The Well-Tempered Clavier

I don’t know how it has occurred, but Idle Tom, the bittersweet publisher, has become something of a central character in this blog …

Yesterday, for instance, Idle Tom had another of his witheringly good ideas:

“I’ve been thinking,” said Tom.

“Oh boy …”

“Do you think there might be any mileage to be had about this Amazon listing? I mean the way that you and your ex-wife have been listed together on Amazon as Perfect Partners - it’s pretty kooky isn’t it? And I’ve been reading up about all the things she’s been saying about you, and …”

“And?”

“And maybe you’d like to set the record straight.”

Set the record straight, indeed. What a wonderful euphemism for spilling the beans.

“But Tom,” I said. “Don’t you think that that might be bad karma for me? I don’t think that it would be a very healing thing to do. Besides, the longer I keep my trap shut, the more it annoys her.”

“No, no!” said Tom. “It won’t be bad karma at all! It’ll be good karma!”

“Well this I must hear.”

“You won’t just be using the piece to plug your book. You’ll be plugging her book too. It’s beautiful. The more you sell, the more she sells!”

“Brilliant!” (And it was brilliant, too. Both cosmically and karmically brilliant.)

“You never know,” said Idle Tom, his voice getting all vibrato with excitement. “Maybe she’ll start slagging you off again, and it might turn into a real ding-dong cat-fight, and the next thing you know it’ll be a Christmas bestseller …”

“They’ll both be Christmas bestsellers!” I said. “Good sales and good karma too. Who’s going to complain about that?”

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 9:00 am and is filed under Bittersweet Tom, Well-Tempered Clavier. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.