George Carlin first got my attention when I was a teenager in the 1970’s.  By that time, Carlin had transformed himself from a tradition old world “show-biz” style performer into a spokesman for the counter-culture.  Gone was the clean-shaven face, the suit and tie, in was the long hair and beard, the t-shirt and jeans.  He was best known for his “Seven Dirty Words” routine which ended up in a Supreme Court case, but underlying all of his comedy was a philosophical approach and a devotion to language that has never been matched.

In his later years, his hippy-esque (and pot influenced) approach was gradually replaced by an increasingly angry social criticism.  No one was exempt from his sharp wit.  But his sense of irony and his love of language never left him.  He had elevated stand-up comedy to an art form.

In this monologue from his later, post hippy period, Carlin displays his brilliance.  He starts out seeming to rage against environmentalists, but then turns the argument against itself.  He uses language as masterfully as any great poet and is extremely conscious of cadence.

My titles are available for free using coupon code SW100. (Valid now through July 31, 2010).

My post from last summer: The Women of Iran.

And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.”  So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.

-Genesis 1:20-22

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.  And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.”

-Genesis 1:27-29

Tamkin’s council and Wilhelm’s inability to shed his burdens only serve to heighten Wilhelm’s sense of failure.  Wherever he seeks sympathy, whether it be his estranged wife who continues to make financial demands on him while refusing to divorce him or his father, a comfortably retired doctor, finds nothing but reminders of his failures.

Born Wilhelm Adler, he changes his name to Tommy Wilhelm to further his acting career.  His career never takes off and so he fails in his attempt to actually become Tommy Wilhelm, a failure he is constantly reminded of by his father who insists on addressing him as “Wilky,” his childhood name.

Seize the Day is a distinctly American story.  Whereas British fiction from Daniel Defoe on up through today’s Ian McEwan is preoccupied by social and economic class distinctions, American society prides itself on being free from class.  No matter what station we are born into, we believe that through hard work, perseverance, and strength of character we can succeed.  If we do not succeed, it is obviously due to some flaw in our character.  American fiction has always explored the chasm that exists between that Great American Ideal (and mythology) and the stark reality that the Universe has no concept of fairness.  American literary characters, unlike their British counterparts, are therefore imbued with a greater sense of anomie. While British heroes and heroines may struggle to overcome the rigid class distinctions in their society, and usually fail, there is at least the idea that there is a sense of order in the Universe, no matter how harsh it may be. American literary figures, from Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths to Fitzgerald’s James Gatz to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to Miller’s Willy Loman, fight not against society but against nothingness.

Years after writing Seize the Day, Bellow said in interviews that never liked Tommy Wilhelm very much.  Indeed, Wilhelm is not particularly likable and the reader is likely to feel as much sympathy for him as the other characters in the novella.  “Stop whining, be a man, get a job!” we want to say to him.  And yet, the story is compelling and unconsciously reaches those hidden parts of our psyche that fear the stark nothingness, and leads us to the novella’s surprisingly cathartic conclusion.

Seize the Day (Penguin Classics)

Cynthia Ozick (Introduction). Penguin Classics 2003, Paperback, 144 pages, $7.40

Although BP has said that all is going as planned with operation “Top Kill,” nothing will be conclusively known about its success until sometime Sunday.    While most articles about this environmental catastrophe refer to this as a spill, that word hardly describes what has happened and what continues to happen.  The word spill implies that there is some finite amount involved, however large it may be.  The Exxon Valdez spilled its contents into Prince William Sound twenty-one years ago.  There was a finite amount of oil onboard and the flow eventually stopped.  When the flow of oil from the Deepwater Horizon well is finally stopped, we can call it a spill.  Until then, it should be called what it is: an endless eruption.

The status reports issued by various sources since BP began pumping drilling mud into the well in an attempt to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.  First there were reports that all was going as planned.  Then there were reports that the operation had been suspended sixteen hours before.  Then there were reports that the operation was resumed and again, everything is going as planned.  Since not one single thing about this drilling operation seems to have gone as planned since the very beginning, taking BP’s word, or the President’s for that matter, about what is happening requires a moon-sized grain of salt.

That this has been going on for over a month with one attempt after another to stop the flow or contain the damage failing is proof that we have inflicted damage to the environment far beyond our ability to control what happens to the gulf and to ourselves.

In 1951, Rachel Carson published the The Sea Around Us. The book sold over 250,000 copies in 1951 and went on to win the National Book Award in 1952. The Sea Around Us and the books that followed, especially her 1964 masterpiece, Silent Spring, became pillars of the modern environmental movement.

As I watch the streaming video documenting our supreme recklessness with Nature, I remember back to about 1970, when Earthday made environmentalism cool, when my grandmother gave to me her book-of-the-month club editions of both those books.  I read them both that summer at my grandparents cottage on the north shore of Long Island.  That was years before mysterious plume of brown algae entered into the Long Island Sound and nearly obliterated the local scallop industry, and even more years before a second mysterious plume entered the sound again just as the scallops were recovering, delivering the final knockout punch to a way of life for generations (or centuries if you count the Native Americans who lived there before we did).

Carson was a gifted communicator and was able to teach science in very simple terms for non-scientists to understand.  Her writing style was beautiful and poetic.  In the very first section of The Sea Around Us, entitled “Mother Sea,” she describes the formation of the earth, its oceans, and the live upon it in a way that is scientific and at the same time as spiritual as any creation myth.  In her version of “Let there be light,” she describes the development of the food chain that binds us to our planet and to every other living thing:

All the while, the cloud cover was thinning, the darkness of the nights alternating more and more perceptibly with the palely illumined days, and finally the sun for the first time shone through upon the sea. By then, some of the living things that floated in the sea must have developed chlorophyll.  Now, in the sunlight, they were able to take the carbon dioxide of the air and the water of the sea and from these elements build the organic substances they needed.  So the first true plants came into being.  A group of organisms unable to produce chlorophyll arose, and found that they could live by devouring the plants.  These were the first animals, and from that day to this every animal in the world has followed the habit acquired in ancient seas, and, directly or through intricate food chains, has been dependent for food and life on plants.

When the oil gushing from this well is finally staunched, next week, next month or next year, where will we be?  What will we have learned?  How badly will we have damaged our only home?  We can already see where the oil has come ashore the destruction of the coastal wetlands along the gulf.  The local economies will be suffering for generations.  Beyond just that, however, are the massive plumes of oil deep beneath the surface.  Ironically, they may have been formed by the highly toxic dispersants that have been used, and continue to be used, by BP to prevent the oil from floating to the surface where they can be seen.  It’s the ultimate cover-up.  It doesn’t seem to have save the coastline from what may be irreparable damage and the long term effects to the health of the ocean, and with it, the food-chain and us.  The dispersants may very well have made it impossible for the oil to ever be removed.

This is all clearly the result of a powerful  industry aided by a regulatory system that is at best, impotent, and at worst, massively corrupted.  Fundamentally, the problem goes deeper than that.  The people of Louisiana are facing the destruction of their seafood industry.  Louisiana, long known for its shrimp, and its oysters, and its crawfish, is also long known for its even larger dependence on the oil business, and has long pretended that those two industries aren’t in conflict with one another.

The effects of these miles-long plumes of undersea oil are as of yet unknown and it may take years to determine.  They may live on for years, travelling around the world in ocean currents, leaving behind dead zones.

How many more times must this happen?  How much of our human habitat must we destroy? Where’s the tipping point?

The Sea Around Us

Jeffrey S. Levinton (Afterword). Oxford University Press, USA 1991, Paperback, 288 pages, $8.95

Silent Spring

Linda Lear (Introduction). Mariner Books 2002, Paperback, 400 pages, $6.48

One thousand.

It’s an impressive number, but not too large that it overwhelms us.  It’s not a million, or one hundred thousand, or even ten thousand. those numbers are too large allow us to see the individual trees for the forest.  Or the individual people in the crowd.  One thousand people would fit comfortably in a single section of a single deck in a modern sports stadium. Or comfortably fill the floor seats in an arena at a political convention.

From a distance we can see the crowd, but if we want to, if we chose to, we can we can focus in and see each individual.  If we can see an individual, we can imagine who he or she is. Maybe the soldier comes from a poor rural area in West Virginia or a desperate ghetto in New York City or Los Angeles  and volunteered for service as a way to pay for an education.  Or maybe they come from a family and a patriotic community in upstate New York where military service is a common value and tradition.  For each, it’s a unique set of circumstances and desires that inspires him or her to volunteer. These include a desire for personal achievement, a desire to provide a better life for their families, a desire to serve and protect their communities and their nation.

For each of the one thousand, we can imagine a broken family.  Maybe there is a younger sister who adored older brother who once made her angry by teasing her when she was a little girl and once again with his smothering overprotection when she became a teenager.  We can imagine her crying all night long on the day her brother shipped out.

Imagine the soldier had a mother who, for all of his life, had only one identity, one role that mattered: mother.  She raised him right.  She picked him up when he fell, she cradled him when he cried, she disciplined him when he needed it.  She had an abiding faith in the goodness of God and she did all she could to instill this faith in her son, so that for all his life his conscience would  guide him and protect him.  When he went off to war, she prayed to God every morning and every night for his safe return.  And when he was killed by an I.E.D on his way back to base camp after a surviving hazardous patrol, she wondered why God had abandoned her.  Maybe in time she can put the broken shards of her faith back together and make peace with the universe, but the certainty of that happening is by no means assured. Who are we to judge if she cannot?

His father has no outlet for his grief.  It is his duty to comfort his grieving wife and sobbing daughter, but their pain (like his own) is beyond his reach.

All those who knew him are left with an impenetrable void that will be with them for the rest of their lives. While this void will never be filled, his memory is always with them.  They remember him forever as he was: young, optimistic, looking to the future with the aura of invincibility only the young and innocent can possess.  He never ages. An ethereal spirit, he becomes an idealized and why shouldn’t that happen?  What in his young life could he possibly had done to deserve his senseless fate?  He is silent and passes no judgment, but in moments of moral ambiguity the people he left behind think of him and wonder what he would think about the choices they make.  He becomes their conscience.

May the politicians and generals who presume to lead, and to all of us who grant them our permission to lead, devote at least some small part of our conscience to the forever young.

In the coming weeks, this mini-eBook, along with the others, will also be available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the Apple Bookstore, Kobo, and Sony.  The folks at Smashwords have been working their butts off implementing all of the distribution deals that they have been put in place.  Given the fragmentation of the eBook market that currently exists, where the retailers each have their own formatting requirements (unlike the world of print publishing), Smashwords is solving a real problem in bridging the technology gap and helping authors reach as many readers as possible.  It’s exciting to watch and to be a small part of Smashword’s quest.

A coworker got his iPad this weekend, so I checked out what my eBooks look like on it.  I’m very impressed and eBooks may end up being the killer app for the iPad.

The ratings are spectacular and the network changes its mind about Beale’s retirement.  The evening news is handed over to a young ambitious programming executive from the entertainment division (Faye Dunaway), and Beale becomes “The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves.”  His rallying cry to his audience is, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”  Millions of people across the nation open their windows and scream it out into the night.  Glenn Beck can only wish he had that kind of clout.

Beale’s success leads to a primetime show that becomes the foundation for a network lineup that plays on all the fears and paranoia of the time and the network rakes in the cash.  The offerings seemed a little over the top at the time, with one program following the activities of the “Ecumenical Liberation Army,” a sly take-off on Patty Hearst kidnappers, the “Symbionese Liberation Army.” In a preview of the current reality show fad, every week the episode featured actual footage of crimes being committed by the terrorists, shot by the terrorists themselves.  Viewed today, however, the offerings of the fiction UBS network, seem like a naive preview of what our culture is today.

Glenn Beck’s daily paranoid and hateful rants, which indicate that sanity is not his friend seem like Beale’s ravings taken to an absurd extreme.  In the parlance of pop culture, Beck jumped the shark long ago, probably before his first telecast.

Beale, in spite of his mental breakdown, never completely broke with reality and seemed to genuinely care about the wellbeing of his audience.  The conspiracies that he warned of were real, and most of all, he urged his audience to think for themselves.  It is his truth telling about his network’s planned corporate merger and its plan to control what people see and think and believe that leads to his ultimate downfall.

Beck does no such thing.  It is he who must do all the thinking for his audience because only he can see all the evil around us, but in reality he is simply an agent of the corporate interests that control him.  If he were a true “Mad Prophet of  the Airwaves,’” attempting to reveal the truths that only a mad prophet can, he would expose the ugly truths of his own corporation and fellow travelers, such as Sean Hannity’s traitorous and obscene exploitation of service families to promote himself and line the pockets of his cronies.   Instead he takes to the blackboard and raves on and on about secret plots that make sense only to himself.  Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski’s manifesto makes more sense than Beck’s condescending lectures.  What he preaches may be nonsense and he may just be another clown, but taking a page from Beck’s own playbook in referencing Hitler, I’ll point out that no one thought Mein Kampf made much sense either, even before it became a blueprint for worldwide catastrophe.  He may be a clown, but the ignorance and hatred he is so proudly preaching is taking root.

Glenn Beck, Fox News, meet your match:

Network (Two-Disc Special Edition)

Owen Roizman (Cinematographer). Warner Home Video 1976, DVD, $12.99

The Reader is Horizontal

As I wrote yesterday, this week is “Read an eBook Week.”  While the printed book is in no danger of extinction, technological innovations, as well as business model innovations, make it clear that the way books are produced, distributed and bought is rapidly changing.

It’s new, it’s green, it’s hot.

Sorry, that sounded a little too much like blowhard Tom Friedman.  Let me start over.

Last fall, when I was in San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador, researching my next book, The World is Green, Sweaty, and Concave, I had a conversation with the cab driver who drove me to the airport about the International Monetary Fund’s Latin American policy and its impact on the  nanotechnology research incubators being established in the former rustbelt of the United States.  When he’s not driving his cab, Pepe is a student at the local university and heads an internet social-media startup…

Sorry, I did it again. One more time, I promise to be good.

EBooks, I was talking about eBooks and the coming revolution…

Last fall, I was talking to some acquaintances, ordinary writers with families and boring day jobs, not high-tech entrepreneurial cabbies from exotic countries, about the changes in publishing, and in particular POD publishing technology and eBooks.  For very little cost, it’s now possible for any writer to publish a book, in digital or print form, and sell it on the internet.  Whether or not it gets any attention at all and sells beyond the small circle of the writer’s friends is another question.  I’m still old-fashioned enough to be skeptical about self-publishing and aside from this blog, I’m still going at it the old fashioned way: trying to convince someone else to publish me.

But I was intrigued.  The biggest challenge to me was the fragmentation of the EBook market in technological terms.  There’s the Kindle, there’s the Sony Reader, the Fictionwise EReader, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and now Apple’s iPad.  All of these devices are closed and proprietary to some degree or another, but more importantly, are tied to specific content distributers.  If you want your book to be available to the widest possible audience, you really need to be able to support all those formats as natively as possible and get connected in to those devices distribution channels.

As a lowest common denominator on the format question, you can use PDF, but PDF documents only work well on real PC’s and not on dedicated devices with smaller screens.  PDF files are composed of fixed pages that don’t display well on smaller screens.  Either the device shows the entire page making the text too small to read, or if you can zoom in, it makes for very awkward reading as you have to slide the enlarged page left and right and up and down as you are reading.  A cumbersome reading experience, especially if you are trying to enter into John Gardner’s fictive dream.  The device, like a real book, needs to dissolve out of our consciousness as we read.  In order to create the proper reading experience, the text needs to be reflowed dynamically for each device, something that PDF doesn’t do well at all.

There’s another practical matter to consider about PDF format as well.  Since it only works really well on a computer, it means that in order to read it you have to be sitting at a computer.  By necessity, I do a lot of reading at my computer these days.  My writing is published in ezines and I read a lot of them along with various blogs that I follow, but that’s hardly the way I done reading for most of my life.  The word sprawled comes to mind as in,  “Sprawled on the living room couch.”  Most of my reading is done horizontally unless it’s not possible, such as when I’m reading from my computer screen or incarcerated on an airplane.  I guess it’s possible to sprawl on an airplane, but it’s not very row-mate friendly.

And in bed.  I read in bed.  I have to confess that my aluminum unibody MacBook is the sexiest piece of hardware I’ve ever seen, but it’s too awkward to curl up next to it in bed.  Mrs. Bubbers would have a problem with that too.  So, the small book sized devices offer the most natural reading experience and cannot be ignored. The vendors of these products won’t let you with all those pictures of happy readers outside sprawled out under maple trees gazing at their devices.

While I was pondering these questions, I discovered Smashwords.com, which I discussed in yesterday’s post.  Smashwords solves several problems at once.  First, it provides the technology to transform your book into all the common formats used by the most popular devices.  Second, through their business relationships, they provide access to the supply chains that are supporting all the various devices.  Still, there’s the marketing challenge that you need to solve on your own, but at least the technical barriers are removed.

I stuck my little toe in the water and signed up with Smashwords as an author.  While I’m still working on a book-length collection of short stories to be published by someone other than myself, I wanted to see how the Smashwords process works.  I selected a memoir that I had written several years ago that had been published in the Oregon Literary Review and set to work formatting the Word document according to the Smashwords style guide.  It took a few attempts to create a document that would look good in all the published formats after the Smashwords meatgrinder  got through with it and also to get approved for their premium distribution program, but in the end, it was a lot simpler than I had expected.

Meta-memoir

The personal essay, or memoir, that I chose for my little experiment was a piece that I wrote several years ago.  It marked my return to serious writing after having quit in my late twenties.  The usual reasons: frustration at not getting published, building a career in software development, starting a family, etc. While in the middle of a thoroughly enjoyable (but harmless) middle-aged crisis, I decided I wanted to start trying to write again.  Unfortunately, I was at a loss as to where to start and the doubts about my talent had never gone away.  Fiction, making things up, was very daunting.  I contacted an old friend from my college days, also a writer, who is now an English professor and teaches, among other things, composition.  She suggested that instead trying to tackle a piece of fiction right away, I try to “get my swing” back by writing a personal essay.  She assigns personal essays to her freshman composition students as a way of helping them work through their fears of writing.  She also sent me a copy of one of her own personal essays that she gives to her students as a sample.  “Don’t worry about what it’s about, just as long as it means something to you,” she said.

When I read her essay, I immediately understand how I should approach my own.  Her first-person narrative was written using the iceberg approach.  Like an iceberg, the part that you see, the part that’s apparent, is only the tip and it’s supported by a huge part that’s hidden underwater.  For a memoir, the part that’s hidden, but still felt by the reader (if you do it right) is the emotional part.  It’s the part that resonates on an almost unconscious level with the reader.  It’s not necessarily an easy thing to do.  If you write too little, the reader literally has no idea what you’re talking about.  That’s what happens when young writers spend too much time in literature classes focusing on the subtleties in great writing.  Get too subtle, however, and you become obtuse.  On the other hand, if you write too much, you leave no emotional space for the reader to inhabit.

Maria’s essay was perfect, and in the years since we were students, she’s mastered the approach.

Since we were always a bit competitive,  when we don’t deny it, I decided to try the same method and see what I could do.  As a topic, I chose a writing workshop that I had taken in my last year at college.  It stood out for me because I remembered at the time how important to me it was and how nervous I was even applying to get accepted into it.  That was where I began.

A month later I, had completed it and it had been a journey.  I’m not one of those who tends to think of writing as a form of therapy.  If you need therapy, see a therapist.  Nonetheless, during the course of working on the essay, I rediscovered a person I had forgotten.  I’ve had no problem writing fiction since then.

For my trial run through Smashwords, I took another pass at the essay and polished a few things that suddenly, four years later, struck me as embarrassing and uploaded it as an eBook.  At about 9,500 words, it’s a pretty short book, so I priced it at $1.00.  It took several months, but the Barnes & Noble version finally showed up a few weeks ago.  I’m still waiting for Amazon.  This is all new for both Smashwords and the channels and they’re still working out the technical kinks.

As part of my participation in “Read an eBook Week,” the already low price of $1.00 has been reduced to free.  You can “purchase” it and download if from Smashwords here.

Unlike most of my fiction, a happy ending…

As a final note, after reading Maria’s essay, I wrote back to her and urged her to send it out for publication.  Neither of us knew that we were submitting to the same place, but much to our surprise, both of our essays were published in the same issue, so in the competition that we don’t really have, it was either a tie or we both won.  I prefer the latter.

“Shadow Ball,” by Maria Pollack, Oregon Literary Review, Vol. 1, No.2

Living in Interesting Times

This week, March 7 through 13, is “Read an eBook Week.”  Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords.com, has an interview at Huffington Post with Rita Toews, who created the annual event in 2004, long before all the recent hoopla and turmoil in the publishing industry regarding pricing, devices, digital rights management (DRM), Google’s attempt to monopolize access to every book ever printed, Apple declaring war on Amazon, and Macmillan picking a fight with Amazon while bloodying the collective noses of its authors.  Add to that mix a reading public getting very used to “free” content on the internet and print on demand (POD) technology and things are getting very chaotic.  The publishing business as we have known for the past hundred years or so is rapidly changing, but it’s hard to know what it’s changing into.  Gutenberg knew he was changing the world but probably never imagined that his printing technologies would drive the Renaissance and create the modern world.

Maybe we’re on the verge of some new Renaissance, maybe we’re not.  Where things are going right now is completely unknown.  Unknown to the publishing houses, the major retailers, literary agents and the technology enablers.  All of the people who are supposed to understand their markets and their businesses are clueless.  Some are embracing change, others resisting it, all are jockeying for position and trying to corner markets no one can understand.  Some are heroes, some are villains,  some are both at the same time.

The publishing houses, aware of what happened to the music industry, have not resisted the digital revolution, and have been offering their books in digital formats for several years now.  eBooks still make up only a small percentage of their total sales, but each year the percentage increases significantly, fueled by improvements in eBook devices.  Growth is still hampered by one major factor: The lack of a single electronic format that works seamlessly across all devices.  If eBooks are going to displace print books, it’s going to be an uphill battle.  If you include the codex, the printed book at nearly two thousand years of age, is still the most perfect communications device ever invented.  All it takes to read a book is at least one eye and one hand.  No expensive electronic equipment, batteries, Wifi, or USP port required.

Unfortunately, this problem is not going away and it’s actually getting worse because the major players are hell-bent on monopolizing the distribution channels.  Amazon, to its credit, has created the most successful eBook reader to date, the butt-ugly Kindle, and has done more to popularize eBooks than anyone else, but they use the eBooks themselves as loss leaders in an apparent strategy to become the sole means of distribution, able to dictate prices to suppliers.  If that doesn’t sound so bad, go ask a former employee of Rubbermaid what they think of Wal-Mart.

To the rescue came Apple, with its announcement of the iPad, and its own eBook pricing model.  Instead of being a retailer, Apple will function as an “agent” of the publishers.  Publishers get to name their price, and Apple will take a 30% cut.  Macmillan immediately took advantage of this and demanded the same kind of deal from Amazon.  Initially Amazon refused and retaliated by removing the buy buttons from all Macmillan and Macmillan imprint books on their site.  Eventually, Amazon had to give in.  Interestingly, it took over a week to restore all the buy buttons when it had only taken them a few hours to remove them.  I’m a computer guy, and quite frankly, that does not compute.

While this battle was going on, I visited various blogs and news sites where this was being discussed.  There was the Amazon-is-evil faction, there was the Steve Jobs-is-evil faction, and there was Micro$oft Sucks faction, even though Microsoft didn’t seem to have anything to do with it.  Then there were those blamed it all on those greedy publishers and authors (note that this is the first time in this article that the actual creators of “content,” authors, are mentioned).  While there are some authors who earn millions of dollars from their writing, the other 99.9% have to have day jobs.  Greed is not an option for them.  Unfortunately, our consumption driven society seems to regard “everyday low prices” as a right, no matter if denies everybody else the chance to make a living, or forces third-world sweatshop workers to live in poverty, or causes environmental devastation in Asia.

Obviously, eBooks should cost less than their print counterparts, but it still costs money to create them.  Aside from the author, there are editors, proofreaders, graphic designers, marketing managers, advertising copywriters, lawyers, and accountants all involved in producing them.  All of them are entitled to be paid for what they do.

I complain as much about the major publishing houses as any other unpublished author, but there are a few things that I’m willing to accept.  I wish that HarperCollins hadn’t inflicted Sarah Palin’s ghostwritten nonsense on us.  On the other hand, it was HarperCollins that took a chance on first time author Ryan Smithson’s important memoir, The Ghosts of War.  Trash finances art.  This has been true ever since the beginning of both trash and art.

Apple shouldn’t be given a free pass in this.  They are not a white knight.  It’s true that they are adopting a strategy that is the exact opposite of what they did with the iTunes store, where they dictated terms to the music industry.  Their goal, however, is no different than any of the other players in this game: to gain proprietary and monopolistic control over the book publishing business.  The danger of this is made apparent by an action Apple took recently in censoring iPhone applications.  Based on some complaints from a family-values group, Apple removed all adult-oriented applications from its iPhone App Store.  Along with all the strip-poker games and hottie-of-the-day viewers, applications provided by literary magazines, such as  Keyhole Magazine, were removed because the short stories had adult language and controversial themes.  What will Apple do when they open their bookstore and the family values crowd complains, as they always do, about Lolita, Ulysses, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

A Smashing Idea

In the midst of all this chaos is internet startup Smashwords.com, Mark Coker’s eBook publishing company.  It’s not a publishing company in a traditional sense, but acts as a distribution company.  For no upfront cost, an author can upload his or her ebook where it is made available for purchase at a price set by the author.  Smashwords takes a set percentage of whatever the price is for each sale.  Additionally, an author may choose to make his or her book available for free or to allow the purchaser to name their own price.

In order to make the books available to the largest audience possible, Smashwords provides the books in a variety of formats, including Kindle, Barnes & Noble ereader, Sony ereader, and adobe PDF.  It takes a lot of technical wizardry to take a single Microsoft .doc file from an author and to publish to all those formats, and to have them look reasonably good.  A program, affectionately known as “The Meatgrinder,” does a pretty good job of it, provided the author has followed some strict formatting rules. Given the fragmented technical landscape that now exists with all the competing digital formats, the Meatgrinder, is the key technology.  As a software product development manager, I tip my cap to Mark Coker and company.  They looked at an emerging market and asked, “What’s the specific problem that needs to be solved, what can we do about it, and can it be a viable business?”   They’re still in start-up mode, but they seem to have put more thought into it than all those hare-brained companies that fueled the first internet bubble in the late 90’s.

Unlike any other business that offers its services to unpublished authors, Smashwords doesn’t try to scam writers.  Unpublished authors are a particularly vulnerable bunch.  Vanity presses, illegitimate agents, and other unseemly types prey on writer’s dreams and separate them from their money.  I wrote about this in a post last year.  Even POD publishers who ask for nothing up front, push all sorts of premium services that can end up costing an author thousands of dollars just to publish a book that will be bought only by the author’s family and long suffering friends.  Smashwords is completely up front about it.  “You aren’t going to make a lot of money,” they say, nor do they try to sell you premium marketing or editorial services or make any money outside of what they make from selling books to customers.  They don’t do any advertising for your book either, they’re honest about that too, and that’s what you get for no money down.  Marketing is your job.

The honesty in a field normally filled with scam artists is refreshing.

In addition to individual authors, there are also some small publishing companies that have signed up with Smashwords that have published multiple titles.  In that case, the companies are providing the sorts of things that traditional publishers do – editing, cover art, marketing – and are using Smashwords as a sales channel.

Smashwords has also made distribution deals with the other major retailers.  All Smashwords books that meet a set of formatting standards are shipped electronically to online retailers such as Amazon, Sony, and Barnes and Noble.  More relationships are promised to be on the way.  This is a very shrewd strategy.  Let the war among those giants rage on, and in the meantime, do business with all of them.

This may be a glimpse of what the future of publishing will look like.

We are the world, in prose.

One of Smashwords most recent releases is short story collection, 100 Stories for Haiti, the brainchild of a group of editors and writers in Europe.  About six weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, word went across the internet that submissions for the book were welcome from all around the world.  Smashwords had signed on to handle the ebook distribution.  One hundred percent of the proceeds are going to the Red Cross for Haitian relief.  It’s an absolutely brilliant idea and it’s also nice to see that while the rest of the publishing industry is scheming how to corner this or that market, a grassroots movement can leverage technology in a new and creative way and actually do something altruistic.

I’ve bought my copy and it was well worth the money I donated.  It’s filled with exceptional writing.  Kudos to Smashwords and all the writers who contributed.

Books mentioned:

Ghosts of War

Ryan Smithson. Collins 2009, Hardcover, 336 pages, $4.93

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov. Vintage 1989, Paperback, 336 pages, $5.00

Ulysses (Penguin Modern Classics)

Declan Kiberd (Introduction). Penguin Classics 2000, Paperback, 1040 pages, $9.83

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger. Back Bay Books 2001, Paperback, 288 pages, $5.82

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Oxford World’s Classics)

Emory Elliott (Editor). Oxford University Press, USA 2008, Paperback, 352 pages, $3.72

In honor of Snowmageddon and Snowmageddon Part Deux, here are some books to read while snowbound:

Alive

Piers Paul Read. Harper Perennial 2005, Paperback, 398 pages, $8.34

Stranded in the Andes, cannibalism ensues.

Desperate Passage

Ethan Rarick. Oxford University Press, USA 2009, Paperback, 304 pages, $10.16

Stranded in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, cannibalism ensues.

The Shining

Stephen King. Pocket 2002, Paperback, 528 pages, $5.00

A struggling writer, snowed in with his family, chews aspirin and slowly goes nuts.  Redrum ensues.

Ethan Frome (Penguin Classics)

Elizabeth Ammons (Editor). Penguin Classics 2005, Paperback, 128 pages, $3.69

No cannibalism or murder in this one, but if there’s a part of this novel that happens during the summer, I can’t remember it.  One of the coldest reads ever.  Also, proof that a Flexible Flyer is a very unreliable instrument of suicide.

The new lords and ladies are the Dick and Liz Cheneys and the people for whom they shill. They are the Rupert Murdochs and the Richard Mellon Scaifes, and they are guaranteed to own more and more of the country as long as more progressive taxation (i.e. pre-Reagan, not pre-Bush) is not restored. They are the ones who didn’t want a public universal health option, did not want the wars abroad to end abruptly, did not want the Copenhagen Climate convention to succeed. They are driven by pure greed and narrow profit-seeking for themselves. They always get their way, and they always will as long as you poor stupid bastards buy the line that when the government raises their taxes, it is taking something away from you. It is the alliance of the Neoliberal super-rich with the new lower middle class populists led by W. and now by Sarah Palin that produces clown politics in the US unmatched in most advanced industrial countries with the possible exception of Italy.

John J. Bubbers (1897-1980)

On Christmas Day of 1979, my parents, my sisters, and I drove out to Stony Brook to visit with Oma and Opa.  Opa was in the terminal stage of the cancer that would take his life the following March.  Christmas was very, very different that year.  Oma’s advanced age and Opa’s severely weakened condition made living in the four floor walk-up next-door to us in Queens impractical, so they had settled into the Stony Brook cottage.  Our Christmas Eve tradition of have a supper of German cold-cuts and salads up in their apartment before coming down to our house to open presents was suspended for the first time in my lifetime.

My father was spending as much time with them as he could while still running his drugstore full-time, and they were blessed with caring neighbors who helped out as well.  Much of all this activity I had missed because I was in my sophomore year at college and I was up in Albany.

The day was overcast, cold, and damp.  We arrived in the early afternoon.  Oma met us at the door and hugged each of her grandchildren and spoke in hushed tones.  Opa was in the living room that also functioned as a dining room, sitting his old rocking chair in the corner.  He was in pajamas and a thick terry-cloth robe that couldn’t hide his emaciated condition.

My father helped Opa out of the rocker and to the table.  Opa was clearly in pain and his legs were too weak to support his weight.  Oma had prepared a scaled-down version of are traditional Christmas Eve supper: knockwurst, bauernschinken, cervelat, creamed herring for my father, and potato salad.  Oma had also thoughtfully prepared a small dish of tuna salad just for me as she always had since the one time, when I was six years old, I had told her that I liked it.  Opa couldn’t eat much of this food anymore.  His meal consisted of mashed potatoes and a small piece of bauernshinken Oma had cut up for him and a piece of buttered bauernbrot.

After our meal, at Opa’s request, my father and I helped Opa into the sun parlor,  we sat him down in the middle of the sofa that faced the window and slowly pivoted him so that he could lay down.  My father stood at the edge of the sofa and held Opa’s shoulders and gently laid him down.  “Get his legs, Freddie,” my father quietly said.  I knelt down and with both hands picked up his ankles and laid them down on the sofa.  All I felt through his pajamas was bone.  Opa winced several times during this procedure.  Oma came in and covered him with one of her loudly-colored homemade afghans.  The excitement of the day – the anticipation our visit, the meal – had taken its toll on him and he quickly fell asleep.

Later, while we were all quietly talking in the living room, Opa woke up.  In a loud, stern voice, he called out, “Children! Come here!”

My sisters and I filed into the sun parlor and stood before him on the sofa.  My parents stood in the doorway.  It was about 5 o’clock and the sun, hidden all day, was low in the sky, finally breaking through the clouds and barren trees outside briefly lighting up the room.

“We will now sing a Christmas hymn,” Opa said.  With that, he began to sing, in German, “O Tannenbaum.”  This was unusual for several reasons.  First of all, my sisters and I speak no German whatsoever (aside from the names of the food Oma served us, and I had to Google them in order to spell them correctly here), much less the words to “O Tannenbaum.”  Second, we were never the sort of family that sang Christmas carols at home.  Maybe in church, but never at home among ourselves.  We did, of course know the tune, so we joined in and hummed along with him, awkwardly at first.

Opa sang verse after verse with one hand desperately clutching the afghan tightly to his chest, the other holding my hand.  He struggled to find the strength to continue singing and his eyes turned glassy.

I am forever haunted by that moment.  I remember thinking at the time about that sun parlor in earlier times, when we were children.  All those summer nights Oma and Opa shared with the steady stream of grandchildren.  The joyous laughter that arose from the board games we played with Oma and competed with the crickets outside.  Those times, those children, all seemed so far away on that Christmas Day.

Thirty years later, a question that can never be answered lingers on for me.  Where was he in that moment singing a Christmas carol that none of us but him knew?  My lifelong love of stories and literature and reading and writing has been quest for understanding what makes all of us who we are, to see into that inner life we all live.

The first half of Opa’s life was very difficult.  Born into poverty just before the dawn of a new century, he struggled to survive all of the turmoil of his times.  As a child in the early days of that new century he could have scarcely imagined the course his life would take. He was a soldier in one world war, a refugee in another.  He struggled just to feed his family during the Great Depression.  Living long enough to see not only his two sons go to college in the country he may have dreamed about, but also all of his grandchildren.

So, where was he on that Christmas Day?  What memory was his inner self reliving?  The carol he sang had no real connection to us. It’s presumptuous to think that during what he knew was his last Christmas, with an entire lifetime to consider, most of which preceded us, he was remembering one of “our” Christmases.  I can never know, I can only imagine.  Maybe it was a December night in 1915 or 1916.  He and his comrades, all of them cold, dirty and hungry, had briefly found themselves in a warm, quiet place.  Maybe while he sang “O Tannenbaum” with his comrades, he imagined a hopeful future, free of hunger, free of strife, and free of fear.

This essay was originally published three years ago in Seeker Magazine.  When I began writing it, my only intent was to document a family story that was going to be forever lost due to the passage of time.  As what sometimes happens when writing personal essays, they start out about one thing, but in the process of writing them, they turn out to be about something else.  In this case, I discovered, over twenty years after they were gone, the impact my grandparents had on the person I became.

Tomorrow, Christmas Day, 2009, a new epilogue to this essay.

My grandparents, John and Frieda Bubbers, or “Oma” and “Opa,” came to America some time after World War I. Opa had been a soldier during the war and for a brief period after the war was over, during the social and economic chaos that was Germany during that time, he had been a police officer. He never spoke much about those experiences, but when he was in Astoria General, near the end of his life, he struggled and had to be restrained when the nurses attempted to place an oxygen mask over his face. He was having flashbacks of trenches and gas masks.

The young couple settled in a small German community in Lawrence, Massachusetts, probably around 1920 or 1921. He never told me what he did for a living, but I imagine that he worked in the textile mills that were still operating all over the northeast at the time. During my time with Computer Associates, a software company based on Long Island, I traveled quite frequently to our office in Andover, just a few miles from Lawrence. I took several trips to Lawrence and saw a poverty stricken area that didn’t seem to have ever recovered from the great depression; the mills still standing like red brick carcasses, crumbling, abandoned and overgrown for over fifty years.

My father once gave me an address and I found the house they had lived in, a non-descript three story dump where they rented a flat on the top floor. I took a picture of it for my father and thought that the place might have fit in anywhere the working poor live in the northeast. It could have been Troy, it could have been Yonkers, it could have been Bridgeport, or it could have been Hamilton Street in Albany.  To my father’s surprise, it hadn’t changed in fifty years.

My uncle Johnny was born around 1921 in Lawrence and my father was born in 1930, also in Lawrence.

The depression was devastating to places like Lawrence. The mills closed down for what turned out to be forever and destroyed their fragile economies. It was during this time that my grandparents decided to move back to Germany. I never got the chance to ask them as an adult what made them make what they later admitted to be the biggest mistake of their lives, but all I have are the memories of what they told me when I was a child. For whatever reason, in 1935 they moved back to Hamburg.

They did tell me that within days of arriving “home”, they had realized their mistake. Opa, visiting some old friends at a police station heard, “John, go back to America. Get your sons out of Germany.” Indeed, my uncle, aged fourteen, was in grave danger, first of being “recruited” in to the Hitler Youth, and then into the Army. Everyone in Germany knew that war, and disaster, was coming. My grandparents had been born in Germany, so their sons’ US citizenship meant little to The Third Reich, and after Opa’s experience in The Great War, he wasn’t going to let that happen to either of his sons.

This story was told to me many times by both my father and by Oma. My father’s version is one of excitement and adventure, the kind of thing that thrills the five year old boy that he was at the time. He never seemed to understand that his older brother could very well have been senselessly slaughtered fighting on the side of evil or that he himself might have been incinerated when the allies firebombed Hamburg.  Oma’s version, however, is a little darker. The last time she told me this story I might have been about thirteen or fourteen, so I think the truth of what they must have felt is more frightening than she was willing to tell me at the time.

It took my family some eighteen months to finally be together again in America. Opa worked double shifts in factories for about a year to earn enough money to return to the United States. He headed to New York City to find work and to prepare a place for Oma and the two boys when they arrived.

In the meantime, my father and my uncle got to experience both the gifts and the punishments of a classical German education. I remember my father proudly showing me his German composition book containing his writing exercises, written with the most exquisitely beautiful and precise penmanship I’ve ever seen, particularly astounding when I realize that it was done by a five year old boy who had learned German as a second language just six months before. My father told me it was the product of both high standards of excellence as well as canings on knuckles and buttocks from the stern schoolmaster.

When Opa had finally sent enough money back to Oma, it was time for them to join him in New York. They took the train from Hamburg down to Genoa, Italy and from there sailed to New York. My father’s account of this trip is the romantic vision of a small boy, riding on a train, seeing Italy, boarding the huge ocean liner. Oma’s story about traveling south on the train, a mother with her two sons, trying to keep the youngest one from innocently telling their story to fellow passengers, passing through checkpoint after checkpoint and having documents scrutinized, is a little more scary.

I can’t pretend that their experience matches the sheer terror of what it must have been like for the many thousands of other people who were fleeing Germany at the time; they were, after all, “pure” Germans. They were still, however, fleeing fascists and fearing for their lives and futures. It is a state of fear that I can hardly imagine myself enduring.

The experience seems to have been particularly traumatic for my uncle. These days, we hardly think of fourteen and fifteen year old boys as “men”, but back then in that time and place, he surely must have felt the weight of the world on his shoulders, feeling that he was the protector of his mother and young brother as the three of them made their way south among all the other refugees.

At my mother’s funeral several years ago, I saw my cousin, Marian, for the first time since we had both become adults with children of our own. She asked me if my father had ever spoken about Germany. I told her that he had quite often and that Oma had told me about it too. Marian, her sister Susan and her brother Eric, had never heard much about it; their father never talked about it when they were growing up, and they hadn’t been able to spend as much time with Oma and Opa as my sisters and I had. She told me that her father, now in his late seventies, had just begun to talk about it in halting, sketchy terms. I spent some time with her and told her the things I could remember. I’m afraid my poorly remembered version of the story told her little about her father’s life-shaping experience.

My grandfather managed to get a factory job in Astoria, Queens and had found a place for them to live on Corona Avenue in Elmhurst. In return for being the superintendent, he had an apartment in the basement of a small apartment building. Being a super in a building in those days was a bit more work than it is now: keeping the hallways and stairwells sparkling clean, installing screen windows in the spring, replacing them with glass storm windows in the fall, keeping the coal furnace in the basement burning through the winter. My father helped him in these tasks as Opa found whatever other work he could in order to make ends meet.

My grandparents lived in that building for the rest of their lives. When Opa was superintendent they lived in that basement apartment while the two boys found what jobs they could while pursuing their educations; my father became a pharmacist, my uncle an audio engineer. Later, after the boys were grown up and moved out, Oma and Opa moved to an apartment on the fourth floor. It was large enough for the two of them to live comfortably as well as entertain guests. There was a living room, a dining room, a bedroom and a small kitchen. Oma served a Christmas Eve dinner for my family every year consisting of homemade potato salad and several varieties of German sausages and cured meats.

The bedroom had an unobstructed view of the Manhattan skyline. When I was a small boy, Opa would give me a pair of binoculars and I would scan the distant skyscrapers for hours, silhouetted against the orange and red sky at dusk with the last rays of the sun glinting off the stainless steel crown of the Chrysler Building, and on into the evening when the lights of the Empire State Building and the Pan Am Building fascinated me.

After the war, in the late 1940’s, Opa had managed to scrape together enough money to buy a small cottage in Stony Brook, out in what was at the time, the distant reaches of the north shore of Long Island. A few years later he was able to buy the lot in back of the cottage creating a large wooded property with pretty gardens in front and on two sides of the house. In back of the house was a large lawn, shaded all summer long by towering oak trees.

It was a small, inexpensively constructed house that he improved over the years: excavating out a full basement, replacing the beaverboard walls with sheetrock, adding wood paneling to the living room, and adding a lovely sun parlor to the side that caught the afternoon sun. There was only one “official bedroom”, so a large dining room table was placed in the living room and the dining room was turned into a bedroom with a huge, in the eyes of a small child, maple bed and matching furniture: nightstands, a small table and lamp, a dresser and several well-stocked book cases. The sofa in the sun parlor opened up to a king sized bed as well.

There was enough room in the house for all six of their grandchildren, some by themselves, others paired by relative age, to take turns spending time each summer with Oma and Opa, going to the beach on most days, but sometimes fishing off the pier in the village or taking a drive in Opa’s Chevy to Montauk or Shelter Island. To me, this little cottage seemed a million miles away from the sidewalk on Corona Avenue back in Elmhurst. The air was fresh and clean, some mornings faintly carrying the salty scent of the Long Island Sound, and crickets and owls sang all through the night.

When my father bought the drugstore a few doors down from the apartment building, Opa retired and went to work for him. He dusted and stocked shelves and made deliveries, first using his own car, and then when my father was able to afford it, a specially painted Volkswagen beetle:

Newtown Pharmacy

Free Delivery

HAvemeyer 4-3000

During the summer, my father would hire a teenager for making the deliveries and Opa would spend July and August in Stony Brook with Oma, hosting the grandchildren as we rotated through. When I was old enough, I got the summer job, first riding all over Queens to make deliveries on a bicycle and then, after I got my license, the famously painted Volkswagen. The girls I dated in high school eventually got used to sitting at night in a car that stood out among the others parked alongside a small park near a Long Island Railroad overpass.

During the years that Opa worked for my father, a special bond formed between them. Opa was, I believe, my father’s closest friend in the world. As my teenage years progressed, my relationship with my father became strained and distant and we were never completely reconciled. I have always been envious of the relationship that my father had with his father.

My cousins lived in Huntington on Long Island. Oma and Opa were equally kind and generous and loving to all of their grandchildren, but because my sisters and I lived next door to them in the city most of the year, we got to spend more time with them. As the youngest of all the grandchildren, and the most spoiled, I probably got the most exclusive time with them.

When I was very young, Opa would stop by early in the morning on his way home from the deli with fresh breakfast rolls to bring me up to the apartment to have breakfast with him and Oma: orange juice, rolls with whipped butter and jelly, tea with milk and honey, and fruit. When I started school, I visited them in the afternoon when Oma would have afternoon cake and chilled leftover tea, again with milk and honey. I would spend a few hours with Oma until it was time for me to go home for dinner.

Oma, as everyone who knew her will remember her, was always a “Lady.” She was always dressed tastefully in dresses that she made herself. She spoke gracefully, as if she were a member of gilded age society. The rest of us were amused by this and teased her sometimes, thinking that she was trying to put on airs because we did, after all, live in the middle of middle-class Queens, and we had the accents to prove it. She did, however, have a good sense of humor, at least when it came to tolerating her youngest grandson’s childish pranks.

While Opa was a very quiet man who always retained a very strong German accent, Oma was very talkative and had barely a trace of an accent. To this day, I cannot understand how it was that this woman who came to America in her twenties and learned English as a second language could speak such grammatically perfect English with hardly any accent. At some point she may have taken lessons, because I remember her once asking me if I was studying “elocution” in school. I had to ask her what “elocution” meant. The one thing that she always had problems with was the “ch” sound which she could never do; it would always come out as “sh”. I used to play a game with her where I would say, “Oma, do you remember the name of that movie you took me to see? The one with the magic car?”

“Shitty Shitty Bang Bang,” she would reply, and then get flustered and scold me. I now realize that after the first twenty or thirty times I did that, she probably caught on and was play acting with me just so she could hear the scrawny little boy with the short pants and crew-cut laughing hysterically. So much for Oma putting on airs.

And she could talk. It became an in-joke in the family that you could have a conversation with Oma and not have to say a word for the first hour.

It was during those afternoons that Oma would tell me stories. The very first one I remember her telling me was “Hansel and Gretel” while I looked at illustrations through a tiny window in the back of a small plastic toy Bavarian cottage, clicking on the chimney to advance to the next picture.

As I got older, she tailored the stories to my age. Since they were from Hamburg, their apartment was decorated with pictures and mementos from the German city. There were several small nick nacks depicting Hummel. When I asked her about them, she told me the story of Hummel, the ill-tempered water carrier who was taunted by children who cried “Hummel Hummel”. Poor Hummel couldn’t chase them because he was weighed down by the water he was carrying so he would reply, “Mors mors,” a low-German phrase loosely translated as “asses, asses.”

Many years later, after both Oma and Opa were gone, one of Opa’s younger brothers came to visit America for the very first time and stayed with my parents. He was in his seventies and spoke no English. He seemed both surprised and disappointed that none of my father’s children knew German and that my father had to act as a translator. When he asked again, through my father, “No German at all?” I replied “Mors Mors.” With that, the old man’s face lit up with joy and he leapt across the room, pulled me out of my chair, and kissed me on the lips. It’s a Hamburg thing.

Oma told me the story of her trip out of Germany with my father and uncle many times. When I first heard it, I was quite young and her story was probably told the way my father remembered it: an exciting adventure. Gradually, as I got older, she added in more of the frightening aspects of the story.

She also told me about the sinking of the Titanic, about how she heard about it as a little girl in Germany when it happened. She told me about Scott’s expedition in Antarctica, followed by Richard Byrd’s flight over the South Pole.

I was captivated by her stories and asked her to tell them to me over and over again. None, however, captivated me as much as the story of Lindbergh’s flight over the Atlantic in 1927. She told me how no one had believed that a man could fly solo for so many hours and find his way across the unforgiving north Atlantic to Paris, but Lindbergh, through courage and conviction, had proven them all wrong. She was able to talk for hours about it as I eagerly listened to it again and again. She told me that when I was old enough, she would give me the book that Lindbergh himself had written and I could read it all for myself.

That day came when I was about ten or eleven years old and I was staying with them for my annual turn out in Stony Brook. In addition to finally being able to go out on the big fishing boat from Captree State Park on the south Shore with Opa, as my older cousin Eric had once done, she finally presented me with the book.

On the first night in the sun parlor, with the crickets singing outside the window screens, and after several games each of Clue and Parcheesi, Oma handed me her copy of Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis. It was a huge intimidating book for me, but every night I climbed up onto the big maple framed bed that dwarfed me with Lindbergh’s book in my hand. I struggled reading it, but by the end of my two weeks that summer in Stony Brook, I had completed it. On the final Sunday afternoon while Opa was putting my suitcase in his car for my trip back to Elmhurst, I attempted to hand the book back to Oma. She pushed it back to me and told me that it was mine to keep.

For many years, Oma and Opa had been members of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and they were voracious readers. Although he was very quiet and usually let Oma do all the talking, my memories of those nights in Stony Brook include the picture of Opa sitting in the corner of the living room in his rocking chair, reading a book or a magazine while Oma played board games with me and told me stories in the sun parlor. He rocked very slightly in the chair as his eyes focused intently through his reading glasses. In later years he would also use a large, square framed magnifying glass.

Starting with The Spirit of St. Louis, Oma would periodically give me books to read, each time turning them into gifts that didn’t need to be returned. Finally, when I was a college-bound senior in High School, she said “Take any books you want, they are all yours.”

As my teenage years progressed, my interests diverged from what seemed to be the only acceptable field for my generation in my family: medicine. My relationship with the rest of my family, particularly my father, was a disaster, and there were times when I wondered how I could be such an oddball in this family that was producing medical professionals. Throughout all this, Oma flew in under the radar and nurtured my interest in literature. The books she gave me during those years included Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring, Marchette Chute’s Shakespeare of London, Collected Short Stories of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, and several volumes of Shakespeare, organized into tragedies and comedies.

I have a book entitled The Hemingway Reader next to me on my desk as I write this essay. It contains the complete text of The Torrents of Spring, The Sun Also Rises, eleven short stories, selections from five other novels, and selections from non-fiction works on Spain and Africa. On the blank page facing the inside cover is an inscription, hand written in a fine slightly Germanic looking script:

John & Frieda Bubbers

1953

Every book that Oma gave to me was so inscribed, with both their names and the year the book was acquired. At some point in time The Book-Of-The-Month Club, in cooperation with Scribner’s, sold a matched set of Fitzgerald and Hemingway novels. Each book has a blue hardcover and a black spine. Titles on the spines are embossed in silver and the author’s names in gold. Oma and Opa only had a few of these volumes. Over the years, I looked in used book stores, gradually filling out my collection. On one happy day when I was in college, I found both a Gatsby and a Farewell to Arms in a musty old used book store on Pearl Street in Albany. These books aren’t of much value, the ones I purchased that day were about two dollars apiece, but they are the two authors who matter the most to me, and my collection began with a gift from Oma and Opa. The completed set now sits on the mantle above the fireplace in my den.

When my sisters, my mother, and I were preparing for my father’s funeral, we were pulling out all the old family photo albums to use the pictures to decorate the funeral parlor. Here and there in the photos we found pictures from long past holidays where both Oma and Opa were present along with my father, my uncle and all my cousins. The pictures are striking. First of all, there’s the abundance of blond hair and blue eyes, blond enough and blue enough that I’m sure to have given tsoris to the grandmother of one of my old girlfriends. Even more striking, however are the physical features that you can see in all of us who have descended from Oma and Opa. A geneticist could use these photographs as lecture aids. My father resembles Oma. My uncle resembles Opa, although he still has some of Oma’s features. My sister Judy and my cousin Marion look like Oma. My cousin Eric and I look like Opa. My daughter Caroline looks like Judy, my father, and Oma. We do, in fact, have photographs of Caroline, Judy and my father each at about the age of five or six. With my father’s girlish blond hair style that mothers of all generations to like to inflict on their little boys, the children in all of these pictures from different generations look identical.

Opa died after a long battle with cancer when I was a sophomore in college. The protracted illness that had slowly killed Opa had been particularly difficult for my father and the death of his closest friend hit him very hard, heightening the disappointment he felt with me. At the time, I was away at college majoring in everything except pre-med. Oma died of a sudden heart attack several years later.

Years later, I now have questions for them that can never be answered. What was it that sent them back to Germany? Was it simply poverty, or was it more? How frightening was it for Oma without her husband, shepherding her two sons south to Italy and back to freedom? By the time I was born, they had completely embraced America. Opa went to visit Germany just once in the 1970’s and Oma never left America again after those eighteen months in Germany in the 30’s. She voted Republican in every single election from Eisenhower to Reagan.

The biggest mystery of all is the collection of books. There is a significant amount of Hemingway and Faulkner in this collection. The Hemingway is understandable. His writing style and subject matter crosses all cultural barriers and he is still one of the most popular writers of English around world. What I can’t understand is how a woman who was raised in Germany, who came to America in her twenties, and who learned English at the same age, could both tackle and embrace Faulkner. Reading Faulkner is not for lightweights and I doubt that these books were ever default selections for the book club. The contents page of The Collected Stories of William Faulkner as very faint checkmarks next to each item. The inscription on the book tells me they acquired it in 1953, after their sons had both been married and moved out; not that I can imagine either of them reading a book by Faulkner they didn’t have to. How I wish I could ask Oma what she thought of “A Rose for Emily.” It is only now that she has been gone for almost twenty-five years that I realize that she must have possessed a finely tuned ear for language and a love for literature and ideas.

Oma and Opa quietly lived a literary life, unnoticed by everyone but their youngest grandson to whom they gave their most precious gift: an enduring love of stories.

Tomorrow: Gifts Epilogue: Christmas 1979

Selections from Oma and Opa:

The Spirit of St. Louis

Reeve Lindbergh (Introduction). Scribner 2003, Paperback, 576 pages, $9.00

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Harper Lee. Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2006, Paperback, 336 pages, $8.33

Silent Spring

Linda Lear (Introduction). Mariner Books 2002, Paperback, 400 pages, $6.48

When Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City was published in 1984, it took the publishing world by storm and ushered in a new era of edgy young writers.  Bright Lights, Big City chronicles the emotional, psychological, and spiritual downward spiral of a young would-be writer in the fast-lane of the mid 1980’s Manhattan club scene.  His wife has left him, his job oppresses him, and he lives in a cocaine-addled twilight zone.  The first chapter, entitled “It’s 6 AM, Do You Know Where You Are?” begins:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.  But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.  You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head.  The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge.  All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder.  Then again, it might not.  A small voice in side you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already.

Confessional stories about people on the descent, whether into madness, depression, dissipation, alcoholism, or any other form of self-destruction are a genre unto themselves that was not invented by McInerney.  In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield tells us about his own drive toward that cliff he hopes to protect all the children. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood descends into suicidal depression.  In John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas, Ben Sanderson literally drinks himself to death.

What makes McInerney’s novel so unique both then and now is that it is entirely written in second person.  “You,” the reader, are character in the story.  It is a testament to McInerney’s talent that he wrote a whole book in this unusual still and managed to pull it off.  I am as amazed by it now as I was when I first read it.

Present tense, in your face…

The book is also written in present tense, which although is nowhere near as unusual as writing in second person, is still fairly uncommon.  Present tense gives a piece of writing a sense of immediacy and places the reader in the middle of the action.

Point-of-view is probably the most critical choice that a writer will make in telling a story.  It not only determines how the writer will envision the story – what parts of the narrative are known and what have to remain hidden – but also how the reader experiences the story.  A first person story told in past tense, as most are, can be more contemplative and reflective.  The “I” in the story is not only the narrator as a character, but also the voice of the narrator at some point in the future, after all of the events in the story have occurred.  Presumably, the narrator has been changed in some way by the story he or she is telling, so we are hearing the story from that changed perspective.  When Nick Caraway, begins The Great Gatsby with “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since,”  he has already witnessed and participated that riotous and tragic Long Island summer.  He knows everything that will happen and can tell the story with an objectivity that can only come with reflection.

In a first person present tense narrative, there is no reflection, no contemplation.  Everything is immediate and there is no second voice, wiser by having gained the experience of the story we are reading.  It’s a very constrained mode of storytelling, nearly as constrained as play, but it is very effective in telling certain kinds of stories.  We live our lives not knowing what will come next and the only wisdom we have in the present is what we already have, not what we will gain in the future.  There is no possibility for objectivity at all.  That lack of insight and wisdom can make present tense narratives uncomfortable for both writer and the reader alike.  It is that discomfort in the storyteller’s voice at not knowing what’s coming next in the storyteller’s voice keeps the reader on edge.

“Natural Selection,” my story in the current issue of Cantaraville is written in first-person, present tense for that very reason.  It’s a dark, downward spiral kind of story that was in part inspired by Bright Lights, Big City.  I wanted the reader to be on edge, knowing that my narrator is headed for bottom simply by what’s going on in the story, but not knowing what’s going to happen next.  I cheated a few times and told some back-story in past tense flashbacks, but the driving force of the story is meant to be immediate and in your face.

“Natural Selection” is about a corporate layoff that has ironically become more timely now than when I first started writing it four years ago. Even when I finally completed, last fall’s economic meltdown that has thrown millions out of work was still unimaginable.  Given long submission-rejection cycles and long lead times, some stories take years to get published.  Stories written before “Natural Selection” are still on their journey out into the world.

Computer Guys

In July of 2005, I attended my first writing conference, The New York State Summer Writer’s Institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.  The writing teacher for the second week of my fiction workshop was Gish Jen.  Prior to registering for the workshop, I hadn’t heard of her, so I ordered her collection, Who’s Irish, and read it before attending the conference.  Gish Jen is an amazing writer.  An American of Chinese descent, she writes with wit and sly humor some of the most deeply moving stories I have ever read.  “Birthmates,” the second story in the collection was selected by John Updike for an anthology titled The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and aptly so.  It’s an incredible story and I immediately felt intimidated.  How on earth had my pitiful writing sample gotten me accepted into a class taught by her?

I was still in awe of her the second week of the workshop when Jen took over.  My work, excerpts from my work-in-progress novel, had been reviewed during the first week when we were lead by Elizabeth Benedict. (Liz, if you’re reading this, I was in awe of you too).  Jen began by going around our circle and asking us to introduce ourselves, as we had during the first week.  Most of my fellow students were young graduate students, studying creative writing or literature.  When my turn came, and I said that I was a software engineer, it piqued Jen’s interest and she started asking me all about what I did and where I worked.  I was a road-warrior consultant at the time and Jen said “my husband does that.”

As I said, I was awestruck at the time and it was only later that I made some mental connections to “Birthmates,” a story about a down-on-his-luck computer guy, working for a down-on-it’s-luck software company, attending a tradeshow.  When I first read the story I found it refreshing.  All too many pieces of literary fiction have protagonists who are  editors, or architects, or college professors or any other profession that serves as a substitute for “writer.”  I fall into that trap myself.  Jen’s computer guy was outside the norm for literary fiction.  I was also struck by the accuracy of the depiction of down on his luck computer guy’s life on the road and the mind-numbing reality that is a technology tradeshow.  They aren’t that way at first, but after attending them year after year, they all blend together into a cacophony of bluster, hype, and desperate boredom.  Jen captured it perfectly and after looking at her educational background I wondered how: BA from Harvard, MFA from the Iowa Writer’s workshop, Harvard Faculty.  No visible experience in the software business.  She must have accompanied her husband on a trip to a computer tradeshow or two.  Or three.

It was during a class break one day later in the week that we were talking about this and she told me that given my background, I owed it to myself and my readers to use it in my writing  I was unique, both working in the corporate and technical world and having a literary mind.

My initial reaction was, “God no!” I try to keep my writing life and my professional life as separate as possible.

“Who are you pissed at?”

During the previous week, Elizabeth Benedict and I had been talking about using personal experience as inspiration for fiction.  “Who are you pissed at, Fred. That’s your story.”  I don’t think she meant it to mean writing fiction as a means of revenge, even though that’s sometimes to hard to resist.  But for any any sensitive introspective literary type, there’s only one truthful answer to the question, “who are you pissed at?”

“Me.”

A few weeks later, considering the advice of both my teachers, I began writing a story about a software manager reaching the end of his rope, so to speak, professionally and personally.  Like millions of others, I have had the experience of both laying off employees and being laid off myself.  I can’t say that I’ve learned anything by either experience other than that it’s psychologically and emotionally traumatic and you don’t really ever get over it.  It becomes part of the baggage that you accumulate in the course of living a life.

The story was very hard to write and I tended to avoid working on it in favor of other less intense pieces.  I had chosen first person, present tense for all the reasons outlined above, which contributed to difficulty get through the first draft.  I finally finished the first draft two years later in one all night writing session.  It was due a few days later at Skidmore for that year’s conference.  I was so emotionally drained by it, actually repulsed by it, that I couldn’t read it.  Instead, I just printed it out, stuffed it in the envelope and sent it out without even proof-reading it, thereby subjecting my fellow students and Elizabeth Benedict, who was again my teacher, to thirty pages of raw anger, embarrassing typos, comma splices, and run-on sentences.

I absolutely hated the story.  I despised narrator even more even more than the other characters, most of whom were despicable in their own unique ways.  Nonetheless, it was in the mail and was going to be photocopied and distributed and analyzed a month later in the workshop no matter how I felt about it.  I was just going to have to sit there, grit my teeth, and get through it.

A month later when the story finally came up for discussion, the class saw some things that I hadn’t, which is what I look to a workshop to do for me. It’s kind of like showing a movie to a test audience.  They were hesitant to comment at first, but after I assured them that the ending was complete fiction, they opened up.  My narrator was certainly a bit of a creep, but not a completely unsympathetic one. They found the title, “Natural Selection,” to be a recurring theme in the story in ways that I hadn’t realized.  They picked out some recurring themes about family that I hadn’t noticed.  There was more to the story than I had originally thought.

Now, a year and a half later, the story has been published.  Between then and now, millions have lost their jobs.  For me, it has confirmed that I got at least one thing right in the story.  It’s shattering, it’s traumatic, and it breaks you.  And after you put yourself back together you’re not quite the same and you can’t quite figure out why.  It is one of those demarcation lines in your life defining  a before and an after.

“Natural Selection” is available in Cantaraville Eight.

Bright Lights, Big City

Jay McInerney. Vintage 1984, Paperback, 208 pages, $5.00

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger. Back Bay Books 2001, Paperback, 288 pages, $5.82

The Bell Jar (P.S.)

Sylvia Plath. Harper Perennial 2009, Paperback, 336 pages, $7.29

Leaving Las Vegas

John O’Brien. Grove Press 1995, Paperback, 189 pages, $4.64

Who’s Irish?

Gish Jen. Vintage 2000, Paperback, 224 pages, $5.00

The Best American Short Stories of the Century

John Updike (Editor). Mariner Books 2000, Paperback, 864 pages, $9.39

Mentors, Muses & Monsters

Elizabeth Benedict. Free Press 2009, Hardcover, 278 pages, $0.19

The broom-clean foyer stands behind the oak and glass door,
A common mosaic in black and white tile beneath our feet
As we stand before the hallway hand-crafted and cracking in plaster and lathe.

The staircase that rises before us to the second storey
Is covered with thread-bare carpet of a later vintage:
Deep-green seventies shag.

“That’s got to go,” you say, and I laugh.

In the empty sitting room stands a tarnished brass floor lamp with a tilted shade.
I turn the key-shaped switch and there is a brief flicker of light
And then we are back in the gray window light

On your knees, you take the ceramic plug in your hand and squeeze the prongs together
You press it back into the socket and the yellow-tinged light returns

We hear a gust of wind in the trees outside
Again the light flickers and finally takes hold
Casting our shadows across the room.

A dried rosebud sits atop a brittle stem in a church bazaar vase
Beneath the kitchen cupboards’ streaked panes and the frames
Covered with layers of pearly enamel.

The steps creak under our feet and echo through the empty house
As we climb the stairs to our room
With the balance of time still in our favor.

Originally published in the Loch Raven Review

Loch Raven Review – Four

Jim Doss. Loch Raven Press 2009, Paperback, 316 pages, $14.95

F. Scott Fitzgerald

These words of F. Scott Fitzgerald from The Great Gatsby, are the ultimate judgment of the beautiful and  rich by Nick Carraway, and presumably Fitzgerald himself.  Today’s bankers, stock traders, car company executives, and hedge fund managers prove that nothing much has changed.  Gene Mirabelli at Critical Pages offers this brief profile of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Crack-Up (Reissue)

Edmund Wilson (Editor). New Directions 2009, Paperback, 352 pages, $9.27

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scribner 1999, Paperback, 180 pages, $4.51

These current-day price wars conducted by giant retailers remind me the the transformation of the business my father was in for forty years.  He was, by profession, a pharmacist.  He was also a businessman.  He owned the neighborhood drugstore in our section of Elmhurst, Queens.  After working his way through pharmacy school, serving in the Army during the Korean war, and then working in other people’s stores for a couple of years, managed to buy the neglected and rundown business in his own neighborhood.  From the time he bought the business in the early fifties until he modernized it in the early sixties, the store looked very much like the one in Edward Hopper’s painting.  Hopper is perhaps best known for his handling of light and the thing that strikes me about this painting is the light streaming out of the store into the darkened street.  It’s 10 PM and everything is closed but the drugstore.  The doorway in the shadow next to the store leads to the stairway up to the second floor where the druggist’s children are sleeping and his wife is waiting for him to close the store and come home.

The picture also prominently shows two hanging show globes.  Even after my father completely modernized the store, he had two antique standing show globes that he kept in the store windows.  From time to time, he would empty them out and change the coloring.  I remember helping him in the back of the store, filling them with water and tincture of this and tincture of that.  For some reason, I never knew what the hell these things were and what purpose they served and I never even thought to ask him.  With the help of Wikipedia, I now know they are a traditional symbol for pharmacies dating back to at least the 16th century.

My father took his profession and his responsibility to his customers and our community very seriously.  He considered himself a healthcare provider and his customers looked to him that way.  If they had a cold, or a fever, or a scratch, or a sudden rash, they consulted him first.  If it was something easy, he handled it.  If they needed to see a doctor, he patiently soothed their fears so that they wouldn’t be too afraid to go.  When they had seen a doctor, while my father filled their prescriptions they often asked him all the questions about their condition and their medication that they had been too afraid to ask the doctor.  Some people even called him “Doc,” just like in the old movies.

While my father was a health practitioner, and no one who knew him ever had any doubt that he did what he did because he loved it, he was also running a retail business.  Over the course of my life I saw it become more and more difficult.  When I was born, it might very well have been his dream that I too would grow up to be a pharmacist and he would hand his business down to me.  By the time I was a teenager, he had seen where the retail pharmacy business was headed and realized there wasn’t much of a future in it.  At least in the way he thought a pharmacy should be run.

We lived in a middle class neighborhood.  My father’s business was successful, so we were probably better off than most people, but we were not rich either.  We lived modestly in an apartment above the store even when we could have bought a real house in a slightly better neighborhood, as some of the other merchants on our street did.

My father’s store was pretty much like any other neighborhood drugstore at the time.  On the shelves near the front of the store where the various sundries one expects: combs, hairbrushes, shaving cream, toothpaste, shampoo.  There was a small counter with cosmetics, a cigar humidor and a candy counter next the cash register.  At the back of the store, on a raised floor, dominating the entire space, was the reason the store existed, the prescription counter.  While my father’s store carried all the normal drug store items, it was the prescription counter that was, as we call it in retail business-speak, the primary revenue center.

Other than my grandfather, who worked in the store dusting stocking the selves, and running deliveries, my father never hired any additional staff.  Over the years he occasionally had a temporary pharmacist come in so that he could take some time, but that was very rare.

As the sixties turned into the seventies and the seventies turned into the eighties, the retail pharmacy business changed drastically.  Chains were established, very often by  pharmacists of my father’s generation who liked business management more than they liked pharmacology.  Chains battled, then merged and became ever larger.  They became large enough to negotiate prices directly with pharmaceutical companies and HMO’s, open stores with floor space three or four times the size of the traditional (now labeled “independent”) drugstores.  They sold everything from lawn furniture to motor oil to potato chips.  The prescription counter was still in the back of the store, but it was the loss leader that drew you into the store so you could buy all the higher profit margin non-prescription items in the front of the store.

Somehow, through all of this, my father remained successful and left on his own terms when he retired comfortably in the early nineties.  The key may have been that he never actually tried to compete with the chains the way they competed with each other.  He didn’t fill up his store with aisles of toys, housewares, and car fresheners.  Instead he focused on filling prescriptions personally while his customers waited.  I remember seeing him behind the counter when the store was busy, deftly filling one prescription after another, banging out the labels two-finger style on his Hermes Rocket, and talking to his customers.  I may be exaggerating, but I don’t think anyone ever had to wait more than ten minutes to get their prescription filled.  So, while the chains used the prescription counter to get customers in the door to buy other stuff, my father used the prescription counter to get them to keep coming back.

He was the last of his breed.  The other neighborhood drugstores in our area either went out of business or got acquired by the chains.  Newtown Pharmacy at 91-09 Corona Avenue in Elmhurst was the last to go.  One fact is telling:  When he retired, he didn’t sell the business, he sold the building.

Last week I needed a prescription filled.  I brought it to a nearby CVS in the morning.  I was told by a pharmacist technician who didn’t know my name to come back in the afternoon to pick it up.  That afternoon when I came back, she handed me the prescription and I made my way back to the front of the store.  I’m sure that same pharmacist technician won’t be there the next time I get a prescription filled.  On the way to the cashier, I picked up some blank recordable DVD’s, some AAA batteries for my wireless mouse, a spare light bulb for the lamp in my office, and a six-pack of Arizona Iced Tea.

As I stood in line waiting to check out I understood how my father stayed in business and competed successfully against the giants, why customers old an new brought there their prescriptions to him instead of the supermarket.  He provided personal, human service and didn’t treat healing and wellness like commodities.

American novelist John Gardner (not to be confused with the British author of thrillers by the same name) is probably best known for his novels Grendel, a retelling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, and October Light, a story about a family and a rural community in Vermont, which won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1976. He died at age 49 in 1982 in a motorcycle crash.

In addition to being a novelist, Gardner also wrote literary criticism and taught writing.  He held very strong opinions about just about everything and frequently stirred controversy in literary circles. He made harsh, judgmental statements about his contemporary authors (including some of my idols like John Updike) and never shied away from an argument.  He was also arguably  one of the greatest teachers of creative writing who ever lived.  At the same time that I was a student writer at SUNY Albany, Gardner was to the south of me, teaching at SUNY Binghamton.  From what I’ve read and heard, I think I’m glad that I was in Albany studying with Eugene Mirabelli, a teacher with extraordinary sensitivity for young writers with fragile egos.  Gardiner, while inspiring for some, could also be extremely intimidating.  He either drove one to greatness or made one give up forever.

It was a year or two after I graduated that I finally picked up his Art of Fiction, and it was probably good that I read it after college and not before.  It’s intimidating as hell.  Gardner apparently read every book ever written, in every language, and he’s not shy in citing them in his lessons.  While I was then, and still am, a proponent of literary canon, Gardner left me in the dust.  When I read through the reader reviews of his book at Amazon, they are mostly glowing, but occasionally there are ones that are scathing indictments of his elitism.

Admittedly, his tone can be condescending, pedantic, and elitist.  He does, however, know what he’s talking about.  Once I was able to get over feeling like a complete ignoramus (a word he frequently uses), I found that I agreed with him.  So, I did what I had done in school when I was stuck in a class with a professor who love to hear himself speak, I “took what I could use and let the rest go by,” to paraphrase Ken Kesey.  (There I go, dropping names just like Gardner).

This is not a Writing Crime Fiction for Fun and Profit kind of book.  Gardner’s focus is on creating literary art, and even though the title says “Notes on Craft For Young Writers,” it’s not a book for beginners.  Or at least is not a book for beginners who don’t have the utmost seriousness and willingness to do what they must to become great writers: devote the rest of their lives to studying, learning, and practicing their craft.

The first part of Gardner’s book is a discussion of aesthetic principles and values.  While the reader may be anxious to get to the “Notes on Craft” part, Gardner takes the position that aesthetic principles and craft (the nuts and bolts parts of character, setting, and plot) cannot be separated and unless a writer has a clear understanding of what he or she is trying to achieve artistically, craft is irrelevant.

It is in this section of the book where Gardner is at his most pedantic and I can see where some readers will reject what he says.  Unfortunately, this is a mistake.  I have been in far too many workshops with writers who haven’t studied much great literature and indeed reject the idea that it is even necessary to read in order to be a writer.  Their writing shows it.

In the second part of the book, Gardner gets down to specifics of writing craft, but in the context of the artistic principles that discussed in the first part:

The most important single notion in the theory of fiction I have outlined—essentially the traditional theory of our civilization’s literature—is that of a vivid and continuous fictional dream.  According to this notion, the writer sets up a dramatized action in which we are given the signals that make us “see” the setting, characters and events; that is he does not tell us about them in abstract terms, like an essayist, but gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of the, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths.  In bad or unsatisfying fiction, this fictional dream is interrupted by some mistake or conscious ploy on the part of the artist.  We are abruptly snapped out of the dream, forced to think of the writer or writing.

Gardner then sets out to show all the things that can interrupt that dream: a sudden change in point of view, imprecise use of language, an inappropriate change in narrative tone, etc.

When I first read it, it was that idea of fiction as a vivid and continuous dream that captivated me. It really is the best way to describe what reading is like and anything that disrupts that dream destroys the experience.  One of the reasons why real books, the physical kind made out of paper, have endured as a technology throughout the centuries, is that they “disappear” while we are reading them.  The dream takes hold and we are no longer conscious of the binding, the paper, the appearance of the type on the page.  The biggest challenge to designers of electronic book readers, such as the Kindle, is the ability to make the book disappear and not interrupt the dream.

The biggest challenge to the writer is to create a fictional dream and to sustain it.  All the elements of fiction—time, place, character, plot, dialogue—must be mastered to the degree that they become second nature to the writer in order to achieve that goal.

All in a life’s work.

I have to admit that I was put off a bit myself by Gardner’s continual use of the word ignoramus.  It’s a loaded term, and very pejorative, and Gardner, who teaches us to be precise in the use of language is making a point.  In Latin, ignoramus literally means “we do not know.”

Every few years or so, I open up Gardner’s book for a refresher course.  Ignoramus that I am, reading this book never fails to set me back on the right course when my writing has gotten sloppy or lazy.

He also still intimidates the hell out of me.

The Art of Fiction

John Gardner. Vintage 1991, Paperback, 240 pages, $7.92

Grendel

John Gardner. Vintage 1989, Paperback, 192 pages, $6.99

October Light

John Gardner. New Directions 2005, Paperback, 440 pages, $2.08

Seven years later, Mike Nichols turned Charles Webb’s novel The Graduate into a blockbuster movie starring a very young Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock, a young college graduate who is seduced and corrupted by the wife of his father’s law partner, the infamous Mrs. Robinson, played deliciously by Anne Bancroft.  The film captures 1960’s affluent society’s shallowness, best summed up in this memorable exchange:

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?

What one word might a contemporary Mr. McGuire whisper to Benjamin? “Derivatives”?

In the end, Ben finds redemption in the love of Elaine, Mrs. Robinson’s daughter and in the final scene we see them escaping on a city bus.  They may be free, but their future is still uncertain as revealed by the uncomfortable expressions on their faces.  As much as we want them to, I can’t actually picture them staying together.

Novelist Eugene Mirabelli, my college writing teacher, published a novel in 1959, the same year as Roth’s first book, called The Burning Air, which told the story of George and Giula (pronounced “Julia.” It’s Italian and accurate, but I remember Mirabelli using it as an example in class of how to confound your readers by using an an unusual spelling for a common name).  The book is an account of a hot summer weekend after college when the young couple must confront their future.  Complicating matters are the pressures brought to bear by Giulia’s family.  Again, the couple are doomed, and George is left with only a wistful memory.

In Ian McEwan’s 2007 novel On Chesil Beach, the young couple, Edward and Florence, are actually married, but nevertheless still doomed. McEwan sets his story in pre-sexual revolution days of July, 1962.  Edward and Florence are trying to escape the stultifying values of their parents, and to break free of the class distinctions that separate them, but their own insecurities and uniquely sheltered backgrounds lead to a disastrous wedding night.  Again, a young man is left to wonder about what might have been had he been able to discover his adult self just a little bit sooner.

Back when I was a twenty-something, I attempted to write a story in this genre called “A Couple.”  I have to admit that I was very much “influenced” by both Goodbye, Columbus and The Burning Air. The doomed lovers in my story are on their final spring break in college, with graduation and their adult lives steadfastly approaching.  Of course, like Roth and Mirabelli before me, I attempted to blame everything on her family.  I could never really figure out the ending or what the story meant, so I put the first draft manuscript in a box, put the box in a basement, and forgot about it for twenty years.

When I started writing again, my wife found the box in the basement and I rediscovered the story.  I read it again, and although I felt embarrassed by some of the writing, I found something compelling about it.  I remembered writing on my old smith-corona in the apartment my wife and I lived in when we were first married.  It was the last thing I wrote before getting caught up in career pursuits and starting a family caused me to stop writing.

The story still didn’t have a decent ending, but I started typing it into my computer cleaning up the embarrassingly bad parts and crappy dialogue.  I reworked the story over and over again, trying about seven or eight different endings.  Finally, when I got tired of working on it, I started sending it out.  Fifty rejections and several more rewrites later, it was accepted by two journals on the same day.

It’s hard to know what made the difference between rejection and acceptance, but I believe it was the final small revision I made.  I had been in a workshop with Elizabeth Benedict the previous summer and I remembered her speaking about dialogue in fiction.  “Dialogue in fiction is not like conversation, where people avoid the truth at all costs and don’t reveal what they really think.  That doesn’t work in fiction.  Take a chance, have your character say something they never would in real-life, and see what happens.”

I found the place in my story where I needed to do that and I think it made all the difference.  It also revealed that the breakup was not only her fault, it was also his.

“A Couple” is available in Cantaraville Two and also as a mini-eBook from smashwords.com.

Goodbye, Columbus

Philip Roth. Vintage 1993, Paperback, 320 pages, $6.35

The Graduate

Charles Webb. Washington Square Press 2002, Paperback, 272 pages, $1.94

On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan. Anchor 2008, Paperback, 224 pages, $2.95

Mentors, Muses & Monsters

Elizabeth Benedict. Free Press 2009, Hardcover, 278 pages, $0.19

These experiences stimulated all my city-boy senses senses and whenever I read a piece of writing that effectively captures them, I am transported back to those places in my memory.  Some of these places have shown up in my writing.  My young couple in “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” spend a night camping in Acadia National Park. Another couple hike up to Indian Cliffs in Ten Mile River Boy Scout Camp, near Narrowsburg, New York in my story “Indian Summer.”  How I end up mixing fictional couples with boy scout memories in stories with romantic themes is perhaps a topic for psycho-analysis.  As my late father might have said, “Boy Scout camp was never like this!”

I wrote “Indian Summer” in a hotel room in Bellevue, Washington.  It was early spring and I was inspired by the bluest sky I’ve ever seen, the towering evergreens and the sight of Mount Rainer’s face glistening in the late afternoon sun.  I sat down at the computer and challenged myself to write something that captured the natural world.  I imagined a couple walking alone in the woods.  My first attempt was to write it as a narrative poem.  I’m not really much of a poet, so after about an hour of fumbling around, I switched to prose, and it started working for me.  After about three sentences, I realized that I was aping Hemingway, but decided to press on anyway.

Although I was in Washington State at the time, my mind went back to memories of hiking with my boy scout troop.  A favorite destination for a hike in summer camp at Ten Mile River in New York, was Indian Cliffs.  The view at the top is of a bend in the Delaware River.

I imagined my couple hiking to Indian Cliffs on the trail that starts near Camp Kunatah in the Rock Lake section of the reservation.  Old memories of the sights, the smell of the pines, the feel of the earth and rock beneath my feet came back to me.

After I finished the first draft a few hours later, I read what I had written.  While I was proud that it was quite a lovely account of couple walking through the woods, it really wasn’t much of a story.  While it seems that I had captured one of those all to rarely “perfect days” that we experience and remember forever, there was no plot, no conflict.

I set it aside for a week and thought about it.  The piece did indeed capture a perfect day in the lives of the couple in the story.  Like any other perfect, idyllic day, it cannot last for ever.  However blissful they may be, the real world eventually intrudes and that perfect day must come to an end.

The Hemingway-like style of the story also made me think about Hemingway’s early stories, themselves sensuous trips into the natural world.  “The Big Two Hearted River” came to my mind along with its protagonist, Hemingway stand-in Nick Adams.  The “soldier’s home” theme got me thinking about what was different now from when Hemingway’s time.

The war in Iraq was about two years old at the time.  I live in a part of the country where there are a lot of service families.  In some of them, both the husband and wife were in some branch of the military or members of the reserve.  I guitar-playing acquaintance of my was a lieutenant colonel in the army and his wife was in the reserve.  She had recently been called up and deployed to Iraq.

Another friend of mine teaches English at a community college in upstate New York and had been writing to me about some of her students, some just returned, some on their way to Iraq.

I had found the element of the real world that intrudes into that idyllic perfect day where my couple are the only two people in the world.  I went through the story and carefully dropped in little bits of narration and dialogue that just hinted of my newfound theme.  After that I took a few more passes through the story, ruthlessly cutting as much as I could to make every single word that was left the essence of the the piece.  Although I didn’t quite make it, my goal was to cut it to exactly 1000 words.

The story is now four year old and as time has passed, and the war drags on, I’ve this story has grown on me and I consider it one of my finest pieces.

“Indian Summer” is available in Cantaraville Four.

Captains Courageous

Rudyard Kipling. Echo Library 2007, Paperback, 108 pages, $2.94

Nick Adams Stories

Ernest Hemingway. Scribner 1981, Paperback, 272 pages, $7.00