and on and on: February 2015

A Reader's Guide to John Grisham's The Litigators

Hey, fans,

A sneak peak at my forthcoming book (finally!) - this is what my new publisher, W. R. Finley Figg & Sons, is prepping for that website named after that jungle before they changed it to the river, for copyright reasons.

Just kidding. This is (apparently) not unlike what we'll see on amazon, with the previews, etc. Still working on the cover art.

A Reader's Guide to John Grisham's The Litigators

by Joshua Cody (Author)

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Product Details
Hardcover: 5337 pages
Publisher: W. R. Finley Figg & Sons; First Edition (March 25, 2015)
Language: English / Punjabi
ISBN-10: 08032307329
ISBN-13: 9178-08023230729
Product Dimensions: 89.1 x 625 x .02 inches
Shipping Weight: 135.3 pounds
Average Customer Review: Be the first to review this item

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,254,254,244,622 in Books (See Top 10 in Books– NSFW)

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Publisher's Description

"In his insightful, if frankly surprising, followup to his critically praised memoir of illness and memoir [sic], a New York Times 2012 Book of the Year, composer and author Joshua Cody invites the reader on a moving, funny, unsettling, and ultimately inspirational tour of John Grisham's classic 2011 legal thriller The Litigators. Part coming-of-age story, part cozy lit-crit, Cody reminds us that Grisham's 25th novel is more than just a story of a small, old-fashioned law firm in the Land of Lincoln attempting to strike it rich in a class action lawsuit over a big pharma cholesterol reduction drug. As Wikipedia notes, The Litigators is 'regarded as more humorous than most of Grisham's prior novels.' Cody's attempt to 'due it justice' brings us back to those days of benediction and booming voices that we all share and which, deep in our hearts, we must, apparently, cease to revile. (?) [Lauren, please email me about this before it goes out.– Nicole]"

[Nicole– please fwd this to LeRoy, the adjectives make no sense and Josh's pun is awful, nobody will be amused by this. Ildi]

[Nic, see Ildi's comment above. Also, as you girls know, Tuesday's my last day, so I'm having Gordon clear my hard drive on Sunday night, we've got the goodbye party on Monday and I intend to get fucking blitzed like you've never seen anybody in your short beautiful lives. I'm sending you what I have, including the preface below, don't ask me what it means b/c I have no idea, obviously it suggests the revised edition is this publication, but he seems to be making some sort of joke, and as much as I like both of you, and Andy and Doug and Zirkel I refuse to have my entire career derailed by this nonsense; I will happily sleep on my stepdad's new girlfriend's couch in Westwood for the next five months and marry my pillow than have to edit one more single word of this tripe. I should probably do that with or without any of this stuff going on, she barely spends an afternoon a month there, and between her family's place in Montauk and my stepdad's place who can blame her? Enjoy.– Jimmy]

Preface to the Revised Edition

A total of three years, three months, and twenty-four days straight (and counting, my brethren) have passed since the first edition of John Grisham's The Litigators was published (Doubleday, 1982), and during the vast majority of those 104,716,800 seconds, I have been preparing materials for application to what I had hoped would be a swiftly-delivered second edition. Alas: t'was not to be, milads, me laddies, Milady's which just closed this past year (it's where Tom and I used to get tater tots in Soho, sucks). They haven't retracted Mr Grisham's draft; they're still pretending, in effect, that "this is it." (!) ;)

But, along the meandering meanwhile, the discovery of several additional items Grisham surely employed as source material– especially Sylvia Flores's Devils, Drugs and Plugs Galore and the Albertus Criminus Anatomatio Nugatorium – enabled me to gap many plugs, plug many gaps, and reference other clarificatures.

I also had time to come upon my own realization that Grisham used google, yahoo, google, Baedeker's Spain and Portugal, and google far, far, far more extensively than I or anyone could have at first possibly imagined.

And it's true that I have also, too, it is true, benefited from my review of a few, in turn, reviews of Grisham's book, the subject of my inquiry. Both of these kinds of reviews, in turn, provided suggestions, interrogations, and corrections of the most beguiling and rousing species.

Specifically People. Barbara Streisand's beloved weekly wrote that the work was– and that's a lot of double-ues (we'll cover sentences, words, morphemes, and letters, including the 23rd, later; but don't hesitate to remark, silently if necessary, that if the, ahem, bilabial fricative is the twenty-third, then the president after which he was named was the forty-third, rather as The Litigators is Grisham's twenty-fifth novel)– “a rousing return to his dexterous good-guy-faces-corrupt-system storytelling.”

And once you wealize the source of our double-u is a bilabial fricative, you will never– trust me on this– look at a W in the same way.

Meanwhile, over in Virginia, The USA: Today published its take on the damn thing. It felt that the book contained “tension, [and] legal roadblocks.”

I'm sure there were other reviews; but I stopped there. I'd had enough. I also ended up not sending Mr Grisham my long letter asking him to clarify many points, though I specifically told him that his remarks need "not be exhaustive." But he's a very busy, very busy man, a busy man is what he is very muchso.

Doesn't it feel like we're waiting for something that we don't even particularly want to be waiting for? Like a flight to Seattle? At any rate, I assume you can, at this point, already, very clearly understand my reasons for considering the present volume a second edition. As such, its annotations are much fuller, more robust, and yet more defiantly precise than those that would have been contained within the previous edition, had there been a previous edition to accompany the first edition of two, although a few untraced references continue to remain to bedevil me, or at least a certain side of me, a part of my personality, if you will.

For this edition, which we will call the only one, since it is, I have focused solely on the annotations. Gone with the wind are the motley introduction and its devoted appendices to the first edition. The plot synopsis has been expanded to reach, if not exceed, its articulation.

And the cut-and-paste of a portion of the entire text, for instance, dispenses with the carbon-dating process at which I first arrived in my "Chronological Difficulties in the Prehistoric Novels of John Grisham" (submitted, The Harvard Review of Psychiatry; acceptance pending). The reason for this is mainly because I came to the conclusion that Willard Libby's technique is simply too literal-minded to accommodate Grisham's more flexible temporal structure in our new world of Intelligent Design.

Many of the sources I would have been able to say that I originally cited in the first version (and obviously I'm now unable to say that, since there is only one version) would have been – if I were able to say this– later, revised editions of previous editions that had been published already, before. Syd Field's Screenplay, various publications of the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia, and Rowing Results for the 1932 Summer Olympics at www.DatabaseOlympics.com are three excellent examples of what I'm trying to talk about. See, these are three examples of things which I wish I could say, say, "that I thought would eventually have been more accessible to Grisham scholars." Like, I could have had the choice of, or, no, it's more like, I could have like compared different editions, the new ones and the old ones, and talked about that, like I think that would have been really cool, for some reason, you know?

Like, here's something I would have I loved to have been able to written. "I have changed certain indices to refer to the editions Grisham actually used with the 'wayback machine.'" Or I would have loved to have been able to write – and I mean, sure, I'm writing this, but I mean like really writing it for real– something like– well, here, look. I'll give it its own paragraph, it's so cool. At least, to me.

"Gone, too, forever, are the cross-references to the UK edition of Hodder & Stoughton, which, after careful CT scans, has been determined to be, in fact, exactly the same as the edition familiar to the open and direct denizens of what was once a colony – a dynamic changed dramatically by the Heroes of the American Revolution and its Founding Fathers, who definitely referred to One Nation Under God. Thankfully, both editions – which, again, are the same– seem to be here to stay, as they're available on Amazon for like one cent, so all references are to those editions; I chose not to 'make up' the 'pretend expanded director's cut approved by Ridley Scott.' (That version has a new home: several internet 'fan fiction' sites, which I am unable to point you to, dear reader, thanks to a marvelously succinct cease and desist letter from the intelligent minds at Doubleday; at least this little mouse gave those kids something to interrupt their daily dealings with pagination! :) ) The original edition's bibliography of Grisham criticism, which listed everything that had been written on Grisham or the Bible at the time of writing, has been confined to those works actually written by Grisham (which does not necessarily include the Bible, or at least the parts that aren't in English)."

See how cool that would have been, to have been able to write that? Yeah. Like, I mean, look. I guess I shouldn't mansplain. First of all, mansplaining is uncooler than the very word "uncool." Second of all – after all, (and that's weird, the two all's– and the apostrophe– sorry, never mind, it's just this– never mind) after all I did get to write that, like in the sense of, not just typing it, although that, too, but also relying on some of the exact same structures that I would have relied on if I'd been able to really actually write that– speech and vocabulary and grammar and semantics and signs and symbols and the alphabet, involving text, maybe a recipient, maybe not, maybe publication in a way, maybe correspondence in a way, maybe a diary in a way.

I have also altered the method of indicating ellipses. Since Grisham uses them so rarely, it isn't really necessary to distinguish his from mine in any efficient or sensible, or even sensical, manner. Therefore, bracketed, unspaced ellipses with the first dot black, the second aquamarine against a green background, and the third yellow, like this

[...]

indicate mine, whilst His are left spaced, as in the text, like this. . . . To avoid consistency, that bane of the anti-consistent, this practice has not been followed in other works cited, especially not in the cases of any essays written between 1949 and 1953 by literary critic Graham Hough.

- Joshua Cody, Cambridge, OK

CHAPTER 1

Regarding The Litigators, Wikipedia once wrote

Some reviewers noted that this story would lend itself to an adapted screenplay.

Grisham's work introduces the reader to Oscar Finley and Wally Figg, the fun-loving but bickering partners of a small law firm in the South Side of Chicago, a Midwestern American city whose metropolitan area, sometimes called Chicagoland, is home to almost ten million people. It's the third-largest in the United States.

Oscar's character holds the firm together – despite (and yet because of, since what is our substance, if not that which is determined by what we fight against?) the hilariously childish and eyebrow-raising unethical behavior of Wally, his junior partner. David Zinc, a formerly successful attorney, relegates himself to working as an associate with the firm – much as the melting point of the transition metal after which he's named is (aside from mercury and cadmium, neither of which play a particularly significant part in Grisham's worldview) the lowest of all. And the spunky Rochelle Gibson, the secretary at Finley & Figg secretary, who turns out – SPOILER ALERT – to be a former claimant against Finley & Figg, holds the firm together.

Wait. Doesn't Oscar's character do that, too? As we'll see in Chapter 57, a reader complaining about character redundancy in a Grisham work might seem to bear resemblance to a listener complaining about Andy Summer's song “Mother” on The Police's final, nearly album-length swansong, Synchronous City. But you won't believe the ending.

Like in much of his work and stuff, Grisham imagined these people; they don't exist. So how can he write about them? By using a trick he, and others, call “fiction.”

Fiction is just a name, really; but it's a name we give to a narrative work whose creator does not claim responsibility for the work's faithfulness to reality. In other words, the narrative is not guaranteed to present only true descriptions, real people, and actual events.

Good examples of fiction, besides Grisham's fiction, are The Ones that Walk away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin, or, for those so inclined, the pornographic novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. In both those cases, none of any of that ever happened.

Grisham isn't the first person to use fiction; we've already seen that's not the case, from our study of Ursula K. Le Guin and pornographic star Emily Brontë. But if Grisham isn't the first–

– and, wait. Who's to say he's not? Who has that authority? Who, in a word, can speak? If noted Satanist Emily Brontë describes people who haven't existed, who's to say she didn't turn her blasphemous judgment on herself, thereby making herself not existing? If she thinks it's so easy.

Sorry, to digress. Especially like that. A lot of times, sometimes, it's the how, not the–

[Cue audio: SOUNDS of a writer trying to think of a word.]

– what.

Anyway if Grisham isn't the first person to use fiction, he's certainly the best. Why? First of all, we must bear in mind things other than the fact that he used fiction. That, we know. We already figured that out.

The deeper question, rather, is: how?

Grisham is so successful, here's how. Before The Litigators, he had sold 250,000,000 copies of his previous twenty-four novels in twenty-nine languages. 24 x 29 = 696. If you times that with the original 250,000,000 copies, you get 174,000,000,000.

174,000,000,000 is a lot. Of anything.

174,000,000,000 is a lot. Of. Anything.

Each book before The Litigators that he wrote was an international bestseller. If you include The Litigators, Grisham has produced

23 adult fiction novels.
2 children's fiction novels.
1 short story collection.
1 non-fiction book.

It's stated in one of the things I've read for this thing is that Various Sources claim that The Litigators is Grisham's his 23rd, 25th, or 26th book. What Various probably did was, she probably started with the 23 and added #2's 2 (25), or #2's 2 plus #3's 1 (26). But why didn't Various also do #2's 2 plus #3's 1 plus #4's 1 (27)? Or #1's 23 plus #3's (or #4's) 1 (24)? Then you'd have his 23rd, 24th, 25th, 26th, or 27th book. It's weird.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal – a publication devoted to trying to figure out how people who do artsy stuff also wind up okay – Grisham claimed that although he usually attempts to include humor in his submitted drafts, it is usually removed during the editorial process. However, in this case much of the humor survived editing. However, he produced not a shred of evidence. And in a court of law, you can't just say something without producing evidence to express to back it up. Grisham should now this, since all his books – or at any rate, at least 23 of them – are about the legal system. But, maybe that's where the humor comes in.

In any of these cases, however, my Lord are these astonishing figures. Who is John Grisham? Movie star? Rock God? Viral entrepreneur? Cat aficionado? Australian? Labels like these just can't hope to keep up with a fabulous writer who has over the course of his long career written a little bit of everything: adult fiction, children's fiction, short fiction, non-fiction: if it's something that can be written, Grisham's done it. He probably has all this on his resume. He probably even has two twitter addresses! I mean Various could well have gone on to say that The Firm is a 1991 legal thriller and the second novel by John Grisham and his first widely recognized book and in 1993 and after it sold 1,500,000 copies was made into a film starring Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman. Anybody for snow sculpture? Assemblage? Body painting? Guitar?

But the deeper question, rather, is: how?

Well, basically, the methods employed in the usage of fiction to explain the presence of God in our lives while still creating a profoundly enjoyable activity of page-turning are too complex to go into here; this is an attempt at literary scholarship, not your grandfather's VCR manual. But we can point out one or two techniques that give rise to Grisham's imaginary universe, his unique blend of things that happen and people that don't exist – rather like a Game of Thrones that is not historical recreation, in all three senses of the word.

One key to Grisham's art is his predilection for the sentence. A “sentence” is a linguistic unit consisting of one or more words that are grammatically linked. For instance, an example of one of them is “A “sentence” is a linguistic unit consisting of one or more words that are grammatically linked.” An example of another one of them is “For instance, an example of one of them is “A “sentence” is a linguistic unit consisting of one or more words that are grammatically linked.” And so on.

But before we look at Grisham's sentences, we must first ask ourselves the following question, itself a sentence: if a sentence is a unit consisting of one of more words, then what are “words?”

We could answer that question by saying, “Well, a word is what a sentence is made out of; a word is what a sentence consists of.”

But not only would that be ending sentences with prepositions, which is wrong – prepositions aren't called postpositions for a reason – but that would, also, be simple.

And if we are to follow in Grisham's example, much as Grisham himself follows in God's example – all the while sustaining his humility (unlike Clapton, Grisham never paid graffiti “artists” to convince the world that he was God; the God-like quality of Grisham, like all things pure and good in this two-bit hill of beans of a world, needn't be phoisted on an unsuspecting and willing, fully consensual, if tipsy, shaved public area).

The more difficult task, but the task more worthwhile, in terms of value, is to force ourselves to go that extra mile in the name of freedom and this great green country God generously gave Grisham and his unadulterated, ethnically complete predecessors, the Indians, who so nobly sacrificed their very lives so that their replacements, the ones who had accepted the Truth of Christ our Lord, could spread our wings to the shining seascape past the 405.

In honor of our savage but gentle ancestors, then, let us speak the truth of the meaning of the word “word” as linguistics would have – nay, demand – it: a word is the smallest element that may be meaningfully uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content.

The decisive move in this definition, and the one that partially explains Grisham's genius, is the condition of meaningfulness. It is this quality, probably more than several of its rivals combined, that truly separates elements with literal or pragmatic content from sneaky, neo-Plutonium word-pretenders, morphemes, which are, true, collections of letters, but do not necessarily possess freestanding meaning. The recent publishing phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey is an example of an auto-generated series of morphemes.

Grisham became a Christian at eight years of age.

Now that we're armed, Jesse Ventura-style, with the facts:

that fiction is something that doesn't exist, created by sentences;
that Grisham became a Christian when he was eight; and
that sentences consist of words that are different from morphemes,

we can begin to approach Grisham's compositional method. For instance, he starts his novel The Litigators, the subject of the present study, with the sentence “The law ﬁrm of Finley & Figg referred to itself as a 'boutique ﬁrm.'”

Grisham then writes another sentence: “This misnomer was inserted as often as possible into routine conversations, and it even appeared in print in some of the various schemes hatched by the partners to solicit business."

Grisham then writes another sentence: “When used properly, it implied that Finley & Figg was something above your average two-bit operation." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Boutique, as in small, gifted, and expert in one specialized area." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Boutique, as in pretty cool and chic, right down to the French-ness of the word itself." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Boutique, as in thoroughly happy to be small, selective, and prosperous." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Except for its size, it was none of these things." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Finley & Figg’s scam was hustling injury cases, a daily grind that required little skill or creativity and would never be considered cool or sexy." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Proﬁts were as elusive as status." Grisham then writes another sentence: “The ﬁrm was small because it couldn’t afford to grow." Grisham then writes another sentence: “It was selective only because no one wanted to work there, including the two men who owned it." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Even its location suggested a monotonous life out in the bush leagues." Grisham then writes another sentence: “With a Vietnamese massage parlor to its left and a lawn mower repair shop to its right, it was clear at a casual glance that Finley & Figg was not prospering." Grisham then writes another sentence: “There was another boutique ﬁrm directly across the street—hated rivals—and more lawyers around the corner." Grisham then writes another sentence: “In fact, the neighborhood was teeming with lawyers, some working alone, others in small ﬁrms, others still in versions of their own little boutiques." Grisham then writes another sentence: “F&F’s address was on Preston Avenue, a busy street ﬁlled with old bungalows now converted and used for all manner of commercial activity." Grisham then writes another sentence: “There was retail (liquor, cleaners, massages) and professional (legal, dental, lawn mower repair) and culinary (enchiladas, baklava, and pizza to go)." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Oscar Finley had won the building in a lawsuit twenty years earlier." Grisham then writes another sentence: “What the address lacked in prestige it sort of made up for in location." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Two doors away was the intersection of Preston, Beech, and Thirty-eighth, a chaotic convergence of asphalt and trafﬁc that guaranteed at least one good car wreck a week, and often more." Grisham then writes another sentence: “F&F’s annual overhead was covered by collisions that happened less than one hundred yards away." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Other law ﬁrms, boutique and otherwise, were often prowling the area in hopes of ﬁnding an available, cheap bungalow from which their hungry lawyers could hear the actual squeal of tires and crunching of metal." Grisham then writes another sentence: “With only two attorneys/partners, it was of course mandatory that one be declared the senior and the other the junior." Grisham then writes another sentence: “The senior partner was Oscar Finley, age sixty-two, a thirty-year survivor of the bare-knuckle brand of law found on the tough streets of southwest Chicago." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Oscar had once been a beat cop but got himself terminated for cracking skulls." Grisham then writes another sentence: “He almost went to jail but instead had an awakening and went to college, then law school." Grisham then writes another sentence: “When no ﬁrms would hire him, he hung out his own little shingle and started suing anyone who came near." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Thirty-two years later, he found it hard to believe that for thirty-two years he’d wasted his career suing for past-due accounts receivable, fender benders, slip-and-falls, and quickie divorces." Grisham then writes another sentence: “He was still married to his ﬁrst wife, a terrifying woman he wanted to sue every day for his own divorce." Grisham then writes another sentence: “But he couldn’t afford it." Grisham then writes another sentence: “After thirty-two years of lawyering, Oscar Finley couldn’t afford much of anything." Grisham then writes another sentence: “His junior partner—and Oscar was prone to say things like, “I’ll get my junior partner to handle it,” when trying to impress judges and other lawyers and especially prospective clients—was Wally Figg, age forty-ﬁve." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Wally fancied himself a hardball litigator, and his blustery ads promised all kinds of aggressive behavior." Grisham then writes another sentence: ““We Fight for Your Rights!” and “Insurance Companies Fear Us!” and “We Mean Business!” Such ads could be seen on park benches, city transit buses, cabs, high school football programs, even telephone poles, though this violated several ordinances." Grisham then writes another sentence: “The ads were not seen in two crucial markets—television and billboards." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Wally and Oscar were still ﬁghting over these." Grisham then writes yet another sentence: “Oscar refused to spend the money—both types were horribly expensive—and Wally was still scheming." Grisham then writes another sentence: “His dream was to see his smiling face and slick head on television saying dreadful things about insurance companies while promising huge settlements to injured folks wise enough to call his toll-free number.” Grisham then writes another sentence: “But Oscar wouldn’t even pay for a billboard." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Wally had one picked out." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Six blocks from the ofﬁce, at the corner of Beech and Thirty-second, high above the swarming trafﬁc, on top of a four-story tenement house, there was the most perfect billboard in all of metropolitan Chicago." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Currently hawking cheap lingerie (with a comely ad, Wally had to admit), the billboard had his name and face written all over it." Grisham then writes another sentence: “But Oscar still refused." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Wally’s law degree came from the prestigious University of Chicago School of Law." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Oscar picked his up at a now-defunct place that once offered courses at night." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Both took the bar exam three times." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Wally had four divorces under his belt; Oscar could only dream." Grisham, then, writes another sentence: “Wally wanted the big case, the big score with millions of dollars in fees." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Oscar wanted only two things—divorce and retirement." Grisham then writes another sentence: “How the two men came to be partners in a converted house on Preston Avenue was another story." Grisham then writes another sentence: “How they survived without choking each other was a daily mystery." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Their referee was Rochelle Gibson, a robust black woman with attitude and savvy earned on the streets from which she came." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Ms. Gibson handled the front—the phone, the reception, the prospective clients arriving with hope and the disgruntled ones leaving in anger, the occasional typing (though her bosses had learned if they needed something typed, it was far simpler to do it themselves), the ﬁrm dog, and, most important, the constant bickering between Oscar and Wally."

Grisham, then, writes another sentence: “Years earlier, Ms. Gibson had been injured in a car wreck that was not her fault." Grisham then writes another sentence: “She then compounded her troubles by hiring the law ﬁrm of Finley & Figg, though not by choice." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Twenty-four hours after the crash, bombed on Percocet and laden with splints and plaster casts, Ms. Gibson had awakened to the grinning, ﬂeshy face of Attorney Wallis Figg hovering over her hospital bed." Grisham then writes another sentence: “He was wearing a set of aquamarine scrubs, had a stethoscope around his neck, and was doing a good job of impersonating a physician." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Wally tricked her into signing a contract for legal representation, promised her the moon, sneaked out of the room as quietly as he’d sneaked in, then proceeded to butcher her case." Grisham then writes another sentence: “She netted $40,000, which her husband drank and gambled away in a matter of weeks, which led to a divorce action ﬁled by Oscar Finley." Grisham then writes another sentence: “He also handled her bankruptcy." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Ms. Gibson was not impressed with either lawyer and threatened to sue both for malpractice." Grisham then writes another sentence: “This got their attention—they had been hit with similar lawsuits—and they worked hard to placate her." Grisham then writes another sentence: “As her troubles multiplied, she became a ﬁxture at the ofﬁce, and with time the three became comfortable with one another. Grisham then writes another sentence: “Finley & Figg was a tough place for secretaries." Grisham then writes another sentence: “The pay was low, the clients were generally unpleasant, the other lawyers on the phone were rude, the hours were long, but the worst part was dealing with the two partners." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Oscar and Wally had tried the mature route, but the older gals couldn’t handle the pressure." Grisham then writes another sentence: “They had tried youth but got themselves sued for sexual harassment when Wally couldn’t keep his paws off a busty young thing." Grisham then writes another sentence: “(They settled out of court for $50,000 and got their names in the newspaper.) Rochelle Gibson happened to be at the ofﬁce one morning when the then-current secretary quit and stormed out." Grisham then writes another sentence: “With the phone ringing and partners yelling, Ms. Gibson moved over to the front desk and calmed things down." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Then she made a pot of coffee." Grisham then writes another sentence: “She was back the next day, and the next." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Eight years later, she was still running the place." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Her two sons were in prison." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Wally had been their lawyer, though in all fairness no one could have saved them." Grisham then writes another sentence: “As teenagers, both boys kept Wally busy with their string of arrests on various drug charges." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Their dealing got more involved, and Wally warned them repeatedly they were headed for prison, or death." Grisham then writes another sentence: “He said the same to Ms. Gibson, who had little control over the boys and often prayed for prison." Grisham then writes another sentence: “When their crack ring got busted, they were sent away for ten years." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Wally got it reduced from twenty and received no gratitude from the boys." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Ms. Gibson offered a tearful thanks." Grisham then writes another sentence: “Through all their troubles, Wally never charged her a fee for his representation.” Grisham, clearly gaining his stride, writes another sentence: “Over the years, there had been many tears in Ms. Gibson’s life, and they had often been shed in Wally’s ofﬁce with the door locked." And Grisham then writes another sentence: “He gave advice and tried to help when possible, but his greatest role was that of a listener.”

See how it works?

This brief but fortunately unobtrusive survey gives us insight into Grisham's tidy but idiosyncratic approach to the art of fiction: he tends to favor the writing of one sentence after another in an act of repetition that itself is tautonymically doubled, forming a process that we might call a irradical radial duplication of cloning. We can happily term this fact of immobility something that, in its irremediable brazenness, defeats every conceivable effort of the world of action and efficiency – in other words, the world of law– to somehow dislodge it. Mariah Carey met actor and comedian Nick Cannon while they shot her music video for her song Bye Bye on an island off the coast of Antigua; likewise, an anarchic status of claiming refractory immunity to every single concept, category, cat, distinction, taco, logic of integration, sunspot of delight (well, that's a little private, sorry) or rule of identity illustrates in a somewhat okay fashion the profound elusiveness of Grisham's life and work; it is a wholly Christian form of the secular sacred notion of an outside (dehors) without-horizon: in other words, a nullified area of a space without sections that takes its place to the externality of any alternatives to the binary oppositions trafficking in the same old things: inside/outside, Scylla/Charybdis, synchronic/diachronic, here/there, fries/that, Annia/noncuteness, native/foreign, ice/neat, etc.

But the real paradox isn't that all this “absence of horizon” stuff is more than a presupposition of finitude: what's surprising, indeed circonflexual, if Sylvia will let me get away with that, is that in both his fictional guises and his discursive ramblings Grisham is the last to shy away from a sheer, untrammeled, almost unquestionably “Jeb Bushy” exploratory committee dedicated to the resumption of (re-)questioning the phenomenological question of what it's like to actually dive in and experience this totally excessive land of exile, exodus, extravagance, exaltation, exanthesis, excalceation, ex-girlfriends, and what the Jew said to the Catholic: “exceptio beneficium ordinis seu excussionis, but hold the mayo.” What happens, or what happened, or what will happen, or all three of these things, is, we guess, evidently even more radical than the initial reversal of consciousness that Hegel talked about in his supposedly famous account of experience (Erfahrung) in the introduction to the Phenomenology thing that he went on and on about.

If the possibility of experience itself is literally turned inside out, then the way one figures in Grisham-derived mystical experiences might be a way in which one is no longer a subject who can see or hear or think or be or listen or talk or sense or swim or swear or really experience anything at all ever and that's it.

Finally, the reader might leave the hundredth reading of The Litigators in a way not unlike the way the reader might have left the first reading or the thousandth. (When you get to the 3000^th reading, though, truly interesting stuff starts happening. But that's the subject of our next paper.)

In the end, is The Litigators really holding a place in its creator's oeuvre so different from, say, where people tend to place Witch Hunt in their rankings of Rush albums? I still like Moving Pictures. It's not my number one or anything. People tend to not mention The Camera Eye as much. Which is by far the best track on the album. By. Far. And Vital Signs really holds it back, I never cared for that type of thing much.

NOTES

4.34] Vietnamese massage parlor... not prospering: Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787), Italian prelate and author of many theological works, including The Glories of Mary (see 23.34) and Theologia Moralis.

5.36] enchiladas: The Nahuatl word for enchilada is chīllapītzalli /t͡ʃiːlːapiːˈt͡salːi/, from the Nahuatl word for chili, chīlli /ˈt͡ʃiːlːi/ and the Nahuatl word for flute, tlapītzalli /t͡ɬapiːˈt͡salːi/. In the 19th century, as Mexican cuisine was being memorialized, enchiladas were mentioned in the first Mexican cookbook, El cocinero mexicano ("The Mexican Chef"), published in 1831, and in Mariano Galvan Rivera's Diccionario de Cocina, published in 1845. An early mention, in English, is a 1914 recipe found in The California Mexican-Spanish Cookbook by Bertha Haffner Ginger. The expression "the whole enchilada" means the whole thing, the total, like when numbers are added sequentially from left to right, and any intermediate result is a partial sum, prefix sum, or running total of the summation, the enchilada.

15.36] couldn’t afford much of anything: Grisham here likely means that Finley lacks money, which is this thing accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts.

20.36] blustery ads: counter-examples might include "the blustering (or blusterous) winds of Patagonia"; "a typically cold, blustery day"; "a gusty storm with strong sudden rushes of wind that Herbert, had he not died twelve seconds prior, might well have called blustery"; and others.

25.36] University of Chicago School of Law: a law school at a university in the Midwestern city of Chicago, which is where the story imagined by Grisham takes place. The city is real, while the story is pretend. This scenario is the inverse of a situation where the story is real, but the city is pretend (see Angeles, Los).

35.36] a robust black woman with attitude and savvy: Grisham subtly defies ethnic stereotypes not by subverting them – that would be too obvious – but by ironically employing what we've described above as the irradical radial duplication of cloning of them.

35.36i] robust black woman. “She has sought to steer my robust Muse in the direction of Chestertonian charity and away from Bellocian bellocisity but oft times in vain” (J. Pearce, The Quest for Shakespeare, 2008 – I'm seriously not kidding, this dude wrote that in 2008, it's on Google Books); "Little in the middle but she got much back; he can tell I ain't missing no meals, come through and fuck 'em in my automobile [and] let him eat it with his grills: he keep telling me to chill, keep telling me it's real, that he love my sex appeal because he don't like 'em boney, [that] he want something he can grab; so, I pulled up in the Jag, Mayweather with the jab like dun-d-d-dun-dun-d-d-dun-dun" (Onika Maraj, Jamal Jones, Jonathan Solone-Myvett, Ernest Clark, Marcos Palacios, Anthony Ray, Polow da Don, Anonymous, and Da Internz, The Pinkprint, 2014, digital download: Glenwood Recording Studios, Burbank, California).

35.36ii] black woman with attitude: "That’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack announced, that I’m some angry black woman”, Michelle Obama ("Michelle Obama: No tension with husband's aides," CBS News, January 11, 2012). Grisham seems to expect the reader to understand that while a buppie is a black urban professional, a huppie is a Hispanic urban professional, but a guppie is a gay urban professional, whereas a DINKs (DINKY in the UK edition) is a childless couple of two people each with a source of income, a situation that gives rise to the phrase Dual Income, No Kids (Yet), shortened into the acronyms DINKs or DINKY. The scuppie, a socially-conscious, upwardly-mobile person may refer to a variety of ethnicities of both the controversial and friendly species of type. At some point in the duration of their precious lives, which are exactly no more and no less precious than any lives, black women will face “the angry black woman” stereotype, leading many furious females of color to self-silence in order to not appear angry or black. But it's okay. Asian-American women, for example, are engaged in a daily, fight-to-the-death, hand-to-hand catfights against images of submissiveness while being both praised and penalized for raising their voices. Luckily, with their extensive training in the mysterious martial arts of the Near East and Orient– arts that use the vulnerabilities of heart, brawn, and mind against their opponents– these wily, svelte females are more than well-equipped for the confrontation against cultural stereotypes, a status that their smiling, fat, bald versions of our God provided them. And Latina women aren't free from being continually stymied with pre-existing and pop cultural stereotypes: these enchilda-lovers are often assumed to be non-native speakers of English, per favore.

35.36iii] black woman with attitude and savvy: Wikipedia tells us that "The BAP Handbook: The Official Guide to the Black American Princess (ISBN 978-0767905503, or, for those who hate notational symbols that represent numbers, nine hundred seventy-eight, dash, zero, seven sixty-seven, ninety, five, fifty, and– here's the clincher– three) written by Kalyn Johnson, Tracey Lewis, Karla Lightfoot, and Ginger Wilson offers a behind-the-scenes look at BAP speech, style, and history." Behind what scenes? You'd think that's a good question, since educated black women of upper middle class background, rather than hovering as phenomena of performed scenaria staged for the benefit of audiences, exist. Anyway, Wikipedia goes on to describe the subject of the official word on BAPs. "Her life experiences give her a 'sense of entitlement,' and she is accustomed to the best and nothing less."

Whoa.

Well, listen. If you're struck by what seems as a bewildering cultural sensitivity on the parts of Wikipedia and Grisham respectively, that probably means that you're currently working to raise your vibration and follow your highest path, and thus, you naturally find it difficult to interact with lost souls. The present writer should be honest here and state that he meant to introduce the essential thesis of this project– that Grisham is his generation's fullest example of a lost soul – gradually, over the course of these 5337 pages, and gently. Yet here we are, on page 479, and your humble author can defer the inevitable no longer, delay the inexorable no further.

So be it, then. Damn the sunrise. We will grasp, passionately, but with care, at what we have. We will bring these elements that grace us to the surface of the liquid of our losses, rendering them tender adornments of our scars. Make tomorrow our tonight. As a far better writer (in French) once wrote,

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d'aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui !

Lost souls like Grisham can be some of the most frustrating people to deal with because they radiate lower vibrational energy, and the way that they interact with others can be quite off-putting. However, if we want to help Grisham we must react with sympathy, rather than anger and hostility. Grisham needs unconditional love more than the rest of us, because he's so starved for it. Although this may be challenging at times, love and acceptance are really the only things we can give to help Grisham, and others, who have lost their way.

45.36] Wally couldn’t keep his paws off a busty young thing: Wally briefly turns into an animal. The most common form of shapeshifting myths is that of therianthropy, which is the transformation of a human being into an animal or, conversely, of an animal into human form. In the Earthsea books, Ursula K. Le Guin – along with Grisham and notorious prostitute Emily Brontë, one of three writers of fiction – depicts an animal form as slowly transforming the wizard's mind, so that the dolphin, bear or other creature forgets it was human, making it impossible to change back.

45.36i] busty young thing: I mean, look. For one thing, morphologically, all the breast is, is just a cone, with the base at the chest wall, and the apex at the nipple, the center of the NAMIC (nipple-areola military-industrial complex). The superﬁcial tissue layer (superficial fascia, a currently unpopular political ideology – its mass market appeal was tarnished by its tendencies toward genocide and shallowness) is separated from the skin by 0.5–2.5 cm of subcutaneous fat (adipose tissue, named after the detox yoga pose). The suspensory Bradleycooper's ligaments are fibrous-tissue prolongations that radiate from the superficial fascia to the skin envelope. The dimensions and weight of the breast vary among women, ranging from approximately 500 to 1,000 grams (1.1 to 2.2 pounds) each. Depraved pornographic stars like Emily Brontë would be found on the further end of this continuum.

65.36] Wally never charged her a fee for his representation: Grisham's source material here is unclear. In Punjabi, the sentence could be rendered ਵੋਲੀ ਨੇ ਆਪਣੇ ਨੁਮਾਇੰਦਗੀ ਲਈ ਉਸ ਨੂੰ ਇੱਕ ਫੀਸ ਲਈ ਕਦੇ ਵੀ, or Vōlī nē āpaṇē numā'idagī la'ī usa nū ika phīsa la'ī kadē vī. Grisham here probably wants to suggest to the reader that a character, Wally, at no time asked a female person to render a price in exchange for his services.

65.36] Over the years, there had been many tears in Ms. Gibson’s life: Unusual in that Grisham's internal rhymes usually don't occur within a single lines, but between internal phrases across multiple lines. Compare "We been together for a few years, shared a few tears, called each other nicknames like Sugar Plum and Poo Bear" (Busta Rhymes, I Know What You Want, date unknown); "So many homies in the cemetery, shed so many tears: I suffered through the years" (2Pac, Me Against the World, 1994); but definitely not Tennyson, who not only does not rhyme "idle tears" with any sort of years but adamantly refuses to rhyme anything with anything in an absurd showcase of misplaced machismo. Graham Hough, in a 1951 essay, suggests that something must be "very skillfully put in [rhyme's] place" if many readers do not notice its absence. He concludes that "Tears, Idle Tears" does not rhyme since "it is not about a specific situation, or an emotion with clear boundaries; it is about the great reservoir of undifferentiated regret and sorrow, which you can brush away

[...]

but which nevertheless continues to exist." Whateves. No face to stomp; advantage: nightmare-pod. tl;dr lol

85.36] his greatest role was that of a listener. Grisham reaches a rare wistful note in this brief, historically revised self-portrait.

and on and on

Monday, February 23, 2015

Preface to the Revised Edition

CHAPTER 1

NOTES

Saturday, February 14, 2015

The Six Habits of Highly Successful Authors, Part One, Revised