Book Review:  Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

Posted on September 7, 2024 by John Walters

I haven’t read Zorba the Greek since I was a young man in the late 1960s. It wasn’t as influential for my intellectual journey as Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, or Walden by Henry David Thoreau, but it was one of the works that helped give me a kick in the pants to get out and do something with my life. The occasion for this second look at Alexis Zorba is a fairly new translation of the Greek classic by Peter Bien. According to the translator’s introduction, this version is raunchier and more precise than the one that appeared decades ago: he has retained various expletives that the original translator left out, and in addition, he has worked from the original Greek, unlike the previous translation which was done from a French rendering, not from Greek. This has allowed Bien, as he explains, to go over problematic words and more precisely turn them into English.

Even though it was adapted from French rather than Greek, the original translation of Zorba the Greek became a worldwide phenomenon when it appeared in the early 1950s and was made even more famous by the 1964 Oscar-winning film starring Anthony Quinn. In the film, Alan Bates, an Englishman, plays the book’s narrator, but in the book the narrator is from the island of Crete, where most of the story takes place, and Zorba is from Macedonia, in northern Greece. The narrator’s voice in the book, in fact, very much reminds me of Kazantzakis himself, whose memoir Report to Greco I read a few years ago.

In short, the narrator is a writer who intellectualizes life, while Zorba is a laborer and a womanizer who revels in every moment of his flamboyant existence. When they meet in Piraeus, the port of Athens, the narrator, seemingly on a whim, decides to take Zorba along to southern Crete to help him open a lignite mine. They become good friends, and the narrator absorbs much of Zorba’s freewheeling philosophy as they eat, drink, meet women, and interact with the local villagers.

Kazantzakis is a very talented writer; his descriptions often become poetic as he, through the narrator, comments on the simple beauties and joys of life. Zorba’s moods, on the other hand, shift from pensive to bombastic from one moment to the next. The narrator is obviously envious of Zorba’s childlike, constantly amazed outlook on life, but at the same time he is unwilling to completely forsake his books and writings to adopt this lifestyle for himself. By modern standards, many of Zorba’s outbursts concerning women are blatantly misogynistic; however, I think it is important to take the story in its historical and geographical context. The culture and societal structures of Crete (and of Greece in general) shortly after the end of World War I, when the story takes place, were vastly different than that of the modern era, and readers need to keep this in mind. It reminds me of the boxed set of Looney Tunes cartoons that one of my sons recently gave me. In some of the discs, Whoopi Goldberg comes on to explain that some of the portraitures in Looney Tunes depict racial minorities in ways that today are considered wrong, but to censure or erase these cartoons would be the same as saying that these wrong viewpoints never existed. So: content warning. It’s the same with Zorba the Greek. Some of the things Zorba says are wrong by any standards, but that’s how some people thought and spoke back then, and thus it is portrayed by Kazantzakis in the book.

Would I recommend the book? It depends on whether you can handle the raunchiness and violence. It didn’t affect me personally now as hard as it did when I was a young man who had not yet stepped out and really lived life to the full. However, it does have its touching moments. As I mentioned above: Kazantzakis is a superb writer with a gift for poetic description. This alone is a good reason to give the book a try.

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Book Review:  Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain

Posted on August 31, 2024 by John Walters

Susan Cain is the author of one of the most profound and personally significant books I’ve read in recent years: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. In this volume she inverts another popular trope, namely that melancholia is inherently destructive, demonstrating through various examples as well as personal testimony the efficacy of bittersweet moods in the creative process and in the navigation of life in general. According to Cain, she obtained inspiration for the book as she pondered the conundrum of why sad, poignant music is often so inspirational. She attributes it to a yearning for a “perfect and beautiful world,” or, as she quotes the mythologist Joseph Campbell, our desire to “participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”

The primary definition of poignant in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary is “painfully affecting the feeling: piercing; deeply affecting: touching.” I feel this way often when something in a book or film brings back memories of when my kids were young. We were so busy raising them, and yet those were the most fulfilling years of my life. Tears stream down my cheeks as I realize how much I miss those days. Plato expressed it as “a yearning desire for something wonderful we can’t have.” C.S. Lewis called it an “inconsolable longing for we know not what.” Sufi Ibn Arabi referred to “the pain of separation as a spiritual opening.” Saint Teresa of Avila put it like this: “God wounds the soul but the soul longs to die of this beautiful wound.” Cain offers these examples and many more in her analysis of what makes the bittersweet so important.

In response to Leonard Cohen’s touching lyrics Cain says, “Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.” She points out studies showing that sadness drives creativity. “It’s not that pain equals art. It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.” She emphasizes that a teacher (or by extension a writer or other artist) needs to understand suffering.

In one section of the book, Cain dissects the American myth of positivity, success, and disdain for so-called losers. This is a cover-up and weakness, of course, because Americans experience as much sadness, despair, and loss, if not more, than people in the rest of the world, and the duplicity of the pseudo-success cover-up makes it more difficult for Americans to heal through honestly accessing their emotions.

I relate to some parts of the book more than others. For instance, Cain expends considerable effort detailing elite seminars she attends that only the wealthy would be able to afford. I also found it difficult to get into her description of a bizarre cult of “immortalists,” also known as radical life extension advocates or super-longevity enthusiasts – people who believe they can live forever and expend considerable effort to make that happen. Unfortunately, this causes them to eschew the bittersweet in their desire for eternal life. Cain counterbalances this extreme viewpoint by extolling the value of grief and impermanence in the following chapter. She points out that you can’t necessarily move on from profound grief; you carry it with you and it becomes part of you.

In the end, Cain raises the question: “What are you longing for?” She challenges readers to write the word “home” at the top of a piece of paper and imagine what they would write next. I thought about this for a long time. I don’t really consider the apartment where I currently live to be home, at least not more than an interim home. The house where I grew up as a child was a real home, and the houses where my wife and I raised our kids in Greece were true homes. Now? I couldn’t really pin down a particular place that I would call home. When I roamed the world as a young man I had a different concept of home. As I wrote in my memoir World Without Pain: “And home? I couldn’t go home again. Home was an abstraction from which one commenced a particular stage of the journey, not an absolute.”

A conundrum, to be sure. But that’s the value of this book. It makes you think, but even more: it makes you feel. And it helps you to realize that your feelings, both joyous and bittersweet, are essential elements in your journey through life.

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Book Review:  The Great Divide: A Novel by Cristina Henriquez

Posted on August 24, 2024 by John Walters

The Great Divide deals with the monumental historical event of the digging of the Panama Canal and the ramifications for Panamanians and others pulled into the epic drama of its building. However, it presents its themes in microcosm, through intimate looks into the lives of people affected by the overwhelming reality of the building of the canal. The machinations of governments remain mostly in the background; it is the effect of decisions in high places upon real people that is brought to the fore.

The title refers not just to the huge literal ditch that is dividing one continent from another; it also refers to the divisions between individuals as they confront the changing of their lives. For instance, a fisherman refuses to speak to his son when he takes a job as a digger in the Canal Zone; a sixteen-year-old girl, the child of a white plantation owner and a Black servant, leaves her family in Barbados to seek employment in Panama to pay for medical treatment when her sister becomes ill; when an American scientist researching a means to eliminate malaria moves to Panama, his wife becomes deathly sick.

It took me a while to become absorbed in this story because of the manner in which each subplot is introduced and then left hanging while another thread is added. Once all the major characters have made their appearances, though, their lives begin to intersect and blend in holistic patterns that afford a view of how the inevitable upheaval of the canal building impacts the people involved in it.

The strength of this novel is in its presentation of its characters with all their backgrounds and intricacies. They are depicted in fascinating detail, through flashbacks and even flash-forwards of what happens to them in years to come. This context adds to the appreciation of who they are and why they do what they do.

I don’t often read historical novels; usually if I am interested in a particular time I prefer its depiction in pure nonfictional history. This novel, though, while emotionally written, manages to avoid the melodrama that plagues so much historical fiction. I became invested in the characters without feeling that I had descended into an antiquated soap opera. This is one of the book’s strengths. Another is the way that it thoughtfully deals with so many pertinent issues: the audacity and racism of the Americans as they barge into another country, rip it apart, and then put it back together in their own image; the disruption of the lives of common Panamanians; discord between generations when confronted with inevitable change; attempting to eradicate deadly diseases that claim multitudes of lives; and the disparate toxic effects of colonization on both the oppressed and the oppressors.

Henriquez at no time yields to preachiness; she always confines her commentaries within the bounds of the metaphorical lives of her characters. This strengthens the book’s relevance and gives universality to its themes. It’s not just about the great divide that split the country of Panama in the early twentieth century; it is also concerned with the great divides that isolate humans one from another – and it poses the question of whether it is possible for us to breach these gaps.

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Book Review:  Joy Hunter by Alexis Jones

Posted on August 17, 2024 by John Walters

I picked this book up from the library because it seemed, at first glance, to be about a rejuvenating road trip in an RV, and I like travel stories. Then, when I read the author blurb on the inside back cover, I almost gave up on it before I started. It says that “Alexis Jones is an internationally recognized speaker, media personality, activist, and author.” It goes on to delineate the awards she has received, the famous people lists she’s been on, the appearances she’s made (including at the White House, United Nations, Harvard, Stanford, West Point, and on and on), her world travels, and her stint as a contestant on the TV show Survivor. I usually avoid books by celebrities. They offer advice from a position of power and wealth, and thus have little to say of practical value to us common folk. Still, I decided to try ten or twenty pages of Joy Hunter before I cast it aside, and I ended up reading the whole thing.

Jones is writing from a position of power and relative wealth, and I couldn’t help but be aware of that as I read her story. Merely to rent an RV, take off for a month and then more, and stay in fully-equipped RV camps, is something I dream of but cannot afford. And there’s the fact that Jones seems to have close friends everywhere; it seems that just about every town they travel through she’s visiting another intimate associate. I couldn’t relate to that at all. Most of the closest friends I have known have died, and sometimes I feel quite alone in the world. When I think about it, though, when I was hitchhiking around the world back in the 1970s I did meet a lot of people, and eventually I was able to stop here and there along the way for fellowship and refreshment. Still… Jones’s position of privilege has to be taken for granted as you read, almost as if this were a fantasy tale of a noble princess.

As for the road trip, it takes up a fairly small portion of the book at the end. What Jones mainly writes about are the personal traumas that led her to embark upon the road trip, including a miscarriage after she and her husband had tried so hard to have a child, and the discovery that the man who had raised her and she had always considered her dad was not her flesh father. The road trip is a last-ditch attempt to improve her emotional well-being, and this proves to be a resounding success.

What rescues this book from becoming a maudlin soap opera is Jones’s writing skill. She really is a very good writer, and she weaves together the multitudinous flashbacks and reminiscences that lead up to the road trip with skill and acumen. And the lessons she imparts on self-love and joy-seeking really are relevant to everyone, even those of us who do not have vast networks of friends and associates and cannot afford to rent RVs or take weeks off work. After all, even if we are not all princesses and princes, we enjoy stories about fantasy lands and long to live happily ever after.

In conclusion, I recommend this book. Even if most readers may not be able to relate to the privilege and power of the author, it tugs on the emotional heartstrings, and there are lessons to be learned from it.

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Book Review:  Philosophy for Polar Explorers by Erling Kagge

Posted on August 10, 2024 by John Walters

Not long ago I was pleasantly surprised by the beautiful photos and thoughts in Silence: In the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge. This book is similar in that it is full of breathtaking photographs, mainly of Kagge’s journeys to the poles, and also brimming with insightful comments on courage, decision-making, goals, taking risks, loneliness, and other topics. Kagge was the first explorer ever to successfully meet the three-pole challenge: walking to the North Pole, walking to the South Pole, and climbing to the summit of Mount Everest. Someday I hope he writes a comprehensive memoir about his achievements. In the meantime, the lessons he shares from his unique experiences are edifying, well-written, and worthwhile.

He writes: “I am no scientist, but my experience has been that, to a large extent, feelings of insecurity, loneliness, and depression stem from the flattening of the world that occurs when we are alienated from nature.” In fact, he emphasizes that he feels lonelier in a crowd than he felt while he was walking alone across the ice to the South Pole. I can relate to this. I felt less lonely hitchhiking around the world alone than I feel sometimes in my apartment building – where I am ostensibly surrounded by other people but don’t know any of them on a personal level.

The book bursts with inspiration on making decisions and reaching goals. He says: “For me there’s a great joy in setting targets.” And then, to reach these targets involves a lot of practical gumption. For instance, when he was alone on the ice, despite the cold he always got up early, knowing that there was a lot to be accomplished each day. In this context, he writes that to him raising his three teenage girls seems to sometimes take more courage than mountain climbing. And: “It takes so much courage to battle a serious illness, to show kindness, to keep promises, to end relationships – not to mention daring to love and to express love – and to deal with betrayal, disappointments, and sorrow.”

In any accomplishments in life, Kagge stresses the importance of not undervaluing ourselves, avoiding small-mindedness, and distinguishing the impossible from the merely improbable. Real courage involves risk, and avoidance of risk leads us down the broad path to mediocrity. “Humans need challenges, moments that make us feel we need to earn the gift of life.”

Near the end of the book, Kagge writes of the “champion’s dilemma,” something that can afflict explorers after they reach the goals they have set for themselves – or anyone who reaches a goal or dream and has no idea where to go from there. The solution, of course, is to set new goals. For him, after he accomplished the three-pole challenge, he became a parent. This “gave birth to innumerable new dreams and visions.”

By the time I finished reading this book, I realized that I too need new goals and dreams. For a decade or so I’ve been a single parent, but not long ago I became an empty-nester. In the absence of the direct responsibility of parenting I have been foundering – just barely treading water and wondering what to do with myself. I have the writing, of course, which I accomplish daily, but I need something to replace the void of my family’s absence. This is an ongoing concern. Regardless of your own life’s status, though, I highly recommend Kagge’s book. You’re sure to find something in it to console, inspire, and challenge you.

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The Nemesis of Content Creators

Posted on August 7, 2024 by John Walters

When I moved back to the United States from Greece, it was not my initial intention to become a self-employed freelance writer. I looked for a job. Any job. Well, almost any job. I drew the line at flipping burgers at a fast food restaurant, although some of my sons took such employment for a time when they first got here. However, I could not find a traditional job. My first attempt was to seek a position teaching English as a Second Language at one of the many private language schools in San Diego, the city where I initially landed. After all, I had taught English in Greece for over fifteen years; I was very good at it and had excellent references. I went around to every language school in the area and filled out applications, left reference letters, and so on. Several of the schools were impressed but would not give me an interview; one of them honestly explained to me that though they would like to hire me they couldn’t because I didn’t have a college degree. Damn. Whatever. At one point I applied for a position at a tech company. I impressed the hiring manager and went into the office for a video interview with a higher-up, who really liked me. Again, they wouldn’t hire me. In this case, it was blatant ageism. I was almost sixty years old, and no one else in their office was over thirty. When I went to apply for a job as a Fed-Ex delivery assistant for the Christmas holiday season, hundreds of people showed up to apply for a couple of dozen positions.

And so I turned to the internet to search for freelance writing work to stave off abject poverty. After all, at the time I was responsible for several of my sons who had accompanied me to the New World. Fairly quickly I found jobs. For instance, I got a few hundred dollars for an article on the local surfing scene for a start-up website. Soon after, I got a steady gig writing daily articles on topics of interest to seniors for a company selling Medicare Advantage plans. When that source dissipated, I found websites offering paid writing work that could be claimed on a one-by-one basis. It didn’t pay much, but it supplemented the income from occasional short story sales and royalties from my self-published books. One website would fold and another would open. For months I was writing travel articles: one or two a day for a major online travel company. For a time I was writing mainly business articles. Later I wrote articles on history, literature, and other topics for an educational website; this was one of my favorite gigs.

And then, sadly, came AI, which scrapes the Internet, acquires data, processes it, and regurgitates it in the form of generic articles similar, though far inferior, to those I had been writing. The websites I’d been writing for didn’t care about the diminished quality; using AI was so much cheaper that they gladly took the hit. What they were mainly after was increasing traffic to their websites via SEO through key words and phrases. Quantity, not quality, is what they wanted. One by one, these websites closed to human writers. If we suffered financially as a result, they didn’t give a damn; after all, we were freelancers and they were not legally responsible for us.

By this time, my sons had moved out and I was on my own, so at least my struggle for income did not affect them. I was too old to look for some shit job to pay the bills, so in desperation I searched for any type of paid online work I could find. (I had begun to collect Social Security but because I had spent decades overseas I could only claim a few hundred dollars a month.) Most of this online work involved short writing tasks and even filling out surveys. I figured anything was better than nothing.

And now we come to the reason for this essay. One of the most lucrative survey sites suddenly cut me off. The ostensible reason seems to be that I took my computer to another city for a few days and when I got back the algorithm will no longer recognize and approve my network connection. But here’s the thing: when I wrote a human support member to correct the error, I was told there was nothing they could do – that I had to wait until the algorithm self-corrected. In other words, the human was helpless; the algorithm was in charge. What the hell? What have we come to that in a matter such as this, humans will defer to algorithms to make final decisions about humans? Something is very, very wrong. People have become so lazy and indifferent that they are unloading tasks onto algorithms that algorithms are not or should not be designed for. Already even fiction markets are being inundated with bland, generic stories that obviously have been created by machines. They are attempting to cope with this flood of crap, but it slows down their editorial processes and makes it more difficult to work with real human artists. It’s an ongoing concern. I can’t say that I have answers, as I am still dealing with it myself, but somehow we have to set clear limits between what machines can and should do, and what should be left to humans as they communicate one to another.

As a postscript, I can report that someone at this particular website in question finally did take the trouble to investigate and correct the mistake. However, the larger problem in general of ceding online authority to algorithms still applies.

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Book Review:  Outside Looking In: A Novel by T. C. Boyle

Posted on August 3, 2024 by John Walters

T. C. Boyle has a penchant for examining countercultural issues, especially those from the sixties and seventies. One of his previous novels, Drop City, concerns a commune of hippies that decides to relocate from California to Alaska; the transplanted freaks are ultimately unprepared for the stark realities of the harsh climate and struggle for survival. In Outside Looking In, Boyle focuses on the early 1960s and Timothy Leary’s initial experiments with psychedelic drugs and communal lifestyles.

After a prologue set in Switzerland in 1943, in which the scientist who initially discovered LSD’s radical properties gets unexpectedly blasted out of his mind, Boyle cuts to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962. The story is told in three parts through the viewpoints of Fitz and Joanie, a couple with a teenage son. Fitz is a Harvard graduate student in psychology who is studying under Leary. In the first part, through Fitz’s viewpoint, the couple begins to become part of Leary’s “inner circle” by attending weekend psychedelic parties. They initially take psilocybin and gradually move on to the much more potent but then-untested LSD. At the time, both these drugs were legal, and Leary had Harvard’s approval to pursue the project. In part two, told through Joanie’s point of view, Leary’s followers spend two summers in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, where Leary has booked an entire seaside hotel. In this idyllic setting, they continue to indulge in LSD, psilocybin, marijuana, alcohol, and other drugs, supposedly in the name of research. During the second summer, the authorities in Mexico deport them.

In the third part, told through Fitz’s point of view, Leary is gifted a 64-room mansion in Millbrook, New York, and he invites the entire inner circle and their families to move in. They continue their so-called experiments, which basically amount to staying stoned and drunk most of the time, sharing communal chores and activities, and concocting ever-wilder schemes to expand and unite their minds. One of these involves drawing the names of two random people from a hat; the selected couple spends a week together, freed from household duties and encouraged to partake of large amounts of LSD. When Fitz is paired with an eighteen-year-old teenage girl, he develops an obsessive infatuation with her, losing interest in his wife and son and everything else around.

The Millbrook section traces the deterioration of the group’s harmony, which is inevitable, really, considering that they are united around Leary’s charisma and overindulgence in hallucinogenic substances. The drugs eventually render them at least partially glazed and dysfunctional, and Leary proves to be an untrustworthy guru; by the end of the book he is planning to take off for a six-month-long honeymoon in India with one of the multitudinous beauties that he regularly sleeps with. This last section, to my mind, is a bit tedious; Boyle takes his time detailing the inescapable deterioration, and it is particularly onerous because Fitz is so enamored with his teenage heartthrob that he can think of little else. Joanie eventually gets fed up with the commune and Fitz’s shenanigans and leaves with their son, and Fitz hardly even notices or cares.

In conclusion, it’s an interesting novel, and absorbing in parts, and I would recommend it but with reservations. The last third, as I mentioned, really does stretch out too long, and the climax comes with a fizzle rather than a bang. It doesn’t touch on any of the legal problems that are ahead for Leary; it ends with the so-called inner circle helplessly enmeshed in an experiment gone awry, an experiment that has descended into a mishmash of dysfunctional relationships and drug-muddled minds.

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Book Review:  Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

Posted on July 27, 2024 by John Walters

Let me preface this review by clarifying that I have not seen the award-nominated film of the same name by Martin Scorsese, so reading this book was my introduction to this horrific story. After oil is discovered on land belonging to the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, the Osage people become wealthy, but local businessmen William Hale, his relatives, and criminals he hires conspire to murder numerous Osage who have headrights to the oil deposits so that they can take over their riches. The murders are perpetrated by shooting, poisoning, and bombing; it is almost unbelievable to what evil depths the local authorities, who ostensibly are the guardians of the Osage, will do in their greed to acquire their vast wealth.

The book is told in three parts. The first focuses on an Osage woman named Mollie Burkhart. One by one her relatives are being killed, and investigations financed by Hale and others intentionally lead nowhere. The second part features Thomas White, a former Texas Ranger who is now an FBI agent. J. Edgar Hoover dispatches him to Oklahoma to solve the murders; he puts together a team and slowly unravels the intricate webs of deception that cover the involvement of Hale and his minions. The third part is a first-person account by the book’s author Grann describing his research journey to Oklahoma and his discoveries of documents that prove the Osage murder conspiracy was much more extensive than White discovered during his investigation.

This book’s significance goes far beyond a mere murder mystery. It uncovers the shame of white attitudes towards Native Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a shame that ascended to the highest levels of government. Because members of Congress considered the Osage to be childlike, incompetent, and incapable of handling their own affairs, they authorized the system of guardianship through which local whites managed Osage wealth. The whites used the system as an opportunity to plunder the riches they were supposed to be safeguarding; many of the guardians concocted elaborate schemes to rob their Osage clients of everything they owned, giving them poor advice, falsifying documents, and even resorting to murdering the people they were supposed to protect. Conspiracies ran so deep that they were nearly impossible to overcome; they included local lawyers, sheriffs, policemen, and businessmen. Only White, coming in from the outside as a federal agent, was able to meticulously expose the immense scandal – and Grann makes it clear that he had to do it despite the interference of his overseer J. Edgar Hoover, who was more concerned with his own personal image than with seeing to the welfare of the Osage.

It is a complex story, but Grann presents it with skill and acuity so that readers are never lost in the maze of plots and subplots. The amazing thing is that it is as wild and unpredictable and unlikely as a work of fiction, but it’s all true. It all really happened. It’s disheartening to know that such evil exists in the world, but we knew that already, didn’t we? The triumph is that Hale and his cronies did not succeed. Their plot was exposed and they were tried and sent to prison for life. The tragedy is that so many members of the Osage Nation died, and some of their killers were never caught. Sometimes when I am making a bit of extra cash online by taking surveys I come across a question like: “Are you proud of America’s history as a nation?” True stories like this cause me to take a long pause before answering.

*     *     *

After I finished writing this review and pondered the subject further, I realized I needed to add a postscript to touch on a couple of related topics.

Firstly, in reference to the demonic businessman Hale who relentlessly preyed upon the Osage, I thought of the similarities between him and modern television characters that are idolized such as Kevin Costner as the ranch owner in Yellowstone and basically all the nasty family members in Succession. These award-winning shows are so acclaimed that I tried watching the first season of each. In short, they disgusted me. On both shows there were no good guys whatsoever, only various shades of villains. And the families in each had acquired immense wealth by exploiting the poor. It made me think that the Osage murders were not a fluke in American society, but rather in fact the norm. All too often wealth is built by the rich on the backs of the poor, and the rich use their resources to consolidate their hold on power through generous donations (think bribes) to political patrons. It still happens. Where have all the heroes gone?

Secondly, I remembered my personal connection with Native Americans in Oklahoma. When I attended a renowned writing workshop in 1973, I met a full-blooded Kiowa named Russell Bates. I was just starting out as a writer, but Russ already had several credits, including sales to major science fiction magazines and anthologies and an internship as a screenwriter for Star Trek (the original series). (Russ would go on to co-write an episode for the Star Trek animated series that won an Emmy Award.) Anyway, Russ and I became friends and for a time roomed together in Los Angeles while we tried to write a teleplay. Shortly before I took off on my extensive world travels, Russ decided to return to Oklahoma, so Russ and I and another writing workshop grad named Paul Bond set out on a road trip to take him home. When we arrived at Russ’s parents’ house, they treated Paul and I royally, feeding us their specialty of fried bread and beans, which was oh my God so delicious. On one occasion Russ and his brother David and Paul and I went to a bar for a few pitchers of beer. When we were getting ready to leave, somehow I ended up first out into the parking lot, where a gang of white guys surrounded me, intending to punish me for hanging out with Indians. One of them punched me, splitting the skin open above my left eye, and then David exited the bar. When he saw what was happening, he let out a roar and advanced. He was a big guy and all the white rapscallions scattered and fled. Russ’s mom patched me up when we got home and that was that, but it was a stark reminder that our Kiowa friends sometimes still had to endure the prejudice of narrow-minded white assholes. Some people never seem to learn.

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In Pursuit of Excellence

Posted on July 24, 2024 by John Walters

I have been doing power yoga for decades now, at least three times a week as part of my exercise regimen. Since I began when I was still living in Greece and my schedule and location did not permit me to go to a school or studio, I devised my routine by studying numerous books and culling out the best advice from each. I’ll never forget what one of the authors wrote about the proper mindset during exercise. He said that the ultimate goal is not perfection because you never become perfect. That’s why yoga is called a practice. There is no arrival point; your aim is continual improvement. That’s true of many things in life, of course, including writing. It is important to fully focus on what you are doing so that everything you do is your best possible effort at the time.

Recently I forgot this and attempted to juggle too many projects at once, including finalizing three books and also writing at least five hundred new words a day. The result was that my attention dissipated into several different directions, which slowed me down and made it difficult to properly concentrate on anything. For instance, I had all but completed my new collection of memoirs and essays, Thoughts from the Aerie, but it was roughly assembled; it needed some fine tuning. And I couldn’t do that while I was simultaneously attempting to do all these other things. I had to put the rest aside and focus on the book. As I was beginning to realize and implement this, I came across a book called Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport, which reinforced my efforts to slow down and work on one project at a time, get it right, and then move on. Newport suggests three principles: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. This confirmed the direction I had been heading in sidelining some tasks so I could fine-tune Thoughts from the Aerie. I rearranged the content, took out a few pieces that didn’t quite fit, and revised it thoroughly.

Most of the memoirs and essays I include were composed after I moved into the fourth-floor apartment that I call my aerie. I not only have an excellent physical view from my balcony, but in my solitude I have a sweeping perspective of past, present and future. In the book’s first section, “Back Story,” I deal with the past: I trace the roots of my artistic destiny and my irresistible urge to travel the world; I analyze the intricate patterns of past relationships; and I recall one of the most profound periods of solitude I have ever experienced during my life’s journey, a walk alone into the Himalayan Mountains. In the second and third sections I share observations about writing, travel, literature, perseverance amidst adversity, optimism during a pandemic, and other topics. And finally, I express my hopes and dreams for the future.

It would not have been possible to finalize the book into its present form if I had not made the decision to set aside other projects and prioritize its completion. Going forward, I plan to continue to work slowly, focus intently on one thing at a time, and emphasize quality.

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Book Review:  Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel by Quentin Tarantino

Posted on July 20, 2024 by John Walters

I am normally not a fan of novelizations of films, but this one, after all, is written by Tarantino himself, so I figured it was worth a read. It turns out that the book is not really a novelization; that is, it does not strictly follow the plot of the movie. In fact, the mind-blowing violent climax of the movie is presented as a flash-forward of a couple of pages near the beginning of the book and is not mentioned again at the end. Instead, Tarantino uses the novel as an excuse to fill in back-stories for the book’s main characters, in particular Rick Dalton, played in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio; Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt; Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie; and Charles Manson, played by Damon Herriman. This provides Tarantino with an opportunity to expound on the Hollywood of the late 1960s and on films and filmmakers in general, and he takes full advantage of it. For example, in the novel he presents Cliff Booth as an aficionado of foreign films, and he uses this as an excuse to spend an entire chapter extolling on the talents of his favorite foreign actors and directors. He also delves much deeper than the film does into Manson’s dark past, his acquaintance with Dennis Wilson of the Beach boys and other major players in the Hollywood music scene, his unrequited desire to be a singer/songwriter, the gathering of his harem of vagabond hippie women, and the use of these women as sexual pawns to influence and control the aforementioned important people.

So don’t expect a carefully cadenced plot leading up to a resounding climax. What Tarantino presents, rather, is a disjointed info-dump of details that did not make it into the film. Let me emphasize, though, that they are fascinating details. As I mentioned above, I am not really interested in film novelizations. This, in fact, is something much better: a supplement that brings out nuances of the story and characters that Tarantino was unable to include in the finished film. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is already one of my favorite Tarantino films, and the added material presented in this book only increases my appreciation of it. I’ve already watched it several times, and I can’t wait to watch it again with the extra insights culled from this book in mind.

Tarantino is a very good writer, and the voice with which he presents the material here reminds me of his tone in his other recent book, Cinematic Speculations. He is casual and conversational but at the same time erudite and precise, and he draws on a lifetime of film study and appreciation that few others can match. What can I say more? If you are a fan of Tarantino’s films, you are sure to enjoy this book. I would appreciate it, in fact, if he would write similar treatments for some of his other films. Pulp Fiction, for instance, and Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. That would make for some good reading.

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I couldn’t help but re-watch the film after reading the book. As I did, the differences between the book and the film became even clearer. Tarantino’s main medium is film, of course, and in the length of a film (even a somewhat longer film of almost three hours like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) every moment of screen time is vital for the dissemination of information or advancement of the plot. This movie is set mainly in 1969, and to fully appreciate it you have to be aware of all the cultural inferences that Tarantino throws in – seemingly casually, but in fact all contributing to the buildup to the climax. The film, unlike the book, is a piece of alternate history, but we don’t really understand this until the end. (By the way, if you haven’t yet seen the film, some of that which follows may constitute spoilers.) The murder of Sharon Tate and her friends at the mansion she shared with her husband Roman Polanski (who was away at the time of the killings) was a horrendous deed that among others (such as the murder of a member of the audience by Hell’s Angels during the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont) signaled the end of the seemingly innocent and peaceful hippie era of the 1960s. The aura of love and joy that the hippies disseminated was shattered by the gruesome killings. One reason that I loved Once Upon a Time in Hollywood so much when I first saw it was that it offered a fairy tale-like alternative to what happened in the real world. In Tarantino’s alternate universe, Sharon Tate and the others are not murdered; instead, Manson’s followers are killed as they attempt to attack a mansion next door. I liked this. After all, they were obviously the crazed transgressors. The alternate history ending was similar, in a sense, to what happens at the end of Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds, in which Hitler and his main minions are all burned alive in a movie theater owned by a Jewish woman whose entire family was slaughtered by the Nazis. The stories in these two films, from the beginning to the end, lead up to a fantasy ending in which history itself is changed.

Now: back to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I grew up in the sixties; by 1969 I was sixteen years old. I was old enough to be appalled by the Manson killings when I read about them in the newspapers, and, like the characters in the film, I used to listen to those old pop songs on the radio. Tarantino nails the ambiance of the era; he’s spot on. However, if you are not familiar with this background, the book offers details that will increase your enjoyment of the film, and it also provides enhanced descriptions and explanations for the characters, films, TV shows, and so on that Tarantino refers to in the film. In a sense this blatantly brings out what a good filmmaker has to subtly do to provide verisimilitude in a movie. To get you to properly suspend your disbelief as you watch a film, a scriptwriter has to be aware of the details that Tarantino provides in the novel – even if they are only implied in the finished film. One casualty due to the long explanations in the novel, though, is the fairy tale ending, the “once upon a time” in the title.

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