Imagine being and not being

Imagine doing both simultaneously.

Not easy? Well, suppose you could join a therapy group to help you over the rough spots. And if the reward for success was absolutely heavenly, you might consider trying it? Now suppose one requirement would be to make peace with your worst enemy. Would that be a disincentive? At the very least it’s an interesting proposition for discussion, isn’t it?

Dalma Takács likes to pose questions, big, probing, existential ones. And discussion is what she wants to stimulate with her new novel, The Condo or ... Life, A Sequel. In the spirit of full disclosure I must say that she is a generous friend who has given much good advice on the book I’m writing. She asks tough questions in a gentle way. I imagine that she uses the Socratic method as a professor of English at Notre Dame College in Cleveland, Ohio, and though Socrates does not appear as a character in her book—if he had, he could have had a chat with George Bernard Shaw—the reader senses his presence nonetheless.

She has developed a wonderfully imaginative concept as a framework to consider the nature of evil and whether it is acceptable or desirable to forgive evil. To what extent must one resist evil? Should we make a distinction between evil and the evil-doer? Do we connive with evil by not resisting it? And most crucially, do we destroy ourselves by resisting it too rigidly?

Questions like these arise in extreme circumstances like wartime, and Ms. Takács brings to her task the knowledge and experience that lends urgency to them. Like a good Socratic teacher, she doesn’t presume to give answers. She only frames the questions and so challenges us to think about them.

What is most remarkable is the deceptively simple vehicle she created for this discussion, an easy read of only 149 pages in paperback from Xlibris, described at http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.aspx?bookid=87668.

13 August 1961

Such things always happen on Sunday mornings, and there’s a reason; young Army guys are sleeping off their Saturday night parties.

My phone rang about three that morning. A coded message from division headquarters had arrived, and the code clerk had a three-day pass. Would I come in and decipher it? I quickly dressed and drove three kilometers to the former Nazi airfield that was home to my assigned unit, a medium tank battalion. The message was simple; our unit was on alert. Some seventy-five tank engines wrecked the pre-dawn silence, the radio networks crackled, and we awaited further orders. At four in the afternoon the alert ended, the radios were switched off, and therein—as they say—lies the tale.

We didn’t know why we were alerted or why we stood down, but within hours the whole world knew. In Berlin East German troops had begun tearing up streets and erecting barbed wire barriers that would become the infamous Berlin Wall. While we waited, thinking of swarms of Warsaw Pact tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap, President Kennedy was deciding not to take military action, a decision that determined a generation of Cold War relations.

Frederick Kempe’s book Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the World’s Most Dangerous Place is being released today by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. I’ll be eager to read it and to share with you some thoughts. 

Hidden Treasure

This afternoon on a walk among the twenty-five houses that make up our village we came upon a sign for a yard sale. It urged us onto private property we would not normally have entered. There was no longer a crowd or evidence of a sale, but the front door opened and a friendly face invited us in, even with our dog. We’d missed the sale, but the welcome was beyond resisting. There were books left, our weakness, lots of books, old ones. An early copy of Leaves of Grass had been sold, the owner said, to a man who told her he didn’t know much about books. We were envious, but we left with a contemporary mystery story by Henning Mankell, A Mencken Chrestomathy from 1937, and a much-used copy of More Language That Needs Watching: Second Aid For Writers and Editors, by Theodore Bernstein, a New York Times editor until 1950. The owner of the house was herself the wife and daughter-in-law of newspapermen and resisted our effort to pay.    

The Osprey Are Back

Their high-pitched tweets, so misleading, like sweet little birds in the brush. But no, that tweet belongs to a quick and violent predator. Still it’s good to have them back. I love their graceful aerobatics and their big ungainly nests balanced on a navigation light or the pilings of my neighbor’s dock. Soon they’ll have eggs to hatch, chicks to feed, and their innocent-sounding little tweets will fill the evening air, as they grab mice, fish, and small birds to feed the little ones.

Spring has come to the island. 

Safely on the Bottom?

Now that Osama bin Laden is safely on the bottom of the Arabian Sea, we can turn our attention back to the larger Mideast revolution—Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Libya et al—a new movement toward democracy fueled by social-network technology.

That’s quick shorthand for it, but not so fast, Buckaroos. Before Facebook and Twitter there was samizdat, the low-tech networking device invented forty-five years ago by Soviet dissidents, and look what it got them.

This Russian acronym—self  (sam) + publishing (izdat)—described the network created when a typist using seven sheets of onion-skin and carbon paper made copies of an uncensored document, distributed it to friends, each of whom made seven more copies and distributed those, etc. It was dangerous work. People were sent to prison camps for it.

But copies found their way into the hands of foreign correspondents and eventually onto western radio broadcasts to be heard, despite jamming, by the very Russians the censors meant to shield. This uncontrolled flow of information led to a growing movement of thoughtful and courageous adults whose political dissent had much more to do ultimately with the fall of communism and the Berlin wall than did the American president Ronald Reagan.

Something like that is what’s happening in the Middle East, though now the speed of transmission is instantaneous. But if we assume democracy will result, we may be mistaken. We have only to look at what developed in Russia, where there’s still little tolerance for uncontrolled news reporting and independent thinking.

What Else I Love

If you suspected that I’m fond of Chekhov, you’d be right. Especially “The Cherry Orchard,” and many of his short stories, in particular one called “Misery” and the famous “Lady With A Dog.” 

Here are some other works I love (not equally and in no order):

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Sea by John Banville

Sea Room by Adam Nicolson

The movie “Casablanca”

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi

The Hammerklavier Sonata by Beethoven

The movie “Babe” 

Many books by Stephen Hunter and James Lee Burke

Did I mention Anton Chekhov?

Formula One racing, but not nearly so much now that Bernie Ecclestone has turned a once-valiant and daring sport into his own private cash cow. It’s much less interesting under his control. It promises to become even less interesting if the takeover attempt by Rupert Murdoch and Italian investors related to Ferrari succeeds.  

What I think I should love and don’t yet: David Foster Wallace. Ulysses. Faulkner. Still trying. 

Bald Self-Promotion

My friend Larry McCoy has a book coming out in September. I’m still writing mine. My friend Steve Hunter has published sixteen or thereabouts and will have another out soon. What we have in common, in addition to writing, is that we all realize the unpleasant necessity of self-promotion.

It’s a necessity because publishers do not spend money promoting books—except for a few that sell anyway. In most cases you have to sell the thing yourself.

Wait a minute. Aren’t we supposed to be the fellows tucked away in our closets writing, thinking about structure and plot and character development and voice and all those aspects of a book that didn’t exist until we imagined it, and we’re supposed to be out there selling our books too? Not on yer life! What are we, Supermen?

Most of us are by nature quiet people who are happy alone in our garrets writing and would be miserably unhappy out trying to sell something, least of all ourselves. But publishing, being a business no different than insurance or oil or groceries, is about keeping revenue up and costs down. Publishing houses have much in common with banks, who prefer lending to rich people, and insurance companies, who prefer to insure the healthy.

So much for their problem. Now, about ours. Larry’s book, due in September, is called Did I Really Change My Underwear Every Day? It’s a funny book about the inconveniences of growing older. Larry’s a funny guy. I went to high school with him; he was funny then, and he’s still funny. In the meantime he had a successful career in the news biz and now writes regular essays on his website at http://larrymccoyonline.com/ in which he skewers the biz, himself, and others. It’s one of my favorite sites.

 Steve Hunter is a Pulitzer-prize film critic who writes thrillers, is a master of plot and dialog, and knows everything about guns. But Steve doesn’t do websites. He went one better. He wrote, produced and starred in a YouTube short promoting his latest Bob Swagger book titled Dead Zero. You can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5tKm9AUiow or by Googling Stephen Hunter’s Dead Zero.

Can’t wait to see what he’ll do to promote his next one. Or to see Larry’s next essay.