A booze-fueled break-in. A high speed chase. A New Year's Eve gone horribly wrong. Suddenly, Joe Retard finds himself in basic training for the navy. Espionage, treason, Asian butt cheeks and a misplaced buccaneer named Cornelius P. Quicksilver follow. What, pray tell, am I speaking of? Congressman Titus North's novel Operation Patriotic Toilet Seat, of course!
Sent to me by my channel manager, Justin, the book was eagerly devoured once I discovered that Mr. North is a native Pittsburgher. An adjunct professor in the University of Pittsburgh's Political Science department, Titus has also worked for the Thomson Corporation since 1989 as a political and financial analyst and currently produces a daily English language digest of the Japanese financial press for Thomson, doing much of the translation himself. Titus lived in Japan for ten years and traveled throughout Asia during the 1980s and 1990s. He also teaches karate at USA Professional Karate in Squirrel Hill and is an active member of the Pittsburgh Banjo Club. Titus ran for Mayor of Pittsburgh in 2005 and U.S. Congress in 2006 as the Green Party candidate. He called me from Japan to speak about Operation Patriotic Toilet Seat.
Nikki Tiani: Is the story’s protagonist, Joe Retard, autobiographical?
Titus North: [laughs] Yeah, pretty much. The first few chapters happened like that in real life. I did wander around James Schlesinger's basement looking for his daughter when I was seventeen. Schlesinger was the Secretary of Energy, head of the CIA and later, the Secretary of Defense during the Nixon administration. I've had what some refer to as a Forrest Gump existence.
NT: Had you had these characters in your head for some time or did they just come to you organically as the story unfolded? TN: The basic idea of the bar code [in the story] popped up in my imagination, for starters. At first I was thinking of it being completely absurd but when the Patriot Act, Operation Total Awareness and various things that the US government used to keep track of us started becoming mainstream, my book wasn’t so obscure anymore. When reality became stranger than fiction, I realized that I had been surpassed in the six years it took me to write the book. For the most part the characters were based on people I know. An awful lot of events in the book happened which I threw together like a jalopy.
NT: You've obviously been to Japan many times, which is made clear by the incredibly detailed and colorful references to local food, language and culture in the book. Is this why you chose Asia to be the story's backdrop? TN: Yeah, part of what I was trying to do was paint a picture of what Japan was like in the early eighties. It was a fun time for a young adult, which is what I tried to illustrate. People who were here (like ex-Pats and Japanese) who read the book thought I nailed it. However, plot wise, my target audience was tiny. The only people who understood it were citizens of Japan. There are a lot of details in the book; for instance, prime minister Koizumi is not a household name in the States but a Japanese person would crack up at the situations I put him in. People who follow Japanese politics would understand my references and catch the humor.
NT: Did you allow your children to read the book? TN: My son is 14 and he did a lot of proofreading for it. The book was about hineys, and while not exactly G rated, I wrote it thinking about my family members reading it. There were no explicit bedroom scenes; compared to what my son watches on Saturday Night Live, my book was comparatively tame. One European reviewer suggested it should be put on high school reading lists. My daughter, who is seven, was interested in the cover which was drawn by a local artist Pittsburgh artist named Steve Smith.
NT: Tell me how the book has been received.
TN: Since it was marketed through a small publishing company, it hasn't been circulated a lot yet. Critically, it has done very well. Hopefully, with some advertising, it will sell better. I didn't write it with the idea of making a lot of money off of it. I don't want to write commercially, at least not right now.
NT: Why did you choose to self publish? Would you recommend that route to other aspiring authors?
TN: Well, a few of my friends and I had been talking about trying to set up a writer's cooperative. We put together Enlightened Pyramid (www.enlightened-pyramid.com/) and my book was the first thing we published. We currently have 4 or 5 authors and just started bringing some other projects on board. The woman that the opera singer was based on [in Toilet Seat] wrote an award winning book that her husband made it into a documentary. We're currently trying to turn the documentary into a feature movie. At this point we've just been dealing with people we know; we might possibly accept submissions from unsolicited authors but it's a great chance that the novels aren't likely to make much profit. The reason for doing our books first was to learn the nuts and bolts of publishing.
NT: Any plans for a follow up? Perhaps Operation Communist Bidet?
TN: This [Toilet Seat] was actually my first book published but I wrote a similar book a year before it in 2001. A good friend of mine had passed away and I found writing to be therapeutic. I needed to get some stuff off my chest; I never intended for it to be public. Since [Toilet Seat] did fairly well I think might revisit my first novel and see if I can clean it up.
NT: What are you reading right now? Are there any authors (living or dead) that you would name as influences? TN: I just finished reading the autobiography of a career criminal which is an Enlightened Pyramid project. It was based on the life of a good friend’s uncle. My friend was able to have long interviews with him before he passed away a few years ago. He led a very interesting life- born in the late 30's, he was a Mexican American who got into crime at a young age. He was very good at the lifestyle and, despite a heroin addiction, he managed to live to be 66 years old. I had an odd feeling of rooting for him because he seemed like such a regular person, even though he was cracking safes, holding up liquor stores and robbing banks. We're publishing that book later this year. Mostly I read non-fiction and current events. I love the style of the absurd, like Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett- they’re major influences of mine. Additionally, my father wrote some novels that were quite good but, unfortunately, never came to fruition; he finally gave up on publishing. I gleaned so much from reading his work. I hope that thirty years from now I am able to have the same impact on my children that these people had on me.
NT: Is there anything else that you’d like to add? TN: I really felt that a big hunk of the book takes place in a military place where he [Joe, the protagonist] was being tortured. Like with the KGB or Spanish Inquisition, these people were tortured not for information but for false confessions. The Bush administration was getting out of its torture program by pleading plausible deniability. They claimed that their Intel was bad when all they really wanted to hear was that there may be weapons of mass destruction so they could go in and invade, scot-free. I really wanted to successfully get that point across, which is what I did in the last chapter of the book.
If you want to learn more or purchase Operation Patriotic Toilet Seat, please visit
www.amazon.com/Operation-Patriotic-Toilet-Titus-North/dp/0981555004 or www.enlightened-pyramid.com/. To learn more about Titus North, visit his website at www.votenorth.org/.
Photo credit: Steve Smith
What the critics say:
"Operation Patriotic Toilet Seat is a shocking expose of what was going on within my cabinet. If only I had known sooner, there would have been no Soviet domination of Poland. Kudos to Titus North." --President Gerald R. Ford (deceased)
"Operation Patriotic Toilet Seat is the first book I plan to read when I get out of here." --Prisoner #18479, Illinois State Penitentiary
"I actually read this book and I would still recommend it, even to a friend." --Daniel Papia, President, International Chindogu Society
"Don't read this book. It's crude, childish and immature." --Jasper Weininger, ficticious former Secretary of Defense
"Jasper Weininger is a poo-poo head." --Titus North
Comments
Nice article, Nikki.
Rock on! My channel manager lady is sweet, but we don't get books... Nicely done interview, Nikki!
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