In Praise of Pranking
So now Steinberg has written his “toilet book.” It is not a novel, but it does have a publisher. It is a collection of college pranks called If at All Possible, Involve a Cow. Steinberg poured his heart and soul into it. It brims with displaced consequence.
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Think of prankishness as burbling from the same spring as literature. It stands in opposition. It both tests reality and asserts it. It honors a culture as it assails it. Attempting research, Steinberg was frequently turned away by administrators who feared for their schools’ reputations. (“I wanted to do black colleges,” he told us, “but my approaches to black colleges were kind of rebuffed. An official at Howard said, ‘We don’t do that kind of thing.’”) A hundred schools appear in Cow but three dominate it, Caltech, Harvard, and MIT, each of which takes its superiority for granted.
“Northwestern is a very staid place,” recalled Steinberg, who graduated in ’82. “Not owning a pair of Top-Siders and a tweed coat, I was wondering what was wrong with me. At Northwestern people kill themselves every year. We had someone kill himself by taking a steak knife and stabbing himself in the heart.” So pranks weren’t a tradition, but death was? we wondered. “Northwestern was worried about it,” he said. “There were one or two a year, but that’s enough to catch your attention, and that’s what this book is about in a sense. I’m trying to tell people you don’t have to rent a room in the Orrington Hotel and hang yourself. You can rebel against the things that keep you down.”
He stopped sending out the Games article–“because it skewed people’s thinking”–and instead wrote a sample chapter. Eventually Steinberg went through two agents who briefly represented him but accomplished nothing before finding a young New Yorker, David Black, who both believed in the book and had the talent to sell it. The biggest offer came from Simon & Schuster, where, Steinberg says, an editor told him that this was the first college-prank proposal he’d seen with “philosophical underpinnings.” Steinberg ultimately opted for St. Martin’s Press in order to work with a young editor there who shared his taste for Thomas Pynchon.
Another rule is this: “If at all possible, dispense justice.” Steinberg goes on about justice, which seems to matter even more to him than the cow.
They want the right. Fifteen columnists and three cartoonists were promoted as “conservatives” in E&P and just seven columnists and two cartoonists as liberals. In addition, there was one “libertarian” (the Tribune’s Stephen Chapman) and one “populist.” The totals a year ago were 16 conservatives and 7 liberals.
