment trial would have been African Americans: Betty Currie and Vernon Jordan.”

Being the multimedia kind of guy he is, Shearer will be appearing at a theater near you in Universal’s upcoming “EDtv,” in which he plays a TV talk show host. Surprise! Shearer’s voice is also heard on “Le Show,” his Sunday morning program on KCRW-FM (89.9), and “The Simpsons.” That still wasn’t enough of Shearer’s voice to satisfy Ballantine editor Peter Gethers, who invited him to weigh in with a little book as part of the “Library of Contemporary Thought.”

“It’s a series of basically engorged essays in a format that comes out very close to when they’re actually written. So it offers the topicality and the relative brevity of magazine writing, but the extended quality of book writing.”

Not to mention the giftability. “It’s a great stocking stuffer.” It’s not even Passover. “No, but it’ll keep.”