That’s nothing new; the world of marketing seems to have sports fans pegged, and probably correctly. What I have found completely baffling this year, though, is the odd world demonstrated by the current Viagra commercial.

Here’s the scene: we’re in Nashville; it’s 1:22 a.m. The camera pans around a music studio where a bunch of musicians are tuning their instruments; there’s an empty coffee cup, signifying that this is an all-nighter. One of the musicians, an affable-looking older white guy in a cowboy hat, interrupts the concentrated silence of musicians making preparations: “Hey, fellas. Listen to this.”

And he proceeds to strum “Viva Las Vegas,” substituting his own words. They’re vague, but can be read as pertaining to erectile dysfunction (”can’t wait ’til I get home”), at least until the chorus, which (just as in other Viagra commercials) is “Viva Viagra.”

What I find troubling and fascinating about the commercial are the unanimously favorable reactions of all the other session musicians and the engineers behind the glass in the studio. They wait appreciatively while this dude sings his song, but when he mentions Viagra, why, it’s as if he’d told the funniest joke they’d ever heard. That is, it’s not at all like he’s wasting their studio time dicking around while they’re getting ready for the next take. (Maybe, though, they are working on a Viagra commercial, and he just came up with the winning jingle, and they can all go home now.)

Clearly, commercials are not reality. Commercials don’t go in for gritty realism, and so we don’t get images of the annoyed drummer who just wants to go home, or the young session guitarist who finds this guy’s singing about ED insufferable. But it’s interesting to “catch” the commercial encoding certain attitudes toward ED and Viagra: first, go ahead and sing about it; in fact, take up other people’s time to do it, because ED is serious business and Viagra is some kind of miracle drug. Second, everyone loves Viagra; they find it charming and amusing, because it’s cool.

What’s weird about this appeal, too, is that it has nothing to do with sex. It’s like Viagra has moved from something having to do with erections and sex, to something having to do with just the guys. It almost seems possible, given the NCAA tournament audience–which is probably a fairly broad slice of the dude market–that this is part of a long-range marketing scheme to position Viagra as OK, manly, a rite of getting older just like graying hair, Dockers, and an appreciation for the corny lyrics and music on display in the commercial.

But after recently checking out Garfield on the web (for no real reason but boredom), I think I may have come up with a reason to appreciate the world of this Monday-hating, lasagna-loving cat and his desperately lonely owner, Jon Arbuckle.

That reason is Garfield.com’s Terms of Service and Conditions of Use page.

Tucked into a corner of the garish mash of color that is Garfield.com’s main page, the link is marked by a cartoon of a smarmy-looking lawyer type, one eyebrow raised. The roll-over text reads “Click for copyright and legal mumbo jumbo.”

But if you do click, what you’ll find seems far from the silly, “square” legalese that such a label seems to suggest. There’s a passage where the user agrees to indemnify Paws, Incorporated. There is a list of vendors unassociated with Paws, Incorporated, including Garfield Visa and Mastercards, Garfield Mobile Content, and something called Typing Tutor. There is a disclaimer that reads “uclick and Paws make no warranty that (i) the Service will meet your requirements; . . . [or that] (iv) the quality of any products, services, information or other material obtained from the Service will meet your expectations.”

Admittedly, this is fairly standard legal language—Garfield.com is surely no more draconian than the average entertainment website when it comes to protecting its brand. But the discrepancy between this sort of thing, as a signifier of a certain status obtained by the Garfield industry, and the humble origins of Jon Davis’s strip about a lazy orange tabby, is striking.

Garfield.com has a “cartoon vault” that contains the first Garfield cartoon. I didn’t remember the character Jon Arbuckle ever being a cartoonist (or Garfield being this grotesque and lumpy), but knowing that this was how the whole thing got started casts a weird light on the complex heights Garfield has reached. My inclination is to believe that Jon Davis started off modestly, was pleasantly surprised by the world’s cheering reception of his strip, and at some point became a kind of prisoner to the success of his creation: “You want to make a third Garfield movie? Well, if you say I’ll make the children cry by saying no, then let’s do it.” In this vision, Davis is the victim of a run-away success, Garfield the comic strip a complicated tangle of personal meanings, emotional resonances, and multiple income streams. Garfield is multivalent, no longer quite under the control of its creator (just as Garfield the cat is not quite under the control of Jon Arbuckle, his owner).

But how likely is this? There have been artists who’ve felt trapped by their creations—see Arthur Conan Doyle, who killed off Sherlock Holmes to work on historical novels, only to bring back the famous sleuth when the public (and publishers) demanded it. I’m thinking too of Ricky Gervais’s second television series, Extras, in which his character, Andy Millman, walks away from a wildly popular, dismally bad (read “hilariously bad”) sitcom he’s no longer proud to be a part of.

But Garfield was never a work of thoughtful art. He’s a lazy cat with a ‘tude. If Davis was happy to sell the licensing rights that inflicted suction cup-pawed Garfield dolls on the world, why suspect he has any regrets about the world of Garfield, Jon, Odie, et al turning into a crass virtual theme park, cross-marketed and multi-branded into unrecognizability?

It’s not a problem the average writer can expect to have, but the notion of one’s creation getting away from an author in this way is weirdly compelling (at least to me). It brings to mind a comic-strip topic on which I could be even more long-winded: in some ways the inverse of Davis and his Garfield Universe is Bill Waterston and his Calvin Pissing on Things Underground. By not licensing Calvin and Hobbes for any sort of merchandise, Waterston unwittingly created those incredibly idiotic decals of Calvin pissing on truck logos, and the use of his and Hobbes’s images on cheap t-shirts for fraternities’ pledge weeks.

Maybe I’m overthinking this but, as silly and bad as I find Garfield to be, looking at his internet headquarters suggests, by way of extreme example, something of the relationship between author and text, and how estranged and distorted such a relationship can become.

LEAP YEAR

They broke up then on leap day over email, sending ever-shorter messages back and forth by hitting the reply button until the final word “stop” was the final word.

They left the subject field blank except for the abbreviation for reason, re:, which multiplied with each reply to one another so, at last, the space read: re:re:re:re; etc.

Each of them, miles apart, paused a moment to read again what each had written on the screen, their fingers poised about to send the other this next leap.

Four years later, all the reasons for doing what they did are lost to them, the email program purged, but this extra day returns to both a surplus sadness.

* * *
As always with Martone, don’t skip the author’s note.

Happy Leap Day, everyone.

Prizes are $1,000 for first place, $500 for second and $250 for third. Postmark deadline is December 1.

The best part? No entry fee.

Full details here. Good luck.

Looking through the whole slate of “geniuses” is generally pretty interesting, although about half the “geniuses”‘ work I tend not to understand.

“Genius” and “geniuses” are of course in quotes because the MacArthur Foundation tends to officially discourage the grant being called that, although, really, I can’t imagine they’re not delighted by the name.

It’s not just me. Fellow fiction ed. Ashleigh heroically compiled a long list of literary magazines over the summer, and her listing for Salt Hill was something like “Not sure this still exists.” We just figured it had gone the way of the dodo, so to speak.

Au contraire! Today, via Pitt’s super-useful “dist list,” comes word that Salt Hill not only exists, but is welcoming submissions for its 21st issue. It turns out too that it’s affiliated with Syracuse University.

Here is relevant info from the aforementioned e-mail, followed by an explanation of why I’m not just putting up a link:

“The editors welcome submissions of poetry, prose, translations, reviews, essays, interviews and artwork submitted by April 1. We do not accept electronic submissions.

“. . .

“To submit address your work to the appropriate editor
(poetry, fiction or nonfiction) at:

“Salt Hill
Syracuse University
English Department
Syracuse, NY 13244″

And now here is the web address they provided: SaltHillJournal.com. Click on it. Type it in yourself and see where it goes.

This is the most utterly mysterious literary magazine I have ever heard of.

-Adam

H E A D L E S S

Please send us your poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and cultural criticism on the theme of headless. Horsemen, flat beer, chocolate bunnies, the guy who never gets a blowjob, zombies, animal crackers, classical statues, John Wayne Bobbitt, groups without leaders, blondes, Marie Antoinette and other unfortunate royalty, Medusa post-Perseus, the philosophy of D.E. Harding — any and all of these could fall under the heading of headless. Whatever your interpretation, be sure to stun us. We’ll know it’s good when we feel, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, as if the tops of our heads were taken off.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: September 24, 2007

See here for information specific to different genres.

Congratulations to Alli and Carlos Delgado, who welcomed their son Jonah, healthy and remarkably handsome, into the world at 1:30 this afternoon. Carlos, a third-year fiction student at Pitt, blogged about the experience here.