Go Figure

Late in 1964, the Beatles released their single I Feel Fine after the band, according to John Lennon, spent much creative energy and hard work crafting this soon-to-be big hit of theirs. For the B-side of the single, Paul McCartney threw together a very simple, spur-of-the-moment song titled She’s a Woman, and the Beatles recorded it in a rush with very little fanfare (because it was on the B-side, after all). But when the record came out, radio stations across the country discovered that many fans liked She’s a Woman more than the polished I Feel Fine (including me). So She’s a Woman ended up getting co-billing with I Feel Fine in the charts, even though relatively little effort had been put into it.

Although I’m nowhere near the artistic level of the Beatles, I think I’m beginning to understand how John Lennon felt when, in a later interview, he expressed a little consternation at how the two songs were publicly received. I just recently published two blog articles on successive days. The first, titled Time to Pretend, was on a topic that I felt deeply about. I put a great deal of thought (and emotion) into this personally-relevant piece. The next day, I happened to be headed over to my local Publix grocery to pick up some items when I thought, hey, I’ve got my sturdy little portable AlphaSmart word processor with me, why don’t I just stop over first at the Starbucks a few stores down and “set a spell”? So I bought a coffee and sat down, with no preconceived notion as to what I would write. I was thinking about what an interesting, inclusive program Chris Matthew’s show Hardball was on MSNBC, and how “exclusive” Keith Olbermann’s show Countdown was (regarding the selection of guests), to its detriment. So I whipped up a few words, threw them together, and put it all out on my blog for the next day. I got no discernible reaction for the important (to me) Time to Pretend article, but for the Olbermann article there was an comparatively enormous reaction. The reason? An anti-Olbermann website had picked up my article over the Net and placed a link on their site to it. That was O.K. by me, but still it gripes me a little that what I cared the least about was what the “public” seemed to care about the most. I suppose, though, that if I am really serious about publishing my writings, be they fiction or non-fiction, I should come to expect this sort of frustrating type of reaction from readers. I’ll bet it happens to Stephen King all the time. Go figure.