On Rereading Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr.

Posted on October 11, 2015 by John Walters

James Tiptree Jr. has been one of my favorite short story writers for over forty years.  Lest anyone get confused when I refer to the author as “she” or “her,” James Tiptree Jr. was a pseudonym for Alice Sheldon, a reclusive ex-employee of the CIA, who managed to protect her privacy while making a huge multi-award-winning splash in the science fiction field back in the 1960s through 1980s until investigating fans found her out.

Some of her stories are among the best the field has ever produced, and I have read and reread them over the years, usually mingled in award anthologies with the works of other writers.  Placed in settings such as those, they shine as the most brilliant of jewels.  In a collection like this, one after the other, it’s almost an overdose.  That’s not to diminish the power, technical virtuosity, or emotional impact of the tales.  Let me explain.

Taken one by one, Tiptree’s stories are clearly magnificent.  All together, they seemed, to me at least, in the mood and situation in life I find myself at this moment, too much of the same thing.  Don’t get me wrong; the stories are not imitative of each other.  Each is wildly original.  What they share in common is their darkness and their theme, which after pondering it I summarize as the inevitability of failure.  Every one of the stories is dark; there are no happy endings.  Many are exercises in futility and despair.  Although many also share a feminist theme that was intensely controversial four decades ago, the desperation, angst, depression, and pain of the characters and situations go far beyond that single emphasis.  Tiptree posits, rather, the ultimate futility of all humankind, men and women, in story after story.  Her gift is that she had great grasp of story and so did it beautifully every time.

Perhaps it’s partly me and what I am going through right now.  I bought the book in Greece years ago and read it then, and I don’t remember the negativity of the stories affecting me so profoundly.  But now I feel sometimes I am hanging on the edge of a cliff myself, and I can’t constantly be reminded of my frailty and insignificance or I might lose my grip and fall.

Tiptree/Sheldon did.  Despite the success and acclaim and the awards, one night in 1987 she killed her husband and then herself with a shotgun.

One of the things that struck me as I read the book this time was that the recognition and the awards – all the things I confess I crave when I ponder my own lack of success as a writer – didn’t bring her happiness.  I know that sounds like a cliche, but it has a ring of validity.  Sometimes as I go through my struggles day by day and week by week and so on, I think about how everything would fall into place if I achieved recognition, awards, money, fame.  My life would be easier, for one thing.  I could allow myself to relax more.  I could ease off the nonfiction hack work and concentrate on the stories I really want to tell.  I could get a more comfortable place, buy a car, travel more.  I’d have more friends, or at least more acquaintances.  I’d go out more, do things, maybe even go on dates.  As it is now, I spend all my time struggling to survive.

But no.  There’s no guarantee such things would buy me happiness anymore than they did for poor Tiptree/Sheldon.  True, she put her pain on the page and her brilliant prose continues to bring happiness to many readers.  But for herself?

That’s why when it gets down to it, as I have learned through painful experience throughout my travels, the raising of my family, riding the rollercoaster of ups and downs that life inevitably brings, that one cannot count on any future event to procure some sort of mythical happiness.  Contentment, serenity, and joy can be found in the circumstances one is in at present, or they cannot be found at all ever.  The acceptance of a story by an editor, the winning of an award, the cashing of a big check may bring a momentary thrill, but if the life in between such peak moments is not full of significance as well, then there’s nothing but a huge crash after those high points.  The thing to do is to imbue life itself with relevance, make the living of life an art form of which the writing of stories is only a part.  Anything else leaves too many empty spaces.

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How the Film “All Is Lost” Reminds Me of My Writing Career

Posted on October 3, 2015 by John Walters

When I first began this website/blog I wrote a few essays on my favorite films, but early on I decided to steer clear of film reviews and focus on book reviews, memoirs, and thoughts on writing.  In writing about “All Is Lost” my intention is not to focus on the movie itself – which is amazing, by the way – but on how it made me reflect on my journey as a writer.

Coincidentally, Joe Konrath, who is a continuing proponent of luck as a significant factor in a writing career, just wrote a new blog post in which he sarcastically supposes what the alternative would be – that is, if luck played no role at all in writing success.  He proclaims that the only conclusion to come to for unsuccessful writers is that their writing sucks – an errant theory which history and current publishing trends do not support.  Many bestselling works are terrible, drawing readers not because of their quality but because of the celebrity status of the authors or the sensationalist appeal of the subject matter.  And many writers producing a significant volume of excellent work wait years before they find their readership.  Some novels now acclaimed as classics were failures during the lifetimes of the authors.  Sometimes people get lost at sea through no fault of their own.

“All Is Lost” has Robert Redford as an unnamed old man alone in a sailboat somewhere in the Indian Ocean.  His boat strikes a floating shipping container and springs a leak.  He attempts to repair it, but it breaks open again and takes on water when he is caught in a storm.  The sailboat eventually sinks and he is forced into a small life raft.  One strong impression in the film is his sense of isolation.  That’s how I felt when I got back into writing after a gap of almost two decades.  I had no one around who understood how I felt and no one I could go to for advice.  There were countless obstacles I had to overcome due to my location in Greece.  At first, I sent copies of my stories to my father in the States along with a list of magazines to submit them to.  When I heard about postal international reply coupons, I sent my stories to magazines and anthologies myself, but it was always a struggle to find coupons in Thessaloniki.  Some post offices didn’t even know what they were.  Only a few spots in the city had them.  Eventually they ran out, didn’t resupply, and I had to go downtown to the central office.  You can imagine my joy when editors began to accept electronic submissions.

There is almost no dialog in the film.  The character’s reactions to his predicament are all in expressions.  He never gives up and accepts his fate.  He keeps trying one thing after the other, using whatever is at hand to keep himself alive long enough to be rescued.  Besides repairing the gaping hole in the side of the boat, he pumps out the water the boat has taken on, hoists himself to the top of the mast to fix some wiring, rigs up a contraption to distill fresh water out of seawater, and uses a manual to learn how to plot his location with a sextant.  When he was trying all these various things I kept thinking of all the different things I have attempted to gain recognition, from writing in a wide range of genres at all different lengths, selling stories to magazines and anthologies, learning how to format and create covers for self-publishing, trying to publicize my work.

He finally drifts into the shipping lanes.  Huge cargo ships stacked with containers pass him but they don’t notice his flares.  That reminded me of so many instances of sending what I feel is some of my best work to editors only to be ignored.

In the end, the old man sees a light far off in the blackness of the ocean, but he has no remaining flares.  Desperately he lights a fire in a plastic container to try to attract the attention of whoever is out there.  It’s a last ditch effort, as he realizes that he is dying of thirst and starvation.  The fire spreads to the raft and engulfs it in flames; the old man is forced to leap overboard.  He finally despairs and drifts downward into the dark ocean, but at the last moment before he gulps in water, he looks up and glimpses the light he had seen approaching the burning raft.  With his last bit of strength he swims for the surface and clasps a hand that reaches out to him from the boat with the light.

I’ve written before how being a parent, a single parent at this point in my life, has stabilized me.  I think that if I were not responsible for others, I might be off somewhere, possibly homeless like my protagonist in my short story “Opting In,” or living in a van like my protagonist in “Opting Out” – two short stories that are related in theme but approach the situation in radically different ways.  As I watched the movie, I realized that if I were on my own I might set fire to my life raft, so to speak, by dropping everything else and writing until I made it or starved, in a last ditch effort to obtain recognition.  Not as a death wish, you understand, but as a sincere all-in attempt to succeed.

Writing good work is one thing, but a writer writes to be read by readers.  Sometimes I feel that despite my best efforts I am adrift in a dark ocean without a flare, with no way to signal to readers to give my works a try.  I have been trying for many years to stay afloat – and will continue to do so, of course; but it gets frustrating to say the least to shoot off flare after flare and have the ships sail on by without a glance.  It’s like one of the few bits of dialog in the film.  The old man opens his container of drinking water, takes a sip, and is forced to spit it out.  The entire jug has been contaminated with seawater.   All he can do is lean back in the raft and scream an expletive.

Somehow I thought becoming a writer would be easier.  I didn’t realize it would be such a struggle.  I thought that my talent gave me some sort of entitlement to recognition.  It didn’t turn out that way, at least not with me.  I’ve had to fight for every victory, and they’ve been few and far between.  At least I’m still alive, and still trying.  It often feels like I’m climbing straight up a cliff face when I’d prefer to be hiking up a gentle slope; I don’t have control over those circumstances.  Whatever the terrain, I must persevere.  It’s an ongoing process.  There’s no quick fix.  As the quote says that I’ve shared before:  Never despair, but if you do, fight on in spite of despair.

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Book Review: Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris

Posted on September 26, 2015 by John Walters

The five mentioned in the title are the five top directors working in Hollywood at the start of World War II:  Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler.  When the war started, each of them cut loose from their careers, joined the military, and used their talents to create documentaries for the soldiers going off to war and for the general public.  The book goes into what they were all doing before the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor thrust the United States into the conflict, their various paths during the war years, and how their years in the military affected their lives and work in the postwar era.  It’s a fascinating history not only of the war itself but of how the substance of creative endeavors gave way to the exigencies of the time and trauma changed and shaped the artists.

Frank Capra, the creator of such feel-good comedy dramas such as “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and “Meet John Doe,” was the only one of the five who did not go into combat zones.  His main duty after he joined the Army was the creation of a series of documentaries called “Why We Fight.”  They were aimed at soldiers, meant to educate them about the history of the conflict they had joined and the enemies they faced.  Capra worked tirelessly on the films despite endless bureaucratic blockage.  The ones he managed to make were acclaimed, but he never finished the entire series before the war was over.

John Ford joined the Navy.  Some of the high points of his military career were the filming the Battle of Midway, during which he was wounded, and overseeing the filming of the D-Day invasion while stationed aboard ships off the coast and later on the beach.  After he went off on an alcoholic binge shortly after the invasion and was found dead drunk in a French village, he was sent back to the States.

John Huston was sent to the Aleutian Islands shortly after the Japanese occupied one of the tiny outermost islets to film the battle to retake the remote piece of American soil.  Later, he was sent to North Africa and to Europe.

William Wyler was attached to the Air Force and flew dangerous missions with bomber crews, eventually putting together one of the most famous documentaries of the war, the story of the twenty-fifth mission of the crew of the Memphis Belle.  Later while filming another documentary about fighter planes in Italy, the noise of the wind and the plane’s engine deafened him.  He was discharged as disabled and remained partially deaf for the rest of his life.

George Stevens remained with the allied troops in Europe longer than the others.  He filmed the liberation of Paris and the surrender of its Nazi overseer.  He continued on and crossed the border with the early troops into Germany and filmed the meet-up of the Americans and British with the Russian army.  Instead of going on to Berlin, though, he was ordered to accompany troops liberating the concentration camp at Dachau.  He filmed the crematoriums, the piles of bones, the ashes, the starved corpse-like living among the endless dead.  He put together two documentaries of the atrocities that were used as evidence during the Nazi trials at Nuremburg.

It’s not my intention to go into all the details of what each of the men went through; you can read the book to find that out – and I do recommend that you read it.  This is just a glimpse, a bird’s eye view.

Some of the most heart-wrenching passages deal with the directors after they went home, trying to deal with what they saw and went through and return to some semblance of a normal life.  Frank Capra, working independently, tried to revive his career with the comedy/drama/fantasy “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  Although it has since become a Christmas classic, at the time it failed to connect with audiences and he retired soon afterwards.  Ford built a men’s club for veterans and made mostly westerns after the war.  John Huston managed to re-launch his career and became a prolific, award-winning director.  William Wyler turned his personal trauma into art, expertly capturing the mood of returning veterans after the war with his Academy Award-winning film “The Best Years of Our Lives.”  Despite his hearing difficulties, he went on to make a number of other acclaimed films.  George Stevens took years to shake off the horrors he had witnessed at Dachau and get back to work.  When he did, he was no longer able to create the light-hearted comedies that had made his reputation before the war.  Instead, he turned to more somber themes such as that of “A Place in the Sun,” which won him a best director Oscar.

At first when I picked up this book and began to read, I thought it was a fairly light read about erstwhile Hollywood, but it soon became apparent that there was much more to it.  The writer skillfully and empathetically goes deep into the minds and lives of the directors and how the Second World War changed them and the rest of the world and reshaped their art forever.  Hollywood had been experiencing a boom of productivity and popularity before the war started, and these directors were at the top of their game.  The realities of the global conflict served as a pin that popped the Hollywood bubble, exposing all the dark nasty realities of the human spirit.  How the makers of movies responded influenced the popular media for decades to come.

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Book Review: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Posted on September 20, 2015 by John Walters

I had forgotten the joys of perusing books in libraries, but my present inability to afford to buy books has brought it back.  I’ve found a number of quality books I would have never thought of reading, among them this classic short story collection.  The cover touts it as a twentieth anniversary edition, although the book was first published in 1990, which would make it twenty-five years old now.  I picked up a crisp, clean hardcover copy, newly acquired by the library and possibly never read before.  Nice.

Anyway, Tim O’Brien is an award-winning author known for his books on Vietnam, and I haven’t read too many of his works before.  I know that I read the short story “The Things They Carried” in some anthology years ago, but that’s about it.

This is a very good short story collection.  Some of the stories are superb and rank among the best short stories I have ever read.  I’ll get to those in a moment.  Generally, O’Brien writes in an autobiographical tone, even using his own name when he refers to himself as a first-person character.  It’s hard to know what’s fiction and what’s fact in the collection, and O’Brien alludes to that, intimating that it doesn’t matter.  He alternates between referring to himself as a middle-aged writer in the States looking back on the war, and himself as a foot soldier in the war along with his platoon buddies who supply the material for the stories.

Evidently O’Brien went to the war begrudgingly, having been drafted, and the fear and proximity to death and hellish things he saw and experienced changed him, of course, and writing about it got it out of his system.  Sort of.  It came to me that Vietnam was to O’Brien what the Klondike was to Jack London – a treasure trove of story – but the analogy is flawed.  London went to Klondike seeking adventure and story material.  O’Brien was dragged to Vietnam by the U.S. government.

The book brings out the insanity of the war, all right, from the perspective of those on the ground.  It’s a series of grotesque images and descriptions of how the GIs coped with their terror.  They were just young kids, after all, some of them still teens, when they were pulled away from their families and schools and girl friends and so on and thrust into combat.  Most of them were clueless as to why they were there.  The situation wasn’t as clear-cut as it was, say, during World War Two, when people were fighting for world freedom.  This was a civil war that sprang from a colonial war of liberation of the Vietnamese from the French, and the kids on the front lines had only the vaguest idea of the politics involved.

The stories themselves are dark, every one of them.  Considering their subject matter, there is really no alternative.  The Vietnam War was a dark period in the American consciousness.  Even in the movie “Good Morning Vietnam,” which has its moments of comedy, the darkness bleeds through.

“The Things They Carry” is the most celebrated and famous story in the collection.  It’s perhaps the most accomplished from a literary point of view, but I would not say it’s the best.  Two stories absolutely floored me with their brilliance, and another came close.  One was a first-person emotional piece called “On the Rainy River” in which a young man, purportedly O’Brien himself, about to be drafted, snaps, gets in his car, and drives for the Canadian border.  His conscience cannot allow him to participate in the war, so he has decided to flee.  Along the river that separates Canada from the United States he pulls into a fishing camp.  It’s off-season and the place is empty except for the owner, an old man over eighty years old.  The fleeing youth spends several days with the old man, who never attempts to confide in or argue with him, but his reassuring presence stabilizes the youth, who finally decides to go back and accept being drafted and sent off to war.  O’Brien makes it clear that he considers it the less honorable and more cowardly solution, but the protagonist does it mainly out of embarrassment.  He could never face his family and all those he knew if he didn’t go through with it.

The strongest story in the book for me, though, and what I consider an example of a perfectly executed short story, if there is such a thing, is “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.”  It’s dark as hell itself.  It gave me the shivers.  I couldn’t put it down.  A platoon is stationed on a remote outpost on a hill surrounded by jungle along with a few other troops and a group of Green Berets, who the other military personnel call “Greenies.”  The platoon members are talking about the women they left behind, and one of them says he’ll invite his girlfriend for a visit.  Lo and behold, weeks later, the seventeen-year-old girl shows up on a supply helicopter, young and cute and innocent.  At first it all seems idyllic, and the soldier and his sweetheart share a bunker, renew their relationship, and even get engaged.  The girl enjoys herself by swimming in the nearby river, taking short walks, and learning to shoot.  Gradually, though, the spirit of the war grips her and she begins to change.  She loses her innocence.  She goes out on patrol with the Greenies for days and weeks at a time.  She leaves her boyfriend and stays with the Greenies in their compound, where she takes to burning incense, chanting strange songs, and wearing a copper necklace laced with human tongues around her neck.  When her boyfriend tries to take her back, claiming that she doesn’t belong there, she tells him that he’s the one who doesn’t belong, that she has grown enamored of the land and loves the ecstasy and terror of patrolling through the Vietnamese countryside.  In the end, she disappears into the jungle and never returns, although those remaining at the outpost claim that they can sense her presence in the darkness when they go on patrol.  This story is amazingly effective in its descent into darkness.  It reminds me of Jack London stories such as “In a Far Country” and “The Red One,” both of which describe intruders succumbing to dark, haunting alien lands.  It also reminds me of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song “Run Through the Jungle,” which has a similar dark tone.

All in all, this is an excellent collection and O’Brien is a great writer.  It’s short, but it works at this length.  And O’Brien is spare with his words; for the most part, the prose is straightforward and free of embellishment, which is as it should be.  Recommended.

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Love the One You’re With

Posted on September 12, 2015 by John Walters

I’m a writer.  I’ve made that statement in plenty of blog posts and told lots of people whenever the subject comes up of what I do.  A writer writes.  That’s a truism, of course, but plenty of writers have had to emphasize that point when people point out their supposed prolificacy.  As Harlan Ellison has said, you don’t call a plumber prolific for fixing lots of pipes, and neither should you call a writer prolific for writing lots of words.  If you do it every day as a full time job, the words add up.

Recently I have managed to snap out of a depression having to do with my source of income that I’ve been in for quite some time.  I’m dirt poor, there’s no mistake about that, but somehow my sons and I get by, live in a decent, albeit small, apartment, eat decent food, stay clean and productive.  My depression had not so much to do with our poverty, but rather the fact that instead of spending most of my time writing what I want to, which is to say my novels and short stories and memoirs and so on, I am forced by economic expediency to devote my prime writing hours to low-paying non-fiction piecework that barely keeps us paying the bills and earns me no ongoing royalties.  It’s a constant treadmill that gets me nowhere.  So I would do the work I have to do but begrudge the time I had to devote to it.  Talk about your downward spiral.  I’d wake up every morning ruing the fact that I couldn’t do what I wanted.  Sure, I was thankful for the work.  It kept us alive, after all, and was a damned sight better than having no work and scrabbling for it, a process I describe in my memoir “America Redux: Impressions of the United States After Thirty-Five Years Abroad.”  That first year or two back in the States looking for work was hellish compared to the situation I am in now of being an independent contractor supplying work for an Internet content mill.  Could be worse.  Much worse.  But knowing that things could be, and had been, much worse didn’t alleviate the feeling that I was missing out, that I was pissing away my talent, wasting my time doing work that was getting me nowhere.

As you could see, I was in a dead end rut.  Circumstances being what they were, it was tough to snap out of it, because improving my state of mind seemed to be tied up with improving my career, which was something not in my hands alone but also caught up in the choices that editors and readers make.  I am making progress with my own work, the work I love to do, but it’s slow progress.  I can’t really force things to happen more quickly.  I already work most days from about seven in the morning until almost midnight, taking breaks only to shop, prepare meals, clean up, and take a necessary afternoon nap.  No, there’s not too much slack time to play with.

So what to do about it?  I saw no way out.  Hence my despair.  Well, the hell with that.  Depression sucks.  So what finally happened?  I realized that as a writer, the talent comes from within.  It’s not something that runs out.  It’s like a fountain that doesn’t run dry.  So it costs me nothing extra to throw all of my talent into whatever piece of work I am doing, whether novel or short story or memoir or blog post or Internet article some company is paying me a crappy piecemeal set wage for.  I’d love to spend all my writing time mining my own gold, sure.  But if I can’t, at least I’m writing and not doing something else, and I can have fun making that piece of writing, whatever it is, the best it can possibly be.  It’s like that song Stephen Stills used to sing.  If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.  I did a quick analysis in my head and figure that I make about ninety percent of my income writing non-fiction articles and ten percent through book royalties and short story sales.  So I pretty damn well better learn to enjoy writing non-fiction articles or I’m going to be miserable ninety percent of the time.

I may be poor, but at least I’m writing fulltime.  I may not always get to write what I want, but at least I’m writing fulltime.  There’s not a job in the whole wide world I’d rather be doing.  It was this realization that snapped me out of my depression.  Just last night I was reading a thread on a writer’s forum about how much money most writers earn.  It’s not much.  Sure, there are those who make much, much more.  And self-publishing has opened the gates to make it possible for many more people to make a decent wage writing.  But it’s not easy.  There are no guarantees.  One year it may all come your way, and the next year things might change and the royalties drop and it’s a constant struggle.  Writing is not an occupation for those who want to live on easy street.  As the Grateful Dead sing in “Uncle John’s Band,” life on easy street isn’t as safe as it appears anyway.

The same principle applies for blog posts too.  I put in as much effort with blog posts as I do with my fiction, even though I don’t have many regular readers.  I do get notes from time to time about how much someone appreciates a post.  That’s a good payback.  I knew that the collection of book reviews I put together about a year ago wouldn’t have as much chance of selling as fiction, but I did it anyway because it’s the type of book I look for sometimes, and such books are hard to find.

In closing, I have learned to enjoy life more not so much by accepting my circumstances, as I still struggle to produce fiction and hope that someday it will support my sons and I, as in giving my all to whatever I have to do.  Some – actually all – of my sons are into exercising and keeping fit.  It would be ludicrous of them to go down to the gym and pump iron with fifty percent of their energy, thinking that they don’t really like to do it as much as their martial arts workout so why put in the effort.  No, you have to give one hundred percent in whatever you are doing.  Giving my all in the articles I write for cash makes me a better writer in the things I like to do.  Why hold back?  The talent replenishes itself faster than I can use it up, and the more I invest in it, the stronger and deeper it gets.

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Book Review: The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

Posted on September 5, 2015 by John Walters

This is one of those rarities among books:  fascinating, well-written, and just the right length for what it sets out to do.  It tells the story of the creation of computers, programming, the transistor, the microchip, video games, the Internet, software, and the worldwide web from the time that Ada, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the famous British poet Lord Byron, first conceived the idea of a computer until the present tech-saturated era.  On the way it tells the personal stories of Alan Turing, Vannevar Bush, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page and many other scientists, engineers, and innovators.  It even links the hippy movement and its search for community in the 1960s, exemplified by Ken Kesey and Steward Brand, with the rise of the personal computer.

You’ve probably heard a good deal of this before in bits and pieces, as I have, but the value of this book is in weaving it all together into a coherent and easy-to-follow narrative that is nevertheless detailed enough to give an overall picture of how our present ubiquitous use of personal computers, smart phones, and so on evolved.

It’s very modern history.  As I read I was able to picture where I was and what sort of technology I had in the various stages of its development.  My family acquired our first computer, a 386 that ran on DOS, back in the 1980s in Athens.  By the time we left Athens to move to Thessaloniki, we had graduated to a 486, a color monitor, and rudimentary Windows.  We first obtained a modem and Internet connection soon afterwards, with the help of a computer teacher at the school where I taught English.  One of the first websites I ever looked up was the Science Fiction Writers of America website, from which I was able to obtain links to market lists of places I could send the stories I was writing.  The first game my boys played was a slow, clunky DOS version of Colonization.  Compared to games nowadays it was profoundly simple, but they loved it, taking ten minute alternating turns as often as we would allow them.

Many of you growing up in the latter half of the twentieth century have similar stories to tell of your early encounters with computers and related technology, and that’s one of the great appeals of this book.  It’s history that touches you personally.  You lived through it, and this book fills you in on all the behind-the-scenes details that you never knew.  Or maybe you knew some of it, but this book puts it all together into a cohesive whole, one part linked with another to tell the entire story.

Nowadays, as a freelance writer, I use a computer all day long almost every day.  I can’t imagine what I would do without one, but when I was young there were no such things as personal computers.  Computers were huge, bulky entities that filled entire rooms, accessible only to scientists and privileged academics.  That the technology has come so far, so fast is astonishing, and this book tells the story of how it all came about.  I highly recommend this book to anyone, which is virtually everyone, who uses modern computer technology.  It reminds you not to take the miracles of the modern age for granted, but to understand the labor and collaborative effort that was necessary to create the technology we all enjoy and depend on.

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Failure and Success

Posted on August 30, 2015 by John Walters

Recently I was writing an article about people who experienced adversity in life and went on to become famous and successful.  I’m sure you would recognize all of the names.  A number of things struck me as I pondered the resource material the publisher gave me and wrote the article.

First of all, the people recognized as examples in the lists I perused represent a minute fraction of humankind, and yet they are touted as the best of the best, at least in the estimation of many admirers.  Why?  Many people bravely face and struggle against the adversities these few overcame and never get credit for it.  Indeed, many fail and sink into poverty, depression, illness, isolation, obscurity, and death.  I consider for example parents, who if they take their responsibilities seriously are some of the greatest of heroes.  Or great writers of the past whose works never reached the printed page.  Or soldiers who fought valiantly and yet lost the battle.  So many people with good hearts, true motives, kind dispositions never show up on lists such as the ones I was researching because those with the capability to publicize them never even know they existed.

And we have these few on a numbered list who some writer thought to honor as exemplary role models.  One person, someone in the tech industry near the top of the list, I have been reading about recently, and I know for a fact that he is not someone fit to emulate but rather a ruthless industrial cutthroat who slammed doors in other people’s faces so that he could get ahead.  I did not include him in the article I had been commissioned to write.  I wondered how many other people there are who are just as talented as the people on this list whose morals didn’t allow them to do what this person has done to get ahead, and as a result are not as rich or famous.  Sometimes it’s hard to talk about integrity when you’re dirt poor, but there are many, many people that no one will ever hear of who made the right decisions – decisions that may have cost them some obvious rewards but allowed them to retain clean consciences.

When I write of these things I’m not riding some sort of moral high horse.  Hell, I want to be rich and famous.  If I could only take one I’d take the riches and leave the fame, as I tend to be the shy sort, but the two sort of go together in the writing game.  I’m tired of scraping and struggling.  I want to do some more traveling and see some of the wondrous sights I saw when I used to hitchhike from place to place.  Back then if I wanted to go somewhere, even halfway around the world, I’d just get up and go, money or no money.  It’s a little more complicated now, as a parent.  I can’t just take off and leave the kids behind, and I can’t take them with me without financial resources.

I have often contemplated what constitutes success as a writer.  Is it the number of readers you have?  The amount of money you make?  Or is it the words you produce?  As far as amounts of readers and income, compared to many other writers, I am pretty much a failure.  If you judge by the works I have produced, I am a success.  Five novels, five short story collections, three novellas in a series, three memoirs, a collection of essays.  They are good books.  Each time I do the best work of which I am capable.  As a writer, I can’t do more.  As a publicist, perhaps, but not as a writer.

Back to our strange celebrity culture that idolizes characters who are often reprehensible.  Popular news outlets report on their wardrobe changes, sexual proclivities, and misdeeds as if it is all important news, and the readership lets out a collective gasp when they hear of all the oddities, but who really gives a damn anyway?

Yes, some of these people in the spotlight did overcome great odds to get where they are.  But you know what?  Many more people around the world overcome great odds every day just to survive and keep their children alive.  I was writing another article recently about the World Food Program that the United Nations implements to help starving people in crisis situations.  Most of these people receiving beans and rice and vegetables to keep themselves and their children alive will never “overcome adversity” and become famous billionaires.  Yet hopefully they will live and thrive in their own ways when their crises are averted.

Sometimes I read these bullshit articles about celebrities too, when I am browsing the Internet at the end of a long day.  Sometimes I wish I had the kind of money they earn, but I never envy them or wish I was in their place.  And I certainly don’t look to them as role models.  Our consumer society rewards some people more than others because they sell more movie tickets or other products, but true heroes are all around you, in your midst.  They may never make the media top ten lists, but that doesn’t in the least diminish their worth.

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Book Review: Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates

Posted on August 22, 2015 by John Walters

All of the stories in this book are dark; some are deep; only a few are lovely.  At first I thought the title was an original fabrication referring to the stories themselves, but in fact it is culled from the line in the Robert Frost poem “Stopping in the Woods on a Snowy Evening” that says “The woods are lovely, dark and deep…”  One of the stories, in fact, concerns a fictitious interview with Robert Frost, in which the poet is presented as an egocentric scoundrel.  I almost never made it to that one, though.

It started like this…  I like to alternate reading fiction and nonfiction, and I was coming to the end of a lengthy biography and cast about for a piece of fiction to read.  It had to be something I could obtain at the library, as I am in straitened financial times.  I decided to peruse recent awards lists, and found this book, a finalist for the most recent Pulitzer Prize.  Okay, why not?  The last collection of short stories by Oates I had read, “Wild Nights,” had been entertaining.

The book is divided into four sections, with a few stories in each section, and the fourth composed of a single long novella.  I started reading, and found the first several stories to be mediocre.  Worse, they were depressing.  Not just depressing; they screamed out angst and despair, one after the other.  I thought, what the hell?  To be honest, I couldn’t understand how stories of that quality could be nominated for a prestigious prize like the Pulitzer.  Well, don’t get me started on the politicking that goes on with awards nominations of all sorts; I don’t want to get into or have anything to do with it.  But it did lower the Pulitzer several notches in my estimation.  I have been going through a lot of rough times myself recently:  lonely, poor, frustrated professionally.  I didn’t need to read literature that would only bum me out further.  I could sometimes hear Neil Young playing “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” in my head.

Anyway, loathe as I am to abandon a book in the middle, I almost tossed this one at the end of part two.  One reason is that I had borrowed a very interesting-looking nonfiction book from the library that I was anxious to start.

Something gave me pause, and I am glad I continued – because the last two sections of the book are by far the best.  In the third section Oates indulges in some fantasies, ghost stories.  The writing is more tight and controlled, and my interest level rose.  She seemed to be going somewhere, saying something, and although the themes were still dark, at least she was not just screaming in frustration.

The gem of the collection, though, is the last novella, “Patricide.”  It is the story of a Nobel Prize winning author, told from the viewpoint of his doting middle-aged daughter.  He’s a brilliant writer but also a frantic womanizer.  He has married and divorced four wives, and as the story begins has just met a woman young enough to be his granddaughter who becomes his newest fiancé.  Oates brilliantly depicts the complex relationships between the author, his new young love, and his protective daughter, and weaves in fascinating background about the author’s literary career and past wives.

In my opinion, this book would have been much stronger if only the stories in the last two sections were included.  If that had been the case, I would have given it high praise.  As it is, I acknowledge that in virtually every short story collection some stories are stronger than others.  But it was a grave editing error to put so many inferior and frustratingly negative stories in the front of the book and the finest stories in the back.  Perhaps if the stories had been more skillfully arranged, interspersing the fantasies with the tragedies, I would have been able to handle the bitter, despairing ones better.

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Roadside Stands

Posted on August 16, 2015 by John Walters

While I was preparing to upload some short stories to Kindle for publication, somewhat ruing the fact that I could afford only the most rudimentary covers for them – a few bucks for an illustration from Dreamstime, simple formatting and fonts in PowerPoint – I abruptly remembered the summer roadside fruit stands we used to frequent in Greece.

We would be on our way to one of those splendid sandy beaches fronting the bathwater warm ocean on Halkidiki – that’s what they call the three peninsulas that stick out into the Aegean Sea like fingers east of Thessaloniki.  On the weekends the side roads off the main highway would be packed with cars full of people hitting the beaches, and along the side roads were numerous makeshift fruit and vegetable stands.  They were set up by local farmers and the goods came right off the fields behind the stands.  All the fresh produce would be seasonal.  There would be tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini, grapes, honey melons, watermelons.  People from the city would stop along the side of the road and fill their trunks with bags and crates of produce, because not only were the goods cheaper than they could find in the city supermarkets, but the quality was much higher as well.

The thing about these wildly successful entrepreneurial endeavors, though, is that they were entirely makeshift.  The shops would consist of rough tables or stands, a piece of canvas slung overhead on poles for protection from the sun, the produce displayed in wooden crates.  Sometimes there was a handwritten sign, black marker on cardboard, and sometimes there was no sign at all.  The farmers did the best they could with what they had, and folks from the city, recognizing quality goods, came regardless of the less-than-polished conditions.

Sometimes smaller farms sold only one or two products at these roadside stands.  You might see an old man or woman at the side of the road with one crate of lemons or watermelons propped up on a stool.  In the city, around the outskirts of the larger weekly street markets, there were always old people selling small quantities of goods, sometimes only a dozen or so bundles of herbs out of a cardboard box.  The security personnel policing the markets making sure the larger dealers gave receipts so they’d have to pay taxes left these smaller dealers on the backstreets alone, realizing that selling those bundles of herbs might make the difference of a widow or widower having enough cash to buy food for the week.

What I like about Greece is that there is room for all these vendors, and that they are not criticized or ostracized for the size or quality of their displays.  The United States could learn a lot about tolerance from European countries whose people have had to put up with each other in much narrower confines – not always successfully of course – for many more hundreds of years.

Back now to my short story covers, which I realize are not as professional as they would be if I had hundreds of dollars to spend on them instead of practically nothing.  I suppose I’m like one of those road side vendors.  Most of you might pass by without realizing I have quality goods to sell because my display doesn’t have the glitter and neon of the big chain supermarkets, but I’m going to do the best I can and put them out there anyway because I have to – I want to – I feel compelled to.  Maybe someday I’ll have the finances to upgrade them.  Until then, be assured that these covers package quality goods.  One of the stories I’m uploading now was even accepted and published in an international science fiction anthology.

I’m reminded of the covers of Hugh Howey’s “Wool” series when the stories first appeared as individual novellas – rudimentary at best, he’s told us on his blog.  And yet people bought them anyway.  Like that wonderful fresh produce we bought by the side of the road on the way to Greece.  We didn’t care that it came in wooden crates.  It was inexpensive and fresh and delicious; that was enough for us.  I’m very thankful for the self-publishing venues available nowadays on which writers can display their goods for sale.  Some spend hundreds of dollars on breathtaking covers; they’re like the brand shops in the malls with their garish, eye-grabbing displays.  Others, like the larger roadside produce stands at Halkidiki, rely on simple signs and word-of-mouth to make their sales.  Yet others put up literature with unadorned covers that approximate those poor widows’ cardboard boxes.  There is room for all.

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Book Review: Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris

Posted on August 9, 2015 by John Walters

This is the second volume of a trilogy on the life of Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most dynamic of U.S. presidents.  The first volume, “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt” deals with his youth, education, early years as a rancher in the Badlands of South Dakota, and eventual rise in politics to the vice presidency under McKinley.  McKinley’s assassination at the end of the first book propels Roosevelt into the presidency.

The second volume begins as Roosevelt, who at the time that the president is shot is far off in the Maine wilderness, makes a long journey to Washington D.C., not knowing if the president will live or die, but with a premonition that he is traveling to his destiny.  As Morris recounts details of the journey, he brings the reader up to date on the political situation in the United States.  By the time Roosevelt reaches his destination, McKinley is dead, and Roosevelt must immediately take the reins of the government.

This volume describes Roosevelt’s two terms in office as president, although at least two-thirds of the book is devoted to his first term, during which he consolidated power and achieved milestones such as the treaty that initiated the building of the Panama Canal, the settling of rebel insurgency in the Philippines, the strengthening of the U.S. Navy, and an attack on and legislation against monopolistic trusts seeking to control large sectors of the U.S. economy.  The description of his second term is almost anticlimactic in comparison.

For most of its long length, the biography held my attention better than most novels.  Morris is a better writer than most novelists.  His research is exhaustive, but he melds the wealth of material together in a tight stream of narrative.

Morris certainly has a charismatic main character in Theodore Roosevelt.  Regardless of what one thinks of his personal opinions or political inclinations, the man was dynamic, forceful, persuasive, and intelligent.  As long as he held the presidency he kept strict control of governmental power.  It is fascinating to read how he reacts to one crisis after another, although it is difficult to fathom his need to assert his manhood by going out into the wilderness and slaughtering animals.

Contradictorily, though, his love for nature and the wild led to one of his greatest achievements:  the establishment of a network of national parks, forests, and monuments to preserve the country’s natural resources for future generations.  Without his relentless devotion to protecting the natural beauty of the United States, it would long ago have been decimated by amoral entrepreneurs.

The book’s pace slows a bit in the last sections.  Perhaps, as I said, it reflects the fact that Roosevelt’s first term was far more dynamic than his second.  By the time his second term came to an end he was exhausted, and refused to run for a third term, although his popularity ensured that he would almost certainly have won the Republican nomination and the subsequent election.

This is an excellent book, although in a way it lacks the scope of the first book, being necessarily confined to Roosevelt’s actions in the White House as chief executive.  In “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,” he had to struggle against innumerable odds, and the force of the book is in how he overcomes one adversity after another.  In “Theodore Rex” he has arrived, so to speak, and despite his having to contend with often recalcitrant Congressional personages and foreign governments, one does not sense the same sort of peril or odds against him as he struggles.  Still, the book is worth reading not only as the portrait of a singular individual but as a reflection of the era in which he lived.

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