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, $5.74

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov. Vintage 1989, Paperback, 336 pages, $4.97

Ulysses (Penguin Modern Classics)

Declan Kiberd (Introduction). Penguin Classics 2000, Paperback, 1040 pages, $11.62

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger. Back Bay Books 2001, Paperback, 288 pages, $6.50

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Oxford World’s Classics)

Emory Elliott (Editor). Oxford University Press, USA 2008, Paperback, 352 pages, $3.60

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, $5.92

Stranded in the Andes, cannibalism ensues.

Desperate Passage

Ethan Rarick. Oxford University Press, USA 2009, Paperback, 304 pages, $10.37

Stranded in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, cannibalism ensues.

The Shining

Stephen King. Pocket 2002, Paperback, 528 pages, $3.99

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, $3.73

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, $10.50

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Harper Lee. Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2006, Paperback, 336 pages, $8.53

Silent Spring

Linda Lear (Introduction). Mariner Books 2002, Paperback, 400 pages, $7.47

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, $7.06

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger. Back Bay Books 2001, Paperback, 288 pages, $6.50

The Bell Jar (P.S.)

Sylvia Plath. Harper Perennial 2009, Paperback, 336 pages, $5.42

Leaving Las Vegas

John O’Brien. Grove Press 1995, Paperback, 189 pages, $3.00

Who’s Irish?

Gish Jen. Vintage 2000, Paperback, 224 pages, $4.75

The Best American Short Stories of the Century

John Updike (Editor). Mariner Books 2000, Paperback, 864 pages, $9.86

Mentors, Muses & Monsters

Elizabeth Benedict. Free Press 2009, Hardcover, 288 pages, $9.07

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, $9.00

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scribner 1999, Paperback, 180 pages, $6.45

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, $5.29

Grendel

John Gardner. Vintage 1989, Paperback, 192 pages, $2.91

October Light

John Gardner. New Directions 2005, Paperback, 440 pages, $3.40

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.

Goodbye, Columbus

Philip Roth. Vintage 1993, Paperback, 320 pages, $8.77

The Graduate

Charles Webb. Washington Square Press 2002, Paperback, 272 pages, $5.94

On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan. Anchor 2008, Paperback, 224 pages, $3.35

Mentors, Muses & Monsters

Elizabeth Benedict. Free Press 2009, Hardcover, 288 pages, $9.07

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, $0.01

Nick Adams Stories

Ernest Hemingway. Scribner 1981, Paperback, 272 pages, $4.40

Joshua Winslow
New York 24^th
Hagerstown, Maryland
September 11, 1862

Miss Sarah Davison
Winslow, New York

My Dearest Sarah,

After a hard march of five days, we have stopped, at least momentarily. We are near Hagerstown, Maryland. I’m not sure when I will be able to post this letter. We have been moving quickly of late.

We have been ordered to rest for at least this day and maybe the next. I am writing this letter as the sun is setting over a tent-covered ridge to the west. No fires are permitted after dark, lest the glow of them alert the rebel forces of our position.

The place where we are was once a farm, or more accurately several farms covering hundreds of acres of fertile ground blanketing graceful and gentle hills. If there were a place to rival the beauty of our home in New York, this would be it. What few buildings stand here, barns and farmhouses, have been occupied by the officers as temporary command posts.

I can imagine what this place looked like before the tens of thousands of the Union Army arrived. It was a quiet place and gentle in its stillness. Now, in any direction I look I see an ocean of men and tents, all moving in small waves. It’s as if a large living organism has engulfed this place and forever destroyed its tranquility. When we arrived here yesterday we thought that we were the last, but more men kept arriving through the night. There must be over ten thousand men here by now and they are still arriving. They have come from all over the Union, from Maine and Vermont, from a place called Deer Island, from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, from Illinois and Michigan and Ohio.

And also from New York. My sweet, beloved New York. I remember this time of year up in Winslow as my favorite. The stifling heat of August has broken but the days are still warm and golden, perfect for a picnic near a lake with my love. When the sun goes down, the evenings are cool again. Down here, the heat has not broken and that five-day march was brutal. Several men in our unit collapsed with heat exhaustion and had to be left behind. Many of the men arriving in camp are on stretchers. The drummer boys formed bucket brigades to distribute water from the stream flowing through the middle of the camp.

When I think about the purpose of this convergence of humanity, this temporary city, I try to imagine the destruction it is capable of and I become fearful. I imagine all of these men and their rifles, headed toward me and I can see no escape and I am helpless. Surely we are all here for a reason. Somewhere beyond the horizon is a similar force trying to find us as much as we are trying to find them.

Rumors fly around and buzz through the camp like so many gnats. First we hear that we will continue west and meet the rebels in northwestern Virginia. Then we hear that the rebels are heading north through central Maryland and that we will attack them as they pass to the east of us. Another rumor tells us that they are already to the north of us in Pennsylvania. Still another says that they are to the south of us near Sharpsburg. For all of these to be true we would have to be surrounded by them. As unlikely as that may be, it still gives us all an uneasy feeling that we don’t talk about much.

Our Captain spends most of his time over at the command post that has been set up in a nearby farmhouse. Several times today he has walked through our encampment on foot. Normally when we see him and he addresses us, he is on horseback. Today, he walked through our camp, making sure we were resting, and that we had enough to eat. He is a man of some forty years with a graying beard and a regal manner. He has always had a stern look about him that appeared to be his duty to maintain, but today the sternness was replaced by a deeper, more serious look. His boots were scuffed and his uniform was still dusty from our march as he walked through our camp with his lieutenants. He spoke to us in small groups. He seemed to know more than he would tell us, but nobody was going to speak up and ask a Captain what was going to happen. Instead, he diverted our attention by asking us about ourselves, our names, where we were from. When I said, “Joshua Winslow, Winslow New York, sir,” he turned and approached me. I’ve now gotten used to how people react when I tell them I have the same name as my hometown, but this was different. As he walked toward me, a look of recognition come over his face as he repeated, “Joshua Winslow, Winslow New York.”

“Son, is your father Erastus Winslow?” he asked.

“Yes sir.”

“I know your father, son. We attended Harvard together and I visited him in Winslow some twenty-years ago. We have met several times in Manhattan when we were both there on business.”

Then he did something that I’ve never seen an officer do to a private infantryman. He held out his hand to me. After over a year in the army, serving with boys from all different stations of life, I had forgotten that I come from a family of wealth and position. Indeed, I had spent most of my time keeping that a secret and in many ways I found comfort in fitting in with the rest of the fellows. Of course, all the boys from Winslow know, but many others in the 24^th didn’t. When I was growing up, I always felt a weight on my shoulders walking down Main Street in Winslow. My family owns most of the town, so I could never be sure if people were friendly to me because of me or because of my father’s position. I also felt the weight of expectation on me not only from my father, but from nearly everyone in town.

The anonymity of being just myself in the army, not a town, not a family, not a legacy, felt liberating. While others bristled as they adapted to military discipline, I embraced it because it made me feel, for the first time in my life, like I was like anybody else. It’s hard to find your way when you feel the expectations of your family and community weighing on you. I think that when I finally return home, it will be with knowledge of myself that I never would have been able to gain at home.

The small throng of soldiers that were around the Captain and myself were looking at me and several more who were nearby and heard what was happening joined the group.

I glanced at the other men and realized that I could not deny my heritage any more than I could deny my loyalty and devotion to them. I may have forgotten it, but it’s also who I am, now, it seemed as though I stood form them with this Captain, as if his recognition of me was his recognition of all of them.

I took his hand in mine. His grasp was firm and he pulled me closer. Quietly, for my ears only he said, “Your father is a fine man and I know he is proud of you, son. God bless you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He released my hand and I took a step back from him. He stood there silently for a moment and raised his hand to the side of his face ran his fingers down the edge of his beard. His sternness was replaced momentarily by a puzzled look and his eyes suddenly seemed tired. Then he regarded the whole crowd that had gathered around us and said loudly to them, “And God Bless all of you.”

Then he gripped the hem of his dusty uniform coat, tugged on it firmly to straighten it out over his shoulders, and nodded to his lieutenants that it was time to continue their tour.

It was probably this event that has put me in such a reflective mood for the rest of the day. It is obvious to me that we are soon to be in as large a battle as any of us has ever seen. All of us can sense it. Even if all we know are rumors and all of them cannot be true, our experience tells us that one of them actually is true.

In this past year I have seen many things that I never would have imagined growing up in Winslow. Most of my experiences have been bad and I’d prefer never to experience them again. The hatred in the eyes of those who should be our brothers and sisters but are instead our enemy. Firing our weapons at them and cutting them down during the riot in Baltimore. Seeing an army move over the landscape, destroying everything in its path, not by fighting but simply by trampling it with its sheer size and consuming every barrel of grain and every bit of livestock just to feed its hungry hordes. Seeing my closest friends slowly dying from disease and wondering asking them and not me.

I fear that this war, which we all thought would be over by last spring, is going to be far more destructive than anything we might have imagined. I can only look around at the ocean of men stretching out in all directions to the horizon to tell me that. I fear that I have only had a glimpse of the horrors that are to come.

During all this time, the letters that you have written to me have sustained me. They are now a quite handsome stack and I carry them in a small leather bag that hangs over my shoulder. I can’t count how many times I’ve read each one of them. I read them in the morning when I awake. I read them when we are marching down a dusty road, I read them when we are resting on the side of the road and I read them by firelight before slipping into my tent and dreaming about you.

In all of the letters you’ve written to me, I’ve seen numerous references to my smile. It’s not something that I would normally think about myself, but you mention it when talking about that first dance we had, the smile I would greet you with when you came into my father’s store, and the smile you imagine I will have for you on the day I finally return home.

When you wrote about that smile, you told me how it made you feel, as if you were the most important person in the world for me and how special it made you feel that your presence alone could bring such joy. I’ll tell you now and forever that I was totally unaware that I was smiling and that it can only mean that it was simply a true and natural expression of how you make me feel.

There is a sense of joy and wonder that I feel. It is like that sense of joy and wonder that we find when we are out walking along a beautiful stream or through the woods. It’s that sense of wonder about all of Creation. And in addition to all those beautiful things that God has given the world, he also, for some reason that he alone knows, added you. I spend all my days and nights filled with joy and wonder that you exist, and I can’t imagine that living in a world that didn’t have you in it would be worth living.

In all the hardships that I have endured, and in all the hardships that I will endure, my faith has been and will always be tested. My faith in myself, my faith in our cause, my faith in humanity and ultimately my faith in all the world. It is the joy and wonder that that you bring to me, and that alone, that sustains my faith. In a world that is seemingly headed down a path of violence and destruction, your letters, and you yourself, tell me that no matter where we may be now and whatever may happen to us, the world is ultimately a beautiful and just place and that God’s covenant with us is enduring. I know this because he has given me you.

All my love,

Joshua

On September 17, 1862 the Battle of Antietam was fought near Sharpsburg, Maryland.  More Americans died on that day than any other single day in American military history.

Sculpture by Rodin, Photograph by Caroline Bubbers

Does this work for you:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou are more lovely and more temperate
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

How about this:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

Finally, how about this:

I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light – but hey, that would be going into sexual details …

Ouch.  It starts out pretty good, but soon turns awkward, and, well, nerdy.  Since we know that unlike Shakespeare and Browning’s words, which were written for the world to see, we  don’t get uncomfortable reading them as we do with Mark Sanford’s love letters to Maria, his Argentinean paramour.  And if it weren’t for his holier than thou past, we might feel some sympathy for his predicament.  In this private email, the Governor, ran into a common problem that writers face when they attempt to capture romantic love in its physical incarnation: language.  It’s hard to find the right words that evoke the emotion and sensation without being either crude or giggle-inducing.  “Breasts,” Governor.  You can say that word and not burn in hell for eternity.  “Breasts” works because it’s neither too pornographic nor to clinical.  If you still want to maintain your biblical piousness, I suppose you could use “Bosom,” but I can’t promise I won’t giggle.  The intended recipient of your email may giggle at bosom, but she would still be touched by your sensitivity and vulnerability in expressing yourself.  In love letters written by pious amateurs, surely it’s the thought that counts.

For the past several years I have been working sporadically on a novel.  Ironically, while I have never been a fan of metafiction, Winslow falls into that self-conscious category.  Even more ironically, a major portion of it is in the form of an historical novel, a genre I have never highly regarded.  Finally, this historical novel-within-a-novel is written in epistolary form.  The layers of artifice seem never ending.

How did this come about?  As near as I can tell, it was a kind of psychosis brought on by interrupted circadian rhythms, sleep deprivation, and oxygen-poor airliner air.  I had been working in Seattle for about six months on a consulting contract, each week flying out on early Monday morning and returning home to Baltimore on Thursday night/Friday morning red-eyes.  Over time, this schedule took its toll on me.  The three hour difference in time zones doesn’t seem like that much, but after a while, switching twice a week left me settled into my own time zone.  My home was Eastern Time, my job was Pacific Time, and I existed in an alternate dimension called “Fred Time.”  My client, who shall remain nameless, would probably agree that I was in an alternate dimension.

While working in Seattle, I tried as much as possible to keep myself on eastern time.  This meant getting up before dawn and going to sleep early.  Over time, however, that was difficult to maintain, so while I continued to get up early, I was going to sleep on Seattle time.  I did manage to get quite a bit of writing done during that time.  I wrote in the mornings and evenings in my hotel room and during thirteen hours I spent each week on airplanes.  My story “Indian Summer” was written while watching the golden sunlight fade away on the face of Mount Rainier.

I also began working on what I thought might be a long short story or a novella.  I had been haunted for many years by a short story I had written that I could never get right.  Finally, I realized that my whole approach to it had be wrong and decided to start over, this time writing in first person rather than third.  The story was about a beleaguered young teacher at a fictional private school in a fictional upstate New York town named Winslow.  The writing was going well and I decided to enlarge the story even more with a bit of the history of this school and town that I had invented.  Trying to imagine what the town might have been like a hundred years ago got me within range of the civil war.  It was then that “Fred Time” and that alternate universe took over.  One morning, I got up as the sun was rising and wrote:

The Battle of Antietam was the single bloodiest day in American combat history. The events of that day are documented and the numbers of the dead and wounded have been counted and re-counted. Those numbers include the twenty-seven sons of the town of Winslow, New York. The numbers of the spiritually wounded include eight widows and nineteen children. The sorrow that enveloped Winslow lasted generations and is still recalled by the statue that stands in the square in front of the post office.

Time has forgotten, however, the wounded that are never counted. They were not widows; they were not orphans. They were the young women of the town of Winslow, who had tearfully posted their perfumed letters at that very same post office. Some of those letters were later found, muddy and blood-soaked on the battlefield. Their sorrow was private and they carried it for the remainder of their days. Their betrothed had left the earth, leaving no tangible sign that they had ever existed. These women would never see their lovers smile in a child’s face.

Instead, they were left to mourn their whole lives, driven from joy to sorrow and then back again by memories of lives they had only imagined.

I had no idea where it came from.  I didn’t even know what it had to do with the story I had been working on the night before.  I had no idea where Antietam was, whether it was a Union or Confederate Victory and why I even cared.

As it turns out, The Battle of Antietam was fought near Sharpsburg, Maryland, about fifty miles from where I live.  My excuse for not knowing that is that I grew up in New York and only moved here in 2000, so my knowledge of the state’s history is limited.

Since the story that I was working on was a contemporary one, I realized that I was now working on something much larger than a short story or a novella, and considerably more complex.  I wasn’t sure how to proceed.  I set it aside for a few weeks, occasionally rereading what I had decided would be the epilogue of my unexpected epic.  Those “perfumed letters” kept coming back to me.  And that is how we return to the original topic of this post: love letters.

One Sunday afternoon, in the comfort of my home office, I sat down at the computer and challenged myself to write one of those “perfumed letters.”  I imagined a seventeen year-old girl, perhaps the minister’s daughter, writing to her eighteen year-old beau, the young prince of the town that bears his family’s name.  It was very early in the war, too early for anyone to comprehend the devastation would would occur.  Both of my lovers had heretofore lived idyllic, somewhat sheltered lives, and they are idealistic.

Sarah Davison, of Winslow, New York writes:

Dearest Joshua,

Once again, I hope this letter finds you safe and in good health.

I can scarcely believe that it has only been a fortnight since you and the others are gone and already I am writing my fourth letter to you. I have no way of knowing where or when this letter may find you, but I am sure that wherever you are, you are smiling and saying, “stop using those fancy English words, Mrs. Shakespeare.” I’m sorry my darling Sweet Boy, but someone must bring some refinement and culture into your life. I have always wanted to use the word “fortnight” and now that I have the opportunity, I am going to write it as often as I can in this letter. I hope that each time you read it, it makes you smile and laugh and that it makes you miss your beloved “Mrs. Shakespeare” as much as she misses you.

Since that day, a fortnight ago, when you and the other young men disappeared down the road to Albany, I have been willing myself to be strong. The other women in town are looking to me, the daughter of their minister, for strength and courage. I hardly know what to say to them. I smile and stand straight, with the posture expected of the young lady I am supposed to be, but in my heart, I feel an emptiness that I know will only be filled when the Good Lord sees fit to return you safely home. I have promised myself that I would not burden you with my girlish lamentations, for you surely have many more pressing things to think about, but my darling, I cannot keep from you what I must hide from everyone else. Even my mother seems to be looking to me for some sort of solace. On the night after you and Daniel left and after the house had fallen silent, I heard my mother in the parlor downstairs, quietly weeping for my brother and praying that he would come home. Please do not tell Daniel of this. Just tell him that we all miss him and pray for his safe return.

Had you not been gone for this past fortnight, I don’t think I would have seen you more than three or four times. There would have been Sundays in church, of course, and then your weekly visits to the parsonage to deliver The Crier. I might have made an excuse to come to your father’s store for some contrived purchase, just so that I could see you. Now that you have left town, however, I don’t know how I could have taken so little care to see you as often as I could. I have no idea where you might be at this moment, but I am certain that you must be marching somewhere. Whether you are fifty miles away or five hundred, it really makes no difference since I cannot see you in either case, but my heart feels every mile farther you march away from me. Is it not strange how the heart can so accurately measure distance?

Your father has begun publishing The Crier twice weekly since the whole town is now anxious for any news of the war. If you were here, of course, that would have given you one more chance each week to see me! He has also hired little Samuel to deliver the paper to the shops and houses closest to town. You should have seen him on his first day! He so looks up to you and he was proud to be huffing and puffing his way up Main Street with your canvas bag slung over his shoulder. The bag is almost as big as he is and, when you see him from behind, there is no little boy, just a canvas bag filled with newspapers waddling up the street on two little feet.

Abby has moved in with us for a time. With Daniel gone, she is by herself, so it is good that she has a family to live with. She has been very quiet lately and seems to be feeling unwell. Yesterday morning at breakfast, she became sick but thankfully, this morning she ate well. Don’t tell Daniel of this as it will only trouble him and there is nothing he can do. Although she has no family of her own, she is now a part of our family and I finally have that sister I’ve always wanted. I will try to keep her spirits up.

I have imagined that on your way south that you have traveled through Manhattan. My father took Daniel and me there once when we were children. I remember seeing the girls in their pretty fashions. Tell me darling sweet boy, did they smile and wave to you in your uniform and did you return their smiles and get an extra spring in your step?

Oh, forgive me. You know I have such a jealous nature when it comes to you. I remember how you teased me at the church dance last fall. You had told me that you don’t like to dance, but you promised you would dance with me when we sat in church the week before. Then at the dance, you went right ahead and danced three times with that Ruth Campbell. I know you did that just to make me jealous. I saw you looking over to me all the time to see if I saw you. I’m sure you remember the pain of my boot heal on your toe when you finally did allow yourself to dance with me. My temper is now well known to all. My father tells me that there must be some Irish blood in the family stock, but I’ll have none of that. You deserved it, Joshua Winslow! In educating you, didn’t your father teach you not to trifle with a girl’s affections?

Now that you are gone and I miss you so, I forgive you for all your ill manners and I apologize for my very wicked behavior. All I pray for now is for your safe return.

In spite that brave mask I am forced to wear for others, my father knows of my anxiety. He scolds me less for the gossip I like to talk about at the dinner table and for my strange interpretations of his sermons. He knows of my love of the written word and has asked me to compose a new benediction for him that mentions the brave twenty-seven of Winslow:

“May the Good Lord and his son, Jesus, bless each and every one of you with courage, wisdom and charity, and may he watch over our beloved sons, every day and every night until they are delivered safely home again.”

My darling Joshua, be well and be safe and know that I am praying for you and dreaming of you. My letters will continue to flow over the fortnights to come.

All my love,

Sarah

PS – We have acquired a new peacock and I have decided to name him Jefferson Davis, since he loves to puff himself up and strut his way around the pen all with the pomp and arrogance that I imagine a Southern Gentleman to have. He is no match for me and my broomstick as I am sure that rebel scoundrel is no match for the brave twenty-seven of Winslow.

By the time I was done, needless to say, I was hopelessly in love.  I was enraptured.  I was overcome with that blissful sense that everything on earth and in heaven is in harmony.  I sat at my desk and sighed.

Then I came to my senses and realized I needed a second opinion.  As proud and as touched by what I had written, I realized that it may just be a case of literary…self gratification. I printed it out and then nervously gave the letter to my wife. “Tell me,” I asked, “is this a letter that a seventeen year-old girl would write or is it just a letter I would like to receive from a seventeen year-old girl?”

“That’s good,” was the verdict.

I needed more.  “Is it believable, or is it a creepy middle-aged man’s fantasy?”

“No,” she said. “It’s good. Write more.”

“Write more” is a ringing endorsement to me, especially from my wife.

That was a couple of years ago.  Since then I have occasionally worked on the various parts of the novel: a present time narrative line, a narrative line from the early 1980’s and the epistolary novel set in 1861 and 1862.  I haven’t decided whether the letters are “true” or are just imagined by one of the characters in the other two story lines.  Making them imaginary frees me from having to be historically accurate and helps justify the idealized relationship between Sarah and Joshua.  I’ve written Sarah letters and Joshua letters sporadically since then.  Each of them tries to explore some aspect of love, be it emotional, psychological, physical, or spiritual. Collectively they also tell two stories: life in Winslow during the Civil War as told by Sarah, and the life of a Union soldier as told by Joshua.

When all is said and done, however, they are, quite simply love letters.  One of the things I discovered as I was writing these letters, is that to a large extent, I’m able to throw away all the rules that I normally live by when dealing with emotion in writing fiction.  In general, the more intense the emotion, the more controlled your language needs to be.  To make emotions real for your reader you need to show, not tell.  Emotion isn’t verbal, so it cannot be directly described.  Instead you need to record the effects of emotions.  Physical sensations, descriptions of body language and movement, tone of voice, and dramatic structure evoke the emotion in your reader.  Emoting uncontrollably on the page doesn’t work.

Except in love letters.  Writers of love letters, whether they be literary writers creating fiction, or confused Governors writing emails never meant for anyone other than his lover to read, can throw caution to the wind, have no fear of appearing silly or foolish and simply let go.

Whether or not I ever finish this novel, let alone publish it, writing these letters has been a learning experience for me as a writer.  The fate of my characters is known from the beginning.  Sarah never sees Joshua again because five days after writing his last letter he is killed in the Battle of Antietam.  As the narrative content – the stories Sarah and Joshua tell each other – evolved, so did the characters.  During the course of the year and a half that this correspondence takes place, both Sarah and Joshua are changed by both the words they write to each other and their separate experiences.

Along with the, well, mushy parts of each letter, I also have each character write about their current circumstances and experiences, much in the same way Governor Sanford tells his beloved Maria little tidbits from his political life.  The experiences that I describe are not planned, they are complete improvisations created in the moment.  The historical accuracy of these improvisations is extremely questionable, so I’m leaning toward the view that they are figments of another character’s imagination.  It also helps me continue to tell myself that I am not writing an historical novel.

Governor Sanford’s love letters show great potential.  The emotions seem genuine but he still seems self conscious expressing himself.  He also seems to be unsure of his lover’s devotion to him and tries to impress her with his political credentials.  Relax, Governor. You had her at “hola.”   It’s private, just between you and her, light the fuse and let loose your passion.

While Sarah and Joshua’s letters never come close to the eroticism that Governor Sanford attempts, here’s one of Joshua’s letters that the Governor might use as a guide to how to lay it on the line. It’s not erotic, but it’s about as sensuous as two teenagers from religious families can be in a nineteenth century small town.  In place of Sarah and Joshua, I have substituted the names of Governor Sanford and his beloved:

My Dearest Maria,

Your father may understand the ways of the Lord and the hearts of men, but he has no understanding of the ways of the Union Army. We have not reached the Blue Mountains of Virginia. We have not reached Virginia. It appears that we’ll not see Virginia or even Maryland this year. We’ve marched some, we trained some more, but mostly what we do is wait.

After mustering in Albany, we traveled down to Manhattan Island by boat. We camped there for two weeks while we waited for some more boats to carry us across the very river we came down. Every day we could see ferryboats crossing the river, but we had to wait for the Army’s boats which were being built in Delaware.

After we landed in New Jersey, we marched some, and then we stopped and set up camp on the plains near Trenton. It was a long march and we were glad for the rest, but we have now been here for close to three months. We train on most days and are now very disciplined and sharp, but we have yet to see a rebel flag, see a rebel soldier, or hear a rebel gunshot. There may be a war being fought somewhere, but it’s definitely not in Trenton New Jersey.

We’ve met some boys from other parts of the Union. Having spent all my life in Winslow, I only know farming, farming ways and farming people. I have made friends with a boy named Pete Shotten, from Deer Island, Maine, whose father is a fisherman. There are some other boys as well from his town and they are all sons of fisherman. There’s also a boy named Johnnie Woodbine from Port Jefferson on Long Island. His father is a fisherman. I have to say that after listening to them talk about how much they miss their lives on the water and their homes, I think that I would someday like to live near the sea, at least for a little while. We’ve also got a boy named Boucher who comes from far north in New York, near Canada. His name is pronounced “Boo-shay.” Before he joined the army, he trapped furs with his father and brothers. He speaks English, but we call him “Frenchy” because of his name.

While we have been camped here, there haven’t been too many hardships. The training is hard, but the New Jersey farmland would make all of the farmers in Winslow jealous and the growing season is longer here, so we are well supplied right now. The camp has a still, a laundry, a chapel and a post office. The officers order us to visit the laundry. They don’t have to order us to visit the still or the chapel or the post office.

On the day when that last batch of letters from Winslow arrived at the post office tent, the tent and the whole area around it for at least twenty yards was filled with lavender scent. You and your friends sure mixed up a potent batch of lavender water. The other men have been teasing us about it and they have taken to calling us Winslow boys, the “Perfume Brigade.” They tease us but I think they are also a little jealous that we are all together and come from a home where all the girls would send fragrant letters to their men.

For all of us, those letters remind us all of how much we miss home and to thank the Lord for what we have waiting for us.

For me, that scent brought back a memory of a very special day. It was that day this past June when you and I had our first picnic alone, down by the stream at the edge of Jeb Wilson’s property. I hope you remember it. You had worked so hard to make sure everything was just right, and then everything seemed to go wrong. The ants got into the peach cobbler, you dropped the plate of fried chicken on the ground and I kicked over the jug of cider. All we had left of our picnic were some cherries. You were so upset after all the work you had done, but I didn’t mind it at all. Having that time alone with you in that beautiful place was all that mattered. Finally, you laughed.

That was the day you let me kiss you. We were sitting beneath that old oak tree at the end of Wilson’s rock wall. My ears were filled with the sound of swollen stream and the songs of your laughter. The golden sun was flashing off the pretty yellow dress you wore.

When I hold your scented letter to my nose now, I remember how, after seeing you home and continuing on home myself, I held my hand up to my nose, which had touched your hair, your shoulder and your hip. The scent of lavender reminds me of the taste of cherries and the touch of your lips on mine.

My dear, sweet Maria, please don’t fret because you didn’t say the words to me before I left. You have told them to me now. Paper may get old and crumble, ink may run and fade, but those words are immortal.

You asked me about what I dream and about how will I know that you will love me forever. Let me tell you about a dream that I have. I have it every night. I have had it every night since leaving home. Every time I dream this dream, liking a painting slowly coming into being, it has more form, more detail, and becomes more real. Every morning when I awake now, I believe I am in Winslow and you are beside me. Please tell me if you can imagine this dream:

It is early June. We are in that spot by the stream where we had our picnic. My love for you could never be contained in any church, any structure built by man, and your love for me is a wonderful gift from God, no less then all of his other gifts: the trees and flowers, the birds, his gift of beautiful summer days, the gift of life itself, and so we have asked your father that it be here in this sacred place among all the things that you and I love and cherish. The small roses in your modest bouquet were clipped from your grandmother’s rose garden. Your simple white dress was sewn by your mother who added piece of lace from her own wedding dress. Your beautiful brown hair was braided by your closest girlfriend and decorated with wildflowers gathered by the young girls in your Sunday school class. You are a vision of Nature.

After our vows and our meal, Callie Shaw’s violin plays that old Irish waltz that you love. In that golden afternoon moment, my hand on your hip, your hand on my shoulder, our two hands clasped, we begin our lives together.

If you tell me that you can dream this dream too, then that is all I need to know that you will love me forever.

All my love,

Mark

Well, okay, maybe asking his lover to marry him is a little more complicated for a married 21st century govenor than it is for Joshua.  But again, it’s the thought that counts.

These live videos are of the quality you’d expect from that era. They also appear to be from before the release of their only album since I can hear guitarist/keyboardist Doug White playing in the darkness. Doug left the band just as the album was coming out and musically, they continued as a trio afterwards. Val’s also really playing up the little schoolgirl act (twenty years before Britney Spears, and with a hundred times more musical talent). I remember her toning that part of her act down as the band progressed and acquired a growing, loyal fan base.

Maybe you had to be there in the dark, on the hot sweaty dance floor, nervous about the new wave of conservatism and general uptightness that was sweeping the nation at the time, to truly appreciate them. Maybe they are best left as fond memories. But the music that stays with us is the music that evokes a time and place and makes us remember who we once were, wistfully thinking about what might have been.  And to reafirm the things that once mattered so desperately to us.

Thank you Al, Todd, Steve, Doug, and especially, Val.  You’re all on my iPod.

Shotgun (cover of a Motown classic)

I Need to be Told (Fear of Strangers Original)

“You have to actually say the words.”

Neda Agha Soltan

1982-2009

Neda Agha Soltan, an Iranian student, was attending a protest in Tehran today when she was shot in the chest by a Basij militiaman.  Her death was captured in a shocking video that has now been seen around the world.  She may not have desired it, but she has become a symbol.  Her name, Neda, means “The Voice.”

Her death may have been foretold by another Iranian woman, who anonymously wrote on the night before:

“I will participate in the demonstrations tomorrow. Maybe they will turn violent. Maybe I will be one of the people who is going to get killed. I’m listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It’s worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them. I’m two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism. This note is dedicated to tomorrow’s children…”

After Neda was murdered, she wrote again:

Yesterday I wrote a note, with the subject line “tomorrow is a great day perhaps tomorrow I’ll be killed.” I’m here to let you know I’m alive but my sister was killed…

I’m here to tell you my sister died while in her father’s hands
I’m here to tell you my sister had big dreams…
I’m here to tell you my sister who died was a decent person… and like me yearned for a day when her hair would be swept by the wind… and like me read “Forough”… and longed to live free and equal… and she longed to hold her head up and announce, “I’m Iranian”… and she longed to one day fall in love to a man with a shaggy hair… and she longed for a daughter to braid her hair and sing lullaby by her crib…

my sister died from not having life… my sister died as injustice has no end… my sister died since she loved life too much… and my sister died since she lovingly cared for people…

my loving sister, I wish you had closed your eyes when your time had come… the very end of your last glance burns my soul….

sister have a short sleep. your last dream be sweet.

These moving and powerful symbols are emerging from a culture that, to Western eyes, has historically been oppressive to women.  Nonetheless, they emerge as brave and fierce opponents of oppression.  Embedded in their cultural heritage is figure as meaningful to Iranian woman as any Judeo-Christian symbol is to us: Fatima, daughter of the Prophet, wife of Ali.  Through the centuries, just as our Christian symbols have been manipulated to suit the purposes of the powerful, so has Fatima. In spite of this, she has survived.

From Massoume Price’s Lecture “Distinguished Women, Past and Present: Fatima is Fatima” :

Yet at another level she is the fighter and the defender of the true faith and justice. After her fathers’ death the power struggle starts, her family representing the true faith, the pure and the holy blood is pushed aside. It is her speech that stirs, accuses and reveals all that is wrong and how deviations will happen with the greedy leaders who will change the course of Islam for ever and for worse. At the domestic level she is the loyal daughter, the devoted wife, the caring mother and a symbol of endurance. Such themes have been used for centuries to project her image as that of the ideal Muslim woman. The one who will not hesitate to sacrifice all including herself for the sake of her family and the true fate.

Friday, the 19th of June 2009

Tomorrow, Saturday, is a day of destiny

Tonight, the cries of Allah-o Akbar are heard louder and louder than the nights before.

Where is this place?

Where is this place where every door is closed?

Where is this place where people are simply calling God?

Where is this place where the sound of Allah-o Akbar gets louder and louder?

I wait every night to see if the sounds will get louder and whether the number increases.

It shakes me.

I wonder if God is shaken.

Where is this place where so many innocent people are entrapped?

Where is this place where no one comes to our aid?

Where is this place where only with our silence we are sending our voices to the world?

Where is this place where the young shed blood and then people go and pray?

Standing on that same blood and pray…

Where is this place where the citizens are called vagrants?

Where is this place?   You want me to tell you?

This place is Iran.

The homeland of you and me.

This place is Iran.

Here’s NYU Professor Clay Shirky:

I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary.

The rest of the interview is available on TED.

Shirky’s insightful book about the internet revolution:

Here Comes Everybody

Clay Shirky. Penguin Press HC, The 2008, Hardcover, 336 pages, $5.61

I have compartments of many shapes and sizes

In which I order my life

Some are locked; many are neglected.

In a dusty old box marked “Unfinished Business”

I keep a manuscript, a sibling feud,

And all the apologies I owe.

In another, marked “Never Finished” I keep loose ends:

A child once estranged and now an orphan

And the ragged ticket stubs of the trip I am on.

An oblong box named “Debts”

Contains the curses and slights I’ve inflicted

And the hearts I have broken.

A wooden box covered in deep purple

And sealed under lock and key

Is labeled “Quiet Desperation.”

The largest of all, the one marked “Un-begun,”

Has a stack of books , diets and exercise regimes

And all the languages I will someday learn.

The one you seek but cannot see

Is bound only by Heaven and Earth

Surrounding us with Air and Light and Spirit.

Originally published in Mississippi Crow, Issue 7

One realization does dawn upon the death of the second parent, namely that you’ve now moved into the green room to the River Styx. You’re next. Another thing about parental mortality: No matter how much you’ve prepared for the moment, when it comes, it comes at you hot, hard and unrehearsed.

Those words introduce Christopher Buckley’s memoir, published yesterday in The New York Times Magazine.  Author Kathryn Harrison has written about traumatic events providing a “before and after” for their victims’ lives.  Most of us will not ever know the traumas she has explored in her books, but we do, all of us, have a before and an after.

Growing Up Buckley

While They Slept

Kathryn Harrison. Ballantine Books 2009, Mass Market Paperback, 288 pages, $2.86

Close friends who have known me for a long time know the truth and maybe even know the things that have inspired my stories, but I’ve given up trying to convince acquaintances that my short stories are not “thinly veiled autobiography.”  They never believe me anyway.  Instead, I now just say everything’s autobiographical and let them think that I’ve lived twenty or so lives of assorted genders, proclivities, and orientations, that I’ve been married and divorced at least six times,  that I’m a drunk,  that I’m a stoner, and that I killed a man in Reno (“Yeah, that’s the ticket!”).

“Come Together” is now the third story I’ve had published in Cantaraville and a fourth has been accepted for a future issue.  I’m very grateful that publisher Cantara Christopher and editor Michael Matheny have been receptive to my work.  As any writer of fiction will tell you, it’s a cruel world out there in the slush piles, and far more often than not, you are confronted with either rejection or indifference.  I can’t decide which one of those two I prefer.  To find an editor who seems tuned in to what you are trying to accomplish is like finding a long lost friend.

The best part about being published in Cantaraville is to see my stories surrounded by the work of so many fine writers and poets from around the world.  It’s like living in a really nice neighborhood with beautiful homes, fabulous restaurants, and a sparkling nightlife.

Also in Cantaraville Six:

L. Ward Abel, Robert Louis Bartlett, Amelia Beamer, J.L. Bramble, John Bruce, Bryan Costales, Anna Devine, John Green, Yelena Dubrovin, William Falo, Timothy Gager, Erin Hopkins, Joshua Landers, Carol Mann, Benjamin Nardolilli, Ron Singer, Marilyn Urena, Christian Ward, Clive Warner, Andrew Washton, and R. Hilary Weber

In 2000, my family moved from New York to Maryland.  Like most New Yorkers, I will always be a New Yorker no matter where I may happen to live.  It’s hard to disguise.  All I have to do is open my mouth. Nonetheless, I’ve tried to embrace the community in which I live.  I’ve adopted the Washington Nationals (I could never, ever, root for an American League team), and given how they are currently doing, it’s felt a lot like being a Met fan during most of their history.

I’ve had no problem at all finding a hero columnist in my adopted hometown newspaper and I can easily consider him be a peer of my other columnist heroes.  The Pulitzer Prize Committee agrees with me and has awarded Eugene H. Robinson the 2009 award for commentary.

Placing the news in context, helping us to understand why the issues of the day matter, challenging us to think and to feel.  That’s what great columnists do.

Congratulations Mr. Robinson.

A Special Brand of Patriotism.

“The problem with transparency is that it’s transparent for the terrorists as well.”

- George Will

“Some things in life need to be mysterious.  Sometimes you need to just keep walking.”

- Peggy Noonan

“I’m not confident that forswearing the use of these techniques is prudent.”

- Bill Kristol

“What we really need is to have all these techniques at our disposal… they talk about the banging of the guy’s head against the wall. It turns out to be very controlled and it’s a soft wall that gives way… I’m not at all sure that’s torture.”

- Brit Hume

What country do these people live in?  Certainly not the country I was raised to love and cherish.  Were they asleep in school when The Constitution and The Bill of Rights were covered?  When they were in Sunday School (no doubt they all went to Sunday School), did they miss all the parts about…Jesus?

The memos released by the Obama administration offer the incontrovertible truth.  Our government has tortured.  Not only that, it was officially sanctioned and institutionalized.  Our government violated its own laws, it violated international treaties, and it has committed acts that we have condemned when committed by every other nation on earth.

Fortunately, there is a remedy.  Unfortunately, the remedy is not saying “We promise we’ll never do it again,” as the Obama Administration wishes it could do.  Investigations and prosecutions will no doubt be politically messy, especially when you have nitwits like those quoted above willing to rationalize anything.  Nonetheless, the spirit and soul of our nation is at risk and they are more important than political expediency.

Because this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, all of us have committed these crimes.  These crimes were committed in our name.  If we do not hold those who perpetrated these crimes accountable, then the guilt will be ours.  By looking the other way, we will be war criminals.

Some words from Jacob Bronowski, who bore witness to what can happen when human beings rationalize inhumanity:

“We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.”

The Ascent of Man

Jacob Bronowski. Little Brown & Co (P) 1976, Paperback, $89.27

First of all, it’s really hard.  Being blessed with a good ear for everyday conversation, being a “sensitive observer,” doesn’t buy you much.  Conversation is not dialogue.  One of the reasons that today’s so-called Reality Shows are actually scripted (shock!) is that normal everyday conversation, when listened to by an outsider, is unbearably boring.  For all the talking we may do in real life, we really don’t say anything.  We never say what we really think or reveal what we really feel.  Transcribe a normal kitchen table conversation word for word and there it will lie, limp and lifeless on the page.  Nothing is revealed.  Nothing happens.

The purpose of any work of art – a painting, a song, a play, a poem – is to reveal a truth.  It may be a truth that was once known but is now forgotten, a truth that we see every day but fail to recognize, or a truth that we intuitively know but never fully articulate.  When our audience recognizes that truth, we say that it “resonates” with them.  But the sunlight in an Edward Hopper painting is not real sunlight.  It is a mixture of pigments and texture that creates an illusion of sunlight that strikes us as true.  So it is with fiction.  No matter how natural and realistic it may appear, it is not reality, it is an illusion of reality.  If a piece of fiction is compelling, engaging, and emotionally moving, and its dialogue seems realistic, it is only because it has been carefully crafted to appear realistic.

All too often, in classes and in textbooks on creative writing, dialogue has been taught as a distinct discipline, divorced from the other elements of a story.  Instead of developing an understanding of how dialogue relates to all the other elements, we get rules of thumb that, while true, don’t really help much.  “Every line of dialogue must either reveal something that the reader needs to know or serve to move the story along.” Great.  What the hell does “move the story along” mean?  This kind of advice, disconnected from any consideration of the other elements of the art form  leads to stilted, unnatural dialogue, like a paint-by-numbers painting where you can still see the numbers:

“Say Bill, that’s a really big Colt 45 in your holster.  Where did you get it?”

Elsewhere, these same sources will say, “Every character must want something.”  Also true, but never placed in context.

Walk into a creative writing class in the middle of the semester and ask, in drill sergeant fashion, “What does Odysseus want?” and in unison, the class will say (or should say), “To go home!”

One of the fundamental principles of western literary tradition is that it is character-driven as opposed to plot-driven.  Popular, or genre fiction, on the other hand, tends to be plot-driven.  The characters, what they want and what they feel, is less important than the plot.  There are exceptions of course, and the masters of various genres do write character-driven stories.  John Grisham, for example, writes tightly plotted pot-boilers that are nonetheless driven by his characters’ desires (The Rainmaker, The Testament, The Street Lawyer). Tom Clancy, on the other hand, is all plot and no character.  His plots are intricate and we learn some fascinating facts about our nation’s security apparatus, but his characters leak sawdust all over the page, and his dialogue is the most dreadful ever published.  His books make pretty good movies, but that’s because there’s less plot in them and more character.

Great literature, no matter how intricately plotted, is about desire.  The Iliad, which contains some of the most epic and violent battle scenes in all of literature, is not about the Trojan War.  Consider the first words, as translated by Richmond Lattimore:

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus

and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,

hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls

of heroes, but gave their bodies to the delicate feasting

of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished

since that time when first there stood in division of conflict

Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

All that follows is the result of the feud between Achilles and Agamemnon.  As the story unfolds, it is driven by the desires of the characters, and the most memorable scenes, the ones that make us read through to the end, are not the bloody battles, but the scenes where desires are revealed and shown in conflict. It is written as poetry, translated from an ancient language, about an ancient people living in an ancient culture, yet when the characters speak to one another, in as stylized a manner as one can imagine, their desires ring true across the centuries that separate us from them.

So where does that leave the modern fiction writer?  Dialogue, even when it is serving up exposition, must always reveal desire.  Because of that, we need to set aside the goal of trying to sound natural.  Art is artificial.  Elizabethans didn’t break into soliloquy any more than twenty-first century Americans do.

In real life, people don’t say what they think and would rather die than reveal what they really desire.  In fiction, they must do both of these things, or there is no conflict, there is no story, and worst of all, it will not resonate with the reader.  It is that resonance that creates the illusion that the dialogue is realistic.  It is when characters say what they would not say in real-life that creates those dramatic scenes where conflicting desires explode on the page.

This has been a lesson not easily learned, and even in the stories I’ve had published so far, I don’t think I’ve accomplished it completely in all of them, but I’ve gotten better at it.  Many years ago, I wrote the first draft of a story about a young couple on spring break during their last year of college.  I set it aside and forgot about it when I stopped writing for about twenty years.  Finally one day I pulled it out of my box of old manuscripts.  There was a lot of good writing in it, and the passage of time had given me some perspective, so I set to work revising it.  When I finally got it to be the best I thought it could be, I started sending it out.  No one wanted it.  Over the course of a year, it got forty-nine rejections.  During that year, I continued to revise it.  I rewrote the ending.  I added a coda.  I took the coda out, I added it back in.  I had fellow writers read it.  No one could tell me what was wrong with it.  Some of the rejections included complements on the writing, but with the usual, “not right for us.”

I finally noticed, since I kept changing the ending, that there was something missing that was leaving the reader feel unsatisfied at the end.  Indeed, I felt that way myself.  I took a step back, figuratively, and did some simple analysis of the characters, essentially asking myself, “What does he want, what does she want?”  What I began to realize was that although my characters certainly loved one another, their internal desires were sending them in different directions.  Those desires were apparent in the story, but nowhere were they directly and dramatically shown in conflict.  I found the point in the story, a final argument between them, where the dramatic stage had been set, but neither character said what they really felt.  As a result, instead of climax, the story just fizzled out.  As a writer, I had been a coward.  I didn’t know what was missing, so I looked at the argument sentence by sentence  until I found the line where the woman says, “Talk to your family.”  I changed it to “Talk to your father.”   Without getting too Freudian about it, my narrator became unleashed and said everything that he never would have said in real life.

After that revision, I sent it out to three more journals.  About a month later, and on the same day, I got three acceptances, putting me in in the awkward position of telling two journals that the story was no longer available.  For a writer, that’s a good problem to have.

What was interesting was that while readers were left unsatisfied by the story as it had originally been written and rewritten, it wasn’t specifically clear what was causing that dissatisfaction.  The problem wasn’t in what was there, the problem was in what was missing, and the only person who could find out what was missing was me.  I discovered it when I realized I needed to stop being realistic and to tell the truth.

The foundation of Western Literature and a few guilty pleasures from John Grisham.  As for Tom Clancy save some time and just watch “The Hunt for Red October.”  The desires of Sean Connery and Sam Neill drive the story plus you get to hear Fred Thompson, former presidential candidate, say, “The Russians don’t take a dump without a plan, son.”  That kills me.

The Iliad of Homer

Richmond Lattimore (Translator). University Of Chicago Press 1961, Paperback, 528 pages, $7.70

The Rainmaker

John Grisham. Delta 2005, Paperback, 576 pages, $6.51

 

The Testament

John Grisham. Delta 2005, Paperback, 480 pages, $5.00

 

The Street Lawyer

John Grisham. Delta 2005, Paperback, 384 pages, $6.57

This didn’t suddenly happen on January 20th, it didn’t just happen last fall, or even in the last eight years.  Over the last thirty years, we have seen the most massive transfer of wealth in this country since the early days of the twentieth century, and one only has to look up “1929” to see how well that worked out for us.

Ironically, it was the assault on all the protections that were put in place as a result of the Great Depression that has gotten us to where we are now.  We can accurately point the finger at the Republicans for their slavish devotion to the free market, economic Darwinism, and trickle-down theories, but there was no shortage of Democrats to act as willing accomplices.  The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 was signed by Democrat Bill Clinton after having been passed by a veto-proof two-thirds majority in Congress.  The  repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had prevented savings and commercial banks from also being investment banks, brokerage houses, and insurance companies,  set us on a path that future historians may view as inevitable.  The depression-era regulations, designed to prevent exactly what had happened, seem to have worked very well.  It was when they were systematically weakened and eliminated that something happened that bares a closer resemblance to the meltdown of the early 30’s than anyone wants to admit. To all you sober-minded economists who appear on the Sunday morning talk shows, I know what you’re thinking but won’t say.

While all this was happening – the transfer of wealth, the reckless destruction of financial protections – there was no outrage.  Americans were convinced that government was incompetent, businessmen were the true wise men  (and yeah, it was mostly men), and what was good for CEO’s was good for them.  One of President Obama’s few gaffes during has campaign was his tactless remark about voters in Pennsylvania being difficult to reach because they are cynical of politicians and “cling to guns and religion.”  It was a huge mistake, but I remember thinking, “Poorly stated, but not wrong.”  I admit that I fall into that ideological group known as Eastern Liberals.  The uproar that followed, however, proved the exact point Obama had been trying to make.  His opponent, Hillary Clinton, started wistfully remembering going a-huntin’ as a child with a beloved uncle and got herself seen doing shots in working-class bars.  Obama himself tried to get into act until a set of bowling pins showed him that pandering just isn’t his style.

It’s no surprise that Americans who live in depressed rural areas, or those former industrial states now called the rustbelt are cynical of politicians.  For years, politicians have claimed kinship with them and played to their fears and emotions.  Their hardships were not caused by incompetent corporate management, or by greedy CEO’s, or by a tax policy that encouraged companies to send jobs overseas, or by the fact that the people who do most of the work in this country don’t have lobbyists funding political campaigns.  Instead, their hardships are caused by the anti-gun activists, Cadillac-driving welfare queens, easily available condoms, CEO’s paying too much income tax,  Mexicans, and Michael Moore.

During election years, Republicans standing in front of abandoned factories was as ubiquitous as Democrats standing on front of piles of rubble in the South Bronx.  And yet, all they’ve ever managed to do was to convince people to vote against their own interests.  After generations of misdirection and pandering by politicians as things have gradually gotten worse is it any wonder that they are not trusted?  What’s amazing is how long it took for the fraud to be exposed.

It still continues.  I’m getting a tax cut.  Chances are so are you.  So are the vast majority of American families.  Most of us don’t even come close to earning $250,000 a year.  Yet, the rhetoric that is repeated over and over by ideologues and by mainstream journalists is that Obama is raising taxes.  Raising the top marginal tax rate from 35% to 39% to help support a middle-class tax cut only sets the marginal rate back to what it was in 1999, before George W. Bush’s budget breaking tax cuts.  And this marginal rate applies to income over $372,000.  How many of us does that apply to?

Historically, the marginal tax rates were highest from 1932 through 1980, peaking at 92% in 1952-1953.  In an admittedly simplistic analysis, the marginal tax rate was at its highest during the 1950’s and 1960’s when the middle-class expanded and their quality of life improved.  Executive compensation during that period remained relatively flat.  Even adjusted for inflation, a corporate executive of today wouldn’t get out of bed for what his 50’s or 60’s counterpart earned (and yeah, it’s still mostly men).

I lose no sleep over the fact that someone who earns millions of dollars in compensation is going to pay 4% more, and I find it hard to believe that anyone else besides Joe-The-Make-Believe-Plumber would shed a tear.  Joe, however, is an example the way we have been deluding ourselves.  If Joe was in that bracket, if Joe was actually earning 10 million dollars a year, like all of us wish we ourselves earned, he certainly would resent paying an extra 4%.  I know I would, and I’d be certain to talk about it to my senator over lunch at the Capital Grille.  Joe, unfortunately, has as much chance of earning 10 million dollars a year as a real plumber as I have of playing centerfield for the Yankees.  Or outselling Stephen King.

But no, it’s all about jobs isn’t it?  When the wealthy get their taxes cut, they invest, they create jobs!  How has that worked out for us?  Based on what we see from the series of financial scandals that have been rocking us since Enron and before, they haven’t really been investing.  They have taken the wealth of our nation and, like gambling addict Bill Bennett, they have been on a binge of epic proportions. They literally broke the bank.

Outrage, welcome back.  You have been missed.

Disclaimer: I’ve been to the Capital Grille several times (although not with my Senator), and it gets my ringing endorsement.  The food and service are exquisite, but all the well-healed old white guys, who comprise most of the other clientele, make me feel like someone’s going to grab me by the collar, lift me out of my chair, and say, “Who let you in here, Punk?”

Senator Cardin, you have an open invitation.

Related Post: Pizzigati’s Wakeup Call

It’s interesting how both writers took what was essentially the same material and how differently they used it.  Both writers pierced through the facade of middleclass contentment to show the underlying anomie of our society.  But that’s where the similarity ends.

I remember reading Updike’s Couples for the first time and almost immediately recognizing my parents in his characters, so much so that I started trying to figure out who among Methodist Church’s Couples Club were Mom and Dad screwing around with.  The trials and tribulations of marriages and middle-class family life was Updike’s landscape in almost all of his exquisite short stories and in those novels for which he will be remembered.  As for infidelity, I think Couples was a bit over the top and he did better in his more intimate Marry Me: A Romance.   His nearly career spanning series of short stories chronicling the Maples, collected in Too Far to Go, watches a young couple married in the late fifties, raise children, navigate the tumultuous sixties, and finally break up in the seventies.  Along the way we see the couple gradually grow apart, tentatively cheat on one another, engage in full-grown adultery, and finally reconcile everything by divorcing.  At each point in time, whatever they are doing seems like the right thing to do.

When Updike cracked through the facade, what he found and what he revealed to us was human frailty, and he portrayed it gently and with a tenderness that no matter how exasperated we were with his characters, we still could also have affection for them.  I think this has much to do with Updike himself and how he lived his life.  The Maple’s marriage seems to have lasted about as long as Updike’s first marriage.  I don’t want to insinuate that the Maple’s stories are a thinly disguised autobiography.  I don’t believe they are, but I’m sure that his life and that of his neighbors in Ipswich certainly informed the emotional journeys of his characters.  His suburban landscape was colored by his own fairly gentle and contented life and his continued belief that inner peace was possible, whether it be found in taking the kids to the beach in the summer, having an adulterous affair, or maintaining an active commitment to his Protestant faith.

Cheever, on the other hand, cracked through the facade and found darkness.  One only has to look at his short story, “The Enormous Radio” to see the darkness.  In that story, a young couple buys a radio for their apartment.  The wife discovers that the radio can pick up the conversations of all their neighbors, and listens day after day to the dark secrets of the people in their apartment building.  It’s ugly, it’s prurient, it’s shameful.  It’s not good for our young couple either.

After Cheever died, his daughter’s memoir, Home Before Dark, revealed that Cheever had lived a very haunted life.  An alcoholic, and also bisexual, he inflicted much pain on his family through emotional abuse.  This completes the contrast between Cheever and Updike that shows up in their work.  Where Updike’s white middle-class men are befuddled by life and by aging, Cheever’s become angry and violent.

The beautiful part of art is that we can look at these two very different renderings of the same landscape and see the truth in both of them.

As for me, although I dated a few Gingers, I married a Mary Ann.  And while I listen to the Beatles more than the Stones, at middle-age guitar jams I can still rock out on “Brown Sugar.”

Cheever

Blake Bailey. Knopf 2009, Hardcover, 784 pages, $19.99

Too Far to Go

John Updike. Fawcett 1982, Mass Market Paperback, 256 pages, $3.85

Marry Me

John Updike. Ballantine Books 1996, Paperback, 320 pages, $5.83

The Stories of John Cheever

John Cheever. Vintage 2000, Paperback, 704 pages, $9.19

Home Before Dark (Contemporary Classics (Washington Square Press))

Susan Cheever. Washington Square Press 1999, Paperback, 256 pages, $5.99

That’s how it was for children then.  If the soundtrack of my childhood was provided by the Beatles, the quiet rumbling counterpoint was Vietnam.  I was far too young to truly understand or to be directly affected by the war, but there was no doubt that it mattered to the adults and near-adults around me.  It mattered to the neighbor’s son who got drafted and the other neighbor’s son who volunteered.  It mattered to the older brothers of my and my sister’s playmates who were old enough to be facing the draft.  It mattered to the Methodist church youth group and boy scout troop whose young leaders considered their options, some choosing to serve, some choosing Canada.  They were boys I looked up to, who carried the flag in the Queens Anniversary Day parade, who organized volleyball games at church picnics, who taught me how to hold a baseball bat, and who taught me how to tie a square knot.

Although I was too young to get drafted and both my older siblings were girls, there wasn’t one circle of relationships in my young life – family, school, neighborhood, church – that was left untouched by the war.  And not one adult in my life was left unaffected.  In the stoic silence of a friend’s father when a name was mentioned, in the joy in that same father’s voice when talking about his son’s imminent transfer stateside, in the funereal mood in another family’s living room presided over by a framed eight by ten on the mantelpiece, in my parents’ dinner table conversations about this or that person’s son, the war affected me in ways I am only coming to understand now.

These wars that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are not ours the way Vietnam was.    The men and woman who fight, and  their families, are but a small segment of our society.  They come from the rural regions, and from inner cities where military service offered a way out.  They come from families with patriotic traditions of service.  As of now, there are 140,000 troops in Iraq and over 32,000 in Afghanistan.  At the end of 1968, in contrast, there were of half a million troops in Vietnam.  During the Vietnam era, the draft raised over 2 million men for service.  As unfair as the process was, with deferments less easy to obtain by the poor and minorities, it still reached deeper into our society.  Today, most of us remain untouched by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

These wars of today are given perfunctory coverage in the evening news, if they are covered at all.  The stories of the soldiers, their anguish and their terror suffered in our names, while we keep up with Angelina and Brad and Jennifer, are never heard.  The scars, physical and emotional, are invisible to most of us.

Ryan Smithson is a soldier in the Army Reserves from upstate New York who served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005.  Upon returning home, he began writing personal essays, recounting his time in Iraq and what it was like returning home.  Several of his essays have been published on the web and next month, his book, Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI, will be published by Harper-Collins.

Ryan’s essay “A Little Taste of Death” appeared in the Summer/Fall 2007 issue of the Oregon Literary Review, his essay “Silence and Silhouettes” appeared in Shattercolors Literary Review, and his essay “Hard Canvas” appeared in Identity Theory.

Ghosts of War

Ryan Smithson. Collins 2009, Hardcover, 336 pages, $5.74

Coming from a liberal northeastern background this sudden discovery piqued my interest.  There were no biographies of O’Connor at the time, but in the summer of that year, her collected letters had been published.  I spent a significant amount of time that semester in the university library reading The Habit of Being, to the detriment of my other studies, I might add. Her letters were fascinating.

Her stories had been shocking in several ways.  First, they were violent.  “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is about a pair of escaped convicts who murder an entire family.  Just because.  It’s the literary equivalent of the film “Natural Born Killers,” terrifying to watch but impossible to stop watching.

The other shocking element, especially for the time (the late seventies) where moral relativism was still somewhat in vogue, was her sense of moral clarity revealed in her ironic twists.  One of the classic forms of the short story, which we learn in middle school from O. Henry and Maupassant, is the story that has an ironic twist at the very end.  There is no literary genre that is more eclectic in style and form than the short story, and the classic dramatic structure of O. Henry is not the only way to write a short story, and indeed it was out of style long before O’Connor was writing.  O’Connor, however, took this structure and raised the stakes.  A character in an O’Connor story who faced a story-ending ironic twist did not have to confront the fact that, for example, he sold his prized watch and his wife sold her beautiful hair to buy presents for one another (“The Gift of the Magi”), or a husband and wife had brought financial ruin upon themselves through vanity (“The Necklace”).  Instead, at the end of an O’Connor story, a character might find that he is damned for all time.  It’s clear to most critics that O’Connor’s faith, probably more than her “southern-ness” influenced her world view and her fiction, but it was her artistry that allowed her to write these powerful stories with no hint of preachiness  and barely mention of religion.  She wasn’t an evangelist, she was a seeker of truth.

So who was this southern woman who wrote about the grotesque?  Her letters revealed that she was both incredibly normal and grounded, but also driven and passionate about her writing.  In her letters, she wrote to friends about the stories she was writing at the time, the finished versions of which I was reading.  Along with John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, I can’t think of any better guide for beginning writers than her letters.

O’Connor had a long battle with lupus before she died, and wrote frankly and honestly to her friends about her daily struggles, but with no hint of self-pity and it never seemed to influence her work.  She had very strong opinions about her art and what she had to say in her fiction, so she eschewed the confessional style that was coming into favor at the time.  I wonder what she would think about the current celebrity culture where we are constantly bombarded with Too Much Information about the personal lives of everybody.

It was during that time when I made my first serious attempts at writing, and I tried several times to write O’Connor-like stories.  They were all miserable failures and I learned that what we write is as much a product of who we are and where we come from as it is of who we admire.  As a protestant white male from Queens, NY, it’s impossible for me to write as if I were a Catholic woman from Georgia (although I might want to create such a character, but that’s characterization, not theme).  Subsequent attempts to write like John Updike  and John Cheever didn’t work out either.  I eventually figured out that I needed to learn how to write like me, and O’Connor would have probably agreed.

Still, those letters stayed with me, the way she interspersed serious serious literary discussions with brief glimpses into her daily life.  Part of my novel, Winslow, is composed of letters written by a seventeen year-old old girl to her young man who has gone off to war.  I didn’t realize when I first started writing them that their style, combining both serious thematic content and interesting glimpses of daily life that revealed character, was unconsciously influenced by those letters that I read over twenty-five years ago. (We don’t write letters like that these days, we Twitter).  That is until, completely on her own, Sarah started providing Josh with updates about the peafowl she was raising.

Flannery

Brad Gooch. Little, Brown and Company 2009, Hardcover, 464 pages, $15.99

The Habit of Being

Sally Fitzgerald (Editor). Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1988, Paperback, 624 pages, $10.67

This week, Salon.com is publishing a series of articles about the problems combat veterans are facing coming home.  Untreated PTSD and callous treatment by the military are driving suicide and homicide numbers to the highest levels in decades.  In the first article, we read about Adam Lieberman, whose problems were ignored by the army until he attempted suicide.  Before that, he was a drunk, a fuck-up, anything other than a soldier traumatized by harrowing and gruesome combat experiences.  Just reading about them sends jolts through my nervous system:

“A guy’s face was blown off from his nose to his chin,” he said as we sat at his dining room table with Heidi while he was home on leave recently. The U.S. soldier was gagging, drowning in blood without a mouth or nose. A medic performed an emergency tracheotomy. The soldier died anyway.

During another engagement a gunner atop Adam’s Humvee suddenly collapsed in Adam’s lap. Only a thin flap of skin attached the gunner’s head and torso. Beheaded. Adam vomited.

He once saw the lower half of a friend’s body sheared off by a roadside bomb. In the seconds that followed before he died, his friend still moved his right arm and tried to talk. He looked at Adam. Adam described the look in his eyes as “terror.”

Even after the attempted suicide, instead of proper treatment, the army charged him with defacing government property for writing his suicide note on a wall.  Then they got his mother to help them whitewash it.

The introduction to the series: “Death in the USA: The Army’s fatal neglect”

The first article: “The Death Dealers took my life!”

And I think of John Updike, who illuminated private lives and wrote so lovingly of the world, who called snowfall “an immense whispering” and compared a brilliant snowy day to overdeveloped film. Who re-created the backyards and clotheslines of small-town 1940s Pennsylvania and described the way a girl walked in the hall of high school carrying her books against her body, and in a great story, “My Father’s Tears,” three years ago in the New Yorker, he gave us his father bidding him goodbye on a train platform. Nothing was beneath his careful attention.

“Bereft” at Salon.com

But we are dreamers and that makes us vulnerable to scam artists.  No matter how smart we are in everything else, we can fall prey to those who know where our buttons are: so-called literary agencies who charge reading fees or refer us to “critiquing services” (with a special discount of course), vanity presses, and hucksters selling books that will reveal the secrets to getting published.  You can find examples of this on the right sidebar of this blog.  I signed up with Google AdSense, which scans my content and feeds appropriate ads.  Given that this blog is about writing, they keep serving up scam artist.  Occasionally, they feed an ad for a legitimate MFA program, but for the most part, it looks like the classifieds in the back of Reader’s Digest.  If the mix of the ads doesn’t improve soon, I’m removing it.

A few years ago, when I was in a particularly mischievous mood, I visited the website of one of these fraudulent literary agencies, The New York Literary Agency, impressed by how creative they were in naming themselves.  I won’t provide a link.  You can Google them and find not only their site, unchanged, along with hundreds of other links to discussion boards that expose their fraud.  The website allowed you to submit a query to them for consideration.  Again, I was feeling a little mischievous, so here is how I filled out their questionnaire:

Name: Nick Caraway

How Did You Hear of Us: Web

Title of Work: Rising Sun

Synopsis: Jake has been wounded in the war and cannot have sex. He is in love with Brett, who is a nymphomaniac. Brett, whose  heart was broken when her own true love was killed, loves Jake, but sublimates her love by sleeping with all of Jake’s friends. This makes Jake cranky. They all travel to Spain where Brett has an affair with a young bullfighter who wears tight pants. Jake’s friend, Robert, gets jealous and beats the bullfighter to within an inch of his life.

Two days later, I received an email from Sherry Fine, Vice President of Acquisitions, expressing her interest in my work and asking my to send several chapters for further evaluation.

I admit I had some fun messing with them, but not as much fun as I am now having by posting this on my blog.

If you’re looking for something to help your writing or to re-motivate you, don’t bother clicking on the right-sidebar.  Find a workshop or get yourself a copy of John Gardner’s classic:

The Art of Fiction

John Gardner. Vintage 1991, Paperback, 240 pages, $5.29

I have always been amazed when conservatives rail against the idea of “wealth redistribution.”  They seem to be completely ignorant of history and that one of the fundamental purposes of government is to redistribute wealth.  This has been true since the beginning of civilization.  Sometimes wealth is distributed less inequitably than others, but make no mistake, wealth has always been redistributed.  When we consider the wealth of the entire nation, the profits that are produced by all of the people, it has always been redistributed.

In his book, Pizzigati, traces the history of that redistribution, from times where most of the income flowed into a tiny percentage sitting at the top of the pyramid, the so-called gilded age, to the golden age of the middle class, the 50’s and 60’s when tax rates for the rich were the highest, labor unions were strong, and government intrusion into business was at it’s height.  It was during that time that CEO’s of major companies, although well paid, were low-key figures, and who’s homes were modest compared to today’s royal standards.  And it was not that long ago.

Pizzigati specifically takes on some of today’s CEO’s and their unbelievable compensations and asks several questions.  First, are they, is anybody, worth that much money?  Given what many of them actually did to the companies they led, the answer is no.  Second, is the growing chasm separating the tiny group at the top of our society that owns ninety percent of the wealth from the vast majority who create that wealth god for us as a nation, and as a society?  How has it poisoned our culture?

Pizzigati’s remedies may come across as radical and could be labeled by the right as socialist, or even communist, but they are not.  He is simply arguing for a return to a set of national and social values that flourished during a significant portion of the twentieth century and created the richest, and for a time, the one of most equitable of nations.

Updated 2/1/2009:

Too Much: Sam Pizzigati’s web column.

Greed and Good

Sam Pizzigati. Apex Press 2004, Hardcover, 659 pages, $31.46

John Updike (1932-2009)

John Updike’s Life and Work from Salon

In my job search I had been traveling from one modern glass box to another.  This was an image from an earlier, more personal time.  The storefront was glass and black, with striped awnings.  There were details in masonry and fine guilt-edged lettering and above all a simple symmetry of design that was both firm and tasteful.  In the windows of the storefront were the latest hardcover offerings for the coming holiday season.  Somewhere on one of the floors above the store I imagined was the office where Max Perkins pored over manuscripts from his discoveries: Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe.

I stood there for a few minutes, catching my breath, opening a few more buttons on my coat in an effort to cool down.  People passed by me, taxi’s and bicycle messengers sped by in the street in front of me, taking no notice of the masterpiece of architecture in their midst.

But it wasn’t just the architecture.  It was a place where great books had been published.  Every young writer imagines walking by a city bookstore and seeing their book displayed in the front window.  My writing dream had temporarily been set aside during that tumultuous year when I was trying to find my first job and I was among the eleven percent of us who were unemployed.

The dream came back for a few minutes that day.  Then I had to move on.  I had to get to an interview in a glass box.

Epilogue…

That beautiful building still stands, but it is no longer owned by Scribner’s Sons.  The store is now owned by skin care and cosmetics retailer Sephora.  The publishing company itself is an imprint owned by Simon & Schuster.

The entire publishing industry is undergoing a complete implosion.  All the major publishing houses, Simon & Schuster included, are laying off employees and severely cutting back on new acquisitions.  That dream of seeing your book in the window of a brick and mortar storefront has become a dream of a past age.

Here’s an article from Time about the current state of publishing, and here’s an essay about the new publishing paradigm by writer and publisher Cantara Christopher.

Updated 1/25:

Yet another take on publishing in the twenty-first century at Ward Six.

These words reference and were inspired by I Corinthians 13.  I am by no means a bible scholar, but I happened to recognize these references to a particular passage that I am using as a theme for Winslow.  I’m also not particularly religious, and I firmly believe in secular government, but if you’re going to reference scripture, and use words that can touch believers of all faiths (and even non-believers whom Obama made a point of including) you can’t find a better passage to reference than this:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face-to-face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

I think it’s entirely appropriate that a poet speak at a presidential inauguration.  I just saw filmmaker Ken Burns on television describing America as a country based on nothing more, nothing less, than ideas.  I believe that is true.  We are a nation of immigrants, all from different cultures and different religions.  The only thing that binds us together are the ideas first expressed by Thomas Jefferson what he wrote of “truths we hold self-evident.”  The power of these truths is that they have been in the past, and should be now and in the future, stronger than anything that divides us.

Words, that express ideas, that attempt to articulate truth, matter.  They matter deeply.

One can be skeptical about art that is produced to support a state event.  How can it be any good?  Isn’t it just fancy propaganda?  To ask that question ignores the difference between  art and politics.  Art seeks to express deep universal truths.  It may or may not align with a political agenda.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.

I imagine that it’s very difficult to create a poem that both serves its inspirational purpose, but also reaches beyond political agendas to to touch some universal truth that resonates with us.  As much as I love it, Ginsberg’s “Howl” (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…”) isn’t going to cut it at an inauguration.  The poem must be patriotic, which doesn’t mean it has to be propagandistic.  The poem must be positive, but not falsely so.  It must be emotionally moving, but not sentimental.  But its most important purpose at such an occasion is to give voice to our common identity, those ideas that bind us together, and the journey that we have been on in perfecting how reality reflects those ideas.

As a writer, and especially as a poet of modest talent, I’m in awe of how well Elizabeth Alexander spoke for us.  Every word, every image, contains an epic story:

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.

From “From Books, New President Found Voice“, Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Photograph by Caroline Bubbers

Election day of 2004 found me in, of all places, Austin, Texas.  I had been working as a contractor at the time, designing a dimensional database for an Austin-based company.  That night I watched the election returns with some co-workers at a jazz club on Sixth Street.  The place was empty except for us, the bartender, a single waitress, and the four musicians on stage.  The sound was turned all the way down on the multiple televisions scattered throughout the club, but the CNN graphics told the story well enough.  It was going to be close again, but we were going to also lose again.  I couldn’t decide whether I was shocked that we had re-elected the man I believed to be the worst president in history, or it was completely predictable.  I admit that I had been frustrated by the ineptitude of John Kerry’s campaign.  It followed in a long line of inept campaigns:  Al Gore’s, Mike Dukakis’s, George McGovern’s.  Still, the sheer incompetence of George W. Bush had been stunning in itself.  We were already embroiled in a preemptive war that we had started based on provocations that at best had been imagined and at worst, manufactured.  Our president had embarrassed us all around the world.  He embarrassed us every time he opened his mouth.  Clearly, anyone could be better.

Little did I know that the worst was yet to come.

I was still working in Austin the following August when Hurricane Katrina swept through the gulf and devastated New Orleans.  New Orleans, just like Austin, was among the few places I had traveled to on business over the years that I had fallen in love with.  I guess it’s a weakness for places with thriving musical scenes, great restaurants, and a unique local cultural identities that defy the force of suburban blandness.  (Yeah, I know I live in Columbia, MD).  The cruel, seemingly vindictive, neglect that caused New Orleans to become a post-apocalyptic nightmare enraged me, even while my conservative business associates were making callous, even racist wisecracks about the misery in New Orleans.  On September 3, 2005, I wrote to a friend:

I first visited New Orleans in 1994 when I went there for a week to work a Computer Associates Trade show. It was love at first sight. The music, the food, the architecture, the way people talk, the pride and love that the they have for their history and culture. I was back there many times over the years and it became my favorite place in the whole world. I’ve got no illusions about the poverty and crime there — there were parts of the city that were very dangerous — but I still loved the place.

I’ve been in a slow burn this whole week. Having traveled a bit around America and having met lots of folks on all sides of the political spectrum, I have a pretty positive opinion of the generosity and decency of the American people when they know the truth. I know that all of us would have been fine this week if the entire country ground to a halt while every single plane, bus and truck in the land were sent there to rescue people. All that was needed for that to happen was for the president to pick up the phone and to call a few CEO’s. They would have done it and the rest of us would have managed. I should not have been able to get on my plane back from Austin last night because the plane I was on should have been flying refugees, food or medicine. Instead there are dead children on the floor of the convention center where I once pitched my software. They weren’t killed by looters or by the “armed thugs” on Magazine Street, or by an “act of God”. They were killed by that vacuous, amoral idiot in the White House. Born-again Christian? That’s a crock. Somehow, in all that time he claims he spent reading the gospels, he missed part where it says that we are here to take care of one another. I guess it’s easy to miss, since Jesus only says it two or three times on each page.

Katrina was, of course, the turning point in George W. Bush’s relationship with the American people.  It exposed the corruption, the cronyism, the incompetence, the contempt for the basic values on which this country was founded.  But it had been going on for years.  Sometimes it was obvious, but most often it wasn’t.  It was a gradual slide that happened over decades.

That night in Austin, I was reminded of an election night, long ago, and in another city.  I was young, idealistic, and enraptured by my beautiful and equally young and idealistic dinner companion.  We had no idea what our lives would be, who we would become, or even if we would be together in the future.  Such is the stuff of college romances.   The Italian restaurant in downtown Albany, like the club in Austin twenty-four years later, was empty but for us.  It was “our place,” and I’m cursing myself because I can’t recall the name of it.  There was a small black and white television set  on the bar that night, that I could see over my date’s shoulder.  We didn’t pay much attention to it during our dinner.  Instead, we enjoyed our veal marsala, and our cabernet, and the family who owned the restaurant and knew us, served us with warm quiet smiles, leaving us to ourselves.

Suddenly, something on the TV caught my eye.  One of the candidates, our candidate, was making a speech.  It was far too early in the evening for anyone to be making a concession.  I called out for the sound to be turned up, and we watched in shocked silence as Jimmy Carter conceded to Ronald Reagan.  In retrospect, I guess we should not have been shocked.  The polls in the weeks leading up to the election had been discouraging and we should have expected it, but as I remember it now, we were stunned.  Perhaps it was the decisiveness of the defeat.  Maybe it was the fact that we had both grown up in liberal families in New York City that left us so unprepared.  My date was inconsolable and I’m ashamed now that my first thoughts were about how this was going to affect the rest of my evening.  For better and worse, it affected the rest of our lives.

What had happened, which seemed disorienting at first, was a fundamental change in values.  “Government can’t solve the problem, government is the problem,” declared Ronald Reagan.  At the time, this played well to a population facing record unemployment, high interest rates, and recurring energy crises.  As a policy statement, over the years it came to mean, government shirking its fundamental responsibilities in the name of privatization.  “Government can’t do anything right, they screw everything up,” became the mantra, and everyone, especially the most vulnerable people in society were forced to fend for themselves.  The free market was God, whether you manufactured refrigerators, built cars, sold mortgages, or provided healthcare.  Somehow, if you needed a coronary bypass operation, you were supposed to shop around for the best price as if you were buying a mini-van.  And the Kafkaesque experience of dealing with getting HMO to actually pay for a claim is supposed to be better than dealing with a government “bureaucracy”?  One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that while dealing with health insurance companies has gotten decidedly worse, dealing with the DMV has gotten easier.

But that’s just so much liberal whining.  We learned that trees cause pollution and we were lectured about Cadillac driving welfare queens that no one could actually find.  Instead of expecting the State to coddle us, it was entrepreneurship that would lead the way.  It was the golden age of the entrepreneur.   Entrepreneurship certainly had created innovation in the past and had made this country great.  But just how many of us need to become entrepreneurs?  All 300 million of us?  And what about the two thirds of all new businesses that fail?  Our needs are modest.  Most of us simply want honest work that we can do proudly and allows us to support our families.  Living truly enriched lives, loving our families and instilling compassionate values in our children, improving our communities and the lives of our fellow citizens were given lip-service while we made Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal a bestseller and CEO’s became rock stars.

Instead of improving our society, by making it more just, more fair, more humane, we embarked on a massive redistribution of wealth, which conservatives deny they perpetrated.  The wealth of this nation has been redistributed from the vast middle class that was born in the years following World War Two and had survived until the early 1980’s, to an increasingly smaller and smaller minority who had the money to buy lower taxes, and increased protection by the government.  Ronald Reagan may have been right in declaring “Government is the problem,” but in a way he never intended.

Over time, the changes permeated our society.  Liberal  became a pejorative term, as used not only by southern conservative republicans, but by newscasters and pundits.  Even liberals started calling themselves progressives just to avoid the L-word.  The Vietnam War became a glorious cause, not a horrible mistake, and the one lesson the president had learned from it was not to give up in the face of overwhelming opposition from his own people, not to mention international allies.  Our failure in Vietnam was because we surrendered became the commonly accepted wisdom.

It all became a nightmare to me.  I had seen all those events through a child’s eyes.  The war, the civil rights movement, a nation struggling to make itself more perfect.  As an adult I saw that nothing had been learned at all.  Questioning an immoral and unjustified war was an act of treason.

And so on that election night in Austin in 2004, I wondered how it was possible that we had re-elected a man who had already proven himself completely unsuitable to the job.  And I remembered that night in Albany, when it all began, when the world suddenly became out of kilter in my eyes.  When I was told, “You don’t matter, your values are false, everything you think and feel is immoral.”

It took Katrina, and all the rest of the past four years of this disaster — torture, neglected veterans, illegal wire-taps, the assault on the environment, the economic meltdown — to show just how far we have gone off track.

But there have been things that I never believed I’d see.  A woman mounted a serious campaign for the presidency.  Even more surprising, she was defeated by an African-American man.  And then that African-American weathered still raging storms of fear and racism to a decisive victory.  I don’t think that young couple in the Albany restaurant, as naive and idealistic as they were, could ever have imagined that.  Although I can’t really speak for what she now believes, I’ll take a chance and try to say whether we can imagine it now.

Yes we can.