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The Condor and the Cows: Isherwood's Long Journey

4/30/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
This has been a most wonderful evening. Gertrude has said things tonight it will take her ten years to understand.
Alice B. Toklas
Born April 30, 1877

My Book World

I'VE MADE IT MY GOAL to read the entire oeuvre of late British-American author, Christopher Isherwood, over a twelve-month period. This profile constitutes the twelfth in a series of twenty.
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Isherwood, Christopher. The Condor and the Cows. New York: Random, 1948.

Writers don’t do this much anymore: take long journeys to foreign countries like those found in South America and pen a single book about it, but that’s what Isherwood does in The Condor and the Cows. He writes about his trip taken with lover-at-the-time and photographer, William Caskey, one that spans six months in 1947-48.

“The meaning of the title should be evident, but perhaps I had better explain that the Condor is the emblem of the Andes and their mountain republics, while the Cows represent the great cattle-bearing plains, and, more specifically, Argentina—no offense intended” (3).
It is an interesting concept, recording all your impressions from a single trip: your conveyances, whether they be ships by which you travel five days from one continent to another, or whether they be the relatively new airplane, which can soar above mountains and shorten days-long trips to a few hours. You record the food you eat. The pillows upon which you lay your head. Trains traveling through a dust storm on the Argentine plain, yielding a gritty experience from one end of your sleeping car to the other. Chauffeurs driving ninety miles per hour across that plain because the road is smooth and there is relatively little traffic and because the matron in charge shows no reason to be concerned.
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North American schools seem to teach little about geography anymore, the different types of maps that one can study in advance of a trip, during, and after: climate maps, economic, physical, political, road, or topographical maps. Isherwood’s partner provides the frontispiece map for The Condor and the Cows: an inkling of their half-year journey from Curaçao to Cartagena, to Medellin, to Bogotá, to Quito and Guayaquil, to Trujillo and Lima, to Machu Picchu and Cuzco, to Lake Titicaca, to Arequipa, and finally Buenos Aires (not on this map). Isherwood details every morsel of food they eat, every visit they make with friends who live in various cities, the new friends he and Caskey make along the way, every drop of liquor, details of minor illnesses borne on such a long expedition, clothing natives wear, commentary on local and national and continental politics. Little is out of his focus, and he and the publisher include twenty-four pages of Caskey’s photographs [see photo gallery below for just a few]. I admire the author's due diligence in writing down enough of the bones of his trip to amount to 217 pages of interesting, sometimes titillating, reading that, year by year, may become more so because it also has become a bit of history.

From Left to Right: Bamboo Tenement in Guayaquil | Paco Lara Entering Bullring, Bogotá | Guambia Indians | Country Girl, Pisac | A Gaucho, Argentina (All Photos by William Caskey)
A few nuggets derived from Isherwood and Caskey’s voyage:
“We stopped at El Banco just after dark . . . [o]n the narrow gangplank the two streams of human beings collided, surged and mingled; a yelling mob of white-cotton clothes and dark bodies—yellow, red, velvet black and plum purple, with an occasional, strangely arresting blond head. Above the confusion the ship’s band played its lively clattering music, and through the open doors of the church on the hill there was a glimpse of a priest at the altar, a remote quiet candle-lit figure, saying vespers” (34-5). A lovely description despite Isherwood’s slightly racist point of view.
 
We witness that POV here again as he describes Guambian Indians: “The men have short glossy black hair, shocked up into an untidy tuft, and lively impudent black eyes. Some look strikingly Mongolian. Their mouths are a bit apelike. They smile readily and don’t in the least mind if you examine their ornaments or their clothes” (67). Isherwood’s descriptions are not as insulting as perhaps his patronizing and paternalistic tone. Perhaps we can forgive him if, for no other reason, we remember he is a product of the imperialistic British Empire, born in 1904.
           
When caught in a certain badlands between Ecuador and Columbia, a town called Pasto, the author remarks: “We were put down at the Hotel Granada, a shabby wooden building with inside balconies around a central dining room. The bedrooms are like stables. Windowless, with great barn-doors closed by padlocks. The combined shower and toilet—the only one on the ground floor—is unfit for pigs. While we were eating a tepid greasy supper, in strolled the mail-car driver with his girl. On seeing us, he smiled without surprise but didn’t offer a word of explanation or excuse [earlier they’ve had an altercation]. We neither washed nor shaved, brushed our teeth in bottled mineral water, and went sadly and shiveringly to bed at eight-thirty” (75).
           
Here the author compensates for his grumpy-tourist temperament with the following account: “And at this very moment, like a miracle, the rail-bus appeared. We waved our arms frantically, hardly daring to hope that it would stop. It did stop. We scrambled thankfully on board.

That is the irony of travel. You spend your boyhood dreaming of a magic, impossibly distant day when you will cross the Equator, when your eyes will behold Quito. And then, in the slow prosaic process of life, that day undramatically dawns—and finds you sleepy, hungry and dull. The Equator is just another valley; you aren’t sure which and you don’t much care. Quito is just another railroad station, with fuss about baggage and taxis and tips. And the only comforting reality, amidst all this picturesque noisy strangeness, is to find a clean pension run by Czech refugees and sit down in a cozy Central European parlor to a lunch of well-cooked Wiener Schnitzel” (80).

 
Isherwood now echoes his title with this anecdote: “Mr. Cooper used also to keep a boa-constrictor and two condors. But the boa had to be gotten rid of; it was always trying to get at the other animals, or escaping and terrifying the neighbors. The condors flew away, which is a great pity; perched on the roof, they must have given the house the air of a Charles Addams drawing in the New Yorker.
         “He describes how a party of his friends were riding along a narrow trail in the high mountains when they saw three condors and fired at them. The condors disappeared—to get help, apparently—for they returned a few minutes later with twenty-five others, and all of them swooped down upon the pack-train. In the confusion, two horses fell over the precipice; their riders jumped clear just in time. Condors will peck the eyes out of cows and then drive them with their wings off the edge of a cliff; the cows get killed and the condors eat them” (125).
 
Very subtly Isherwood tells what he believes has happened to the indigenous Indians when attacked by the Conquistadors long ago. “These people, like the Chinese peasants [referring to another trip, made in 1938 with W. H. Auden, detailed in Journey to a War], have an uncanny air of belonging to their landscape—of being, in the profoundest sense, its inhabitants. It would hardly surprise you to see them emerging from or disappearing into the bowels of the earth” (143).
 
It is not beneath Isherwood’s dignity to criticize others: “Cuzco is right on the trans-Andean tourist trail. This hotel is full of tourists. The majority are North American—middle-aged women schoolteachers, mostly. Grimly devout, complaining but undaunted, they make their way over the mountains from Lima to Buenos Aires—gasping in the high altitudes, vomiting and terrified in planes, rattled like dice in buses, dragged out of bed before dawn to race along precipice roads, poisoned with strange foods, tricked by shopkeepers, appalled by toilets” (145). This is an interesting comment, especially in light of the fact that he seems to echoing some of his own prissy complaints listed above.
 
In Buenos Aires, Isherwood makes arrangements to stay with an acquaintance from his Berlin days of the 1930s: Berthold. The author tells a long story, which I will not cite in full, in which Berthold tells of visiting New York City and running into someone he had known previously, someone whom he’d buried in Africa, thinking the man was dead! What a second-hand tale this makes. (186-8).
 
“Argentina, like the United States, has practically liquidated its Indian problem. And much the same manner” (193). In the same breath that he is criticizing the US for wholesale liquidation, Isherwood is betraying his own racist bent with the words “Indian problem,” as if the subjects are unwanted vermin that must be disposed of. It is perhaps a warning to all of us in this era: our words of judgment could, in future years, wind up similarly betraying us.
Nonetheless, even sixty-eight years after its publication, Isherwood’s prose seems fresh, if only because he is able to write down crisp first impressions of lands he has wanted to visit since he was a child, and yet temper his prose with the studied hand of a professional author.

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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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Some Wait Forever

4/25/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.
Flora Lewis
Born April 25, 1918*
(*Sources vary; some say 1920, and others 1922.)

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureEdith Carron
April 25, 2016, Lara Vapnyar, “Waiting for the Miracle”: Thirty-year-old Vadik arrives in New York City from Moscow, connects with a Staten Island buddy and wife, and later hooks up with Rachel, a young woman he meets in a diner—all in his first twenty-four hours. ¶ Vapnyar’s title, a Leonard Cohen song, is also the story of Vadik’s life, and perhaps the lives of all immigrants like his Staten Island friends, Sergey and Vica: a slight disappointment that the big promise of capitalism may have come true for everyone but them. At one point you believe Vadik must marry Rachel:

“Days, week, months, even years later, whenever Vadik thought of their conversation (and he thought of it a lot) he would marvel at how easy it had been” (83).
But no, due to a certain insecurity, the fear of settling down too soon with one woman, he leaves her a note (“You’re beautiful.”) and disappears while she sleeps. He does try to locate her but never succeeds, and his idealization of her—their comfortable sex and easy conversation—hardens into a graven image. Vapnyar captures an alien sense we all have at times, that no matter what we do, we just may not fit in anywhere on earth. Her novel, Still Here, is due out in August.
Illustration by Edith Carron.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Picture
READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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Marlon James, Magician

4/22/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
To invent good stories, and to tell them well, are possibly very rare talents, and yet I have observed few persons who have scrupled to aim at both . . . .
Henry Fielding
Born April 22, 1707

My Book World

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James, Marlon. A Brief History of Seven Killings. New York: Riverhead, 2014.

At the end of  2015, I watched BBC America as Mr. James won the Booker Prize in London—an approximation of America’s National Book Award. Because I’m constantly juggling the reading of several books, I have a difficult time with rather lengthy tomes—this one is 688 pages—but Brief History is well worth the time, is worthy of the many accolades it has received. On the cover some reviewers call it is a masterpiece. Only time will tell on that score, but it is certainly a hearty and substantive read, plenty of red meat for any reader.
 
You know you’re in for an exhilarating ride when the author provides a cast of characters totaling seventy-six. Now only thirteen actually narrate, but still, thirteen alternating points of view provide great layers of texture to the narrative, a broadening of its scope. The first two parts take place in 1979 and fictionalize the assassination attempt on the life of musician Bob Marley—referred to as the Singer. The third part takes place in 1979, the fourth in 1985, and the fifth in 1991—the aftermath that keeps unfolding. A coda of sorts, consisting of twelve short chapters, serves as a very satisfying denouement, in which everyone’s questions are answered.
 
Yet the novel is so much more than an inside look at Jamaica’s drug trade. I’m not sure any writer has ever captured Jamaican life in the manner that James does. First, he succeeds in recreating, in print, not only one but probably several Jamaican dialects (much like Twain does in Huckleberry Finn). Do I know that for sure? No. It’s a guess. But I do know this. The text seems authentic. Nowhere in the book, do you find the word “Goddamn,” except when an American is speaking. You will run across, scores of times, the words “Bombocloth” or “bloodcloth.” If you let your imagination run wild, you can guess what kind of cloth is a bloodcloth. This male-dominated society would rather use iconography of menstruation to swear than risk the wrath of the Pentecostal God that reigns over its shores. Then there is the word, “fuckery.” Beautiful. James’s prose is so clean, free not only of traditional syntax but free of conventional thought, as well. He recreates a world you will never see when your cruise ship stops for the day in Montego Bay.
 
Three paragraphs, and I’ve barely touched on the novel, but here are what I deem to be some pretty fine nuggets:

“Listen.
         Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school. You know where you’re coming from and you’re always returning from it. You know where you’re going though you never seem to get there and you’re just dead. Dead” (1).
What a fabulous opening. And there’s more from this character, who is actually dead—Sir Arthur George Jennings, a former politician, a ghost!
 
“Me want enough money to stop want money” (55).
—Demus, a gang member
 
“The white man say we’re fighting for freedom from totalitarianism, terrorism and tyranny, but nobody know what he mean” (73).
—Bam-Bam, a gang member
 
“Certain parts of town you let the baby walk the street and you leave him when he play in the shit water. And when him get sick so that he is just a ballooning, bursting screaming belly that used to be a baby, you take your time to go to clinic which too packed anyway and the baby dead while you waiting in the line, or maybe you take pity and cover the baby with your pillow the night before and either way, you see and wait, because death is the best thing you could do for him” (179).
—Papa-Lo, don of Copenhagen City, 1960-1979
 
“Please, please, please, please, please shut up. Just shut up. I’m going to go find my head” (308).
—Kim Clarke, unemployed woman. Reminiscent of woman’s speech in Hemingway’s story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which she uses “please” seven times (no commas) to demand that a man to stop talking. Effective in both cases.
 
“—Eh, what do you really think you know about the Central Peace Council? I bet you didn’t know that it was a joke. Peace. Only one kind of peace can ever come down the ghetto. It’s really simple, so simple even a retarded man can catch the drift. Even a white man. The second you say peace this and peace that, and let’s talk about peace, is the second gunman put down their guns. But guess what, white boy. As soon as you put down your gun the policeman pull out his gun. Dangerous thing, peace. Peace make you stupid. You forget that not everybody sign peace treaty. Good times bad for somebody” (387).
—Josey Wales, don, speaking to Alex Pierce, journalist for Rolling Stone
 
“It is a thing to watch, the kind of feeling that take up a white man every time you take him to Port Royal. You wonder if this is the same spirit that leap up in them as soon as they land on any rock. I’m betting it is so, from as far back as Columbus and slavery. Something about landing from sea that make a white man free to say and do as he please” (411). Whoa!
—Josey Wales, head enforcer, don of Copenhagen City, 1979-1991, leader of the Storm Posse
 
“Now something new is blowing through the air, an ill wind” (430).
—Sir Arthur George Jennings, ghost, repeats this phrase--something new is blowing—scores of times in this chapter. “Tony McFerson stands up first with a wide smile on his face, a heave and a sigh of relief one could see from four hundred feet away. The third bullet goes through his neck sideways, explodes the medulla and kills everything below the neck before his brain realizes he’s dead” (432). What description!
 
“But Weeper have this thing where he just can’t get along with any woman, or rather this thing where no woman can tell him what to do. Then again Griselda is not a woman. She a vampire who cock drop off a hundred years ago. She lose her patience with him and when a madwoman like her lose her patience with you she would make even a hardcore Jamaican rudie go, Bombocloth bitch yuh wicked no fuck. Was just a matter of months before she kill Weeper herself” (465).
—Josey Wales, speaking of Weeper, a gang enforcer, Storm Posse head enforcer, Manhattan/Brooklyn
 
“Right now everybody know that whoever shoot the Singer was aiming for the heart but get the chest and only because he exhale instead of inhale, right? I mean, it even in the book on him” (544).
—Tristan Phillips, inmate at Rikers
A Brief History of Seven Killings is one of those major works I know I shall read again—largely because there is so much to digest and understand. It’s that dense with irony, with meaning. It’s that enjoyable, if I dare use such a word.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016


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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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Not To Be a Poet

4/18/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations.
Susan Faludi
Born April 18, 1959

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureRebecca Mock
April 18, 2016, Colin Barrett, “Anhedonia, Here I Come”: Poet Bobby Tallis, twenty-nine-year-old denizen of a “First World Western” country utilizing Euros (answer to the riddle: Ireland), nonetheless supports himself by penning cartoon porn for AllFreeekArt. ¶ Some iteration of this character has emerged in literature before: John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius J. Reilly, Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, maybe even Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty. However, if Bobby is angry like the first two, he buries it with the help of alcohol and weed. And if he is like Moriarty, he has neither wheels nor the exuberance to see beyond the senior-citizen building in which he lives because it is both cheap and quiet. ¶ I confess that I had to look up a-n-h-e-d-o-n-i-a: the lack of pleasure or ability to experience it. It is the key, as any word appearing in the title should be, to understanding this narrative about a failed young poet, who fairly wallows in his obscurity, his quiet life of words, until he learns that his muse-mentor, also a failed poet, has changed his allegiance to a twenty-two-year-old woman who has just won her first publishing contract. Upon learning this, Bobby pounds down five pints and trudges home. Against the fire department’s wishes, he enters his gas-laden building and opens a window in his apartment:

“He put the joint in his mouth and brought the lighter to it. Friction: he looked out across the city sky and flicked the lighter’s wheel, prepared for the night to go up all around him, but the night, as the night was wont to do, rolled impersonally on. After a while, Bobby began to hear the Dopplered gulling of the sirens as the fire trucks made their approach” (69).
Bobby is about to suffer the ultimate inability to feel or experience pleasure, and I’m not sure I care. Barrett’s collection, Young Skins, was published in 2015.
Illustration by Rebecca Mock

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Picture
READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

0 Comments

"The Burglar" Tells Three Stories Simultaneously

4/11/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Time is the nervous system of narration, whether factual or fictive. If it gets confused some of the minutiae of human nature are certain not to work, not to glow, not to strike home.
Glenway Wescott
Born April 11, 1901

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureYorulmaz | Strick & Williams
April 11, 2016, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, “The Burglar”: Structured in fifty-nine short segments, sometimes only sentence-length, Bynum’s story is about a husband, a wife, and the man who is burglarizing them. ¶ I love stories that make an examination of our lives, or better than that, a distillation, a breaking down of how we live: race issues, working housewives rating or vetting termite killers during half-days off, TV series and their writers who push the envelope, jobs that very heavily depend on your performance via viewer ratings, the electronic gadgets which are so expensive at first but wind up being junk by the time a burglar sticks them in an unused bag, and still we won’t let go even if it means getting a bloodied eye. ¶ In her quick-start scenes, Bynum is attempting to tell three stories simultaneously, attempting to put film on paper. And in large part she succeeds. For the traditional reader the ride may be tough going until you pick up the patter or pattern, and by then you’ll be obliged to read at least the beginning again, to see that, as any good story, Bynum has laid out all the clues from sentence one. Now, ready, set, go figure how one of the TV characters becomes the burglar! The author’s Ms. Hempel Chronicles came out in 2009.
Photo-Illustration by Oezden Yorulmaz.
Design by Strick and Williams

NEXT TIME: My Book World


Picture
READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

0 Comments

Have The Conversation Now

4/8/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
Barbara Kingsolver
Born April 8, 1955

My Book World

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Volandes, Angelo E. The Conversation: A Revolutionary Plan for End-of-Life Care. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.
 
Medical Doctor Volandes offers a plan for terminal patients to share with their family members and loved ones concerning how and when their lives should end. He informs the reader that “only 24 percent of Americans older than sixty-five die at home; 63 percent die in hospitals or nursing homes, sometimes tethered to machines, and often in pain” (3). He blames the medical profession—doctors like him—for their failure “to have discussions with patients about how to live life’s final chapter” (3). If you should become a terminally ill patient, you must have The Conversation with your doctor.
 
I am reminded of a scene from the Mike Nichols’s 2001 HBO film Wit (based on Margaret Edson’s play), starring Emma Thompson as a highly educated woman dying from late-stage Ovarian cancer. A kind nurse played by Audra McDonald asks Thompson what her wishes are when her heart stops. Thompson indicates she prefers DNR status: Do Not Resuscitate. Thompson’s young intern, a former university student of hers, makes an error on her chart, and the Full Code treatment to revive her ensues instead. McDonald, fortunately, is on hand to remind the doctor, and Thompson is allowed to die in relative peace—as she’s wished. All too often, according to Volandes, Americans are not afforded the courtesy of having The Conversation, and patients are subject to CPR, when statistics show that only a small number of the elderly survive such efforts.
 
At the same time, Volandes explains that medical doctors are trained in the following manner: “To doctor patients is to learn how not to die” (8). They and their staffs often can’t help themselves. With all the lifesaving equipment and procedures available to them, physicians forget the old saw, “First, do no harm,” and forge ahead because they can. Volandes states, “Patients can drive change by having greater knowledge of their options, while doctors can drive change by communicating and advocating for those choices . . . every doctor knows that in the end, we all find ourselves on the patient’s side of the stethoscope” (9).
 
Most of the research, he tells us, indicates that terminal patients are healthier and have a better outlook at the end of their lives if they know what their choices are, and the two choices are pretty much this: you either want to be at home, made comfortable with pain control, or you want to be Full Code, where the hospital staff does everything to keep you alive until your loved ones say “Turn it off.” The doctor’s book is simply written and lacks the dry, overladen rhetoric of medical speak. Instead, he employs moving anecdotes about patients facing the end of their lives, including one about his own father. He describes the video he produces to screen for patients and their loved ones to help them decide how their lives should end, instead of, defaulting to the hospital.
 
I plan to keep The Conversation handy and study it when and if the time arrives. I could always get hit by a truck!

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016


Picture
READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 

Introduction to My Long-Playing Records

"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"

Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

0 Comments

"God's Work" Not So Mysterious

4/4/2016

0 Comments

 
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A WRITER'S WIT
People have always asked me why I'm drawn to material about kids, and for me, it's—I remember being at that age and feeling completely and utterly powerless. You know, there's so many things you wanna do and so many things you're told you can't do.
Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
Born April 4, 1981

New Yorker Fiction 2016

PictureCarucci | Brand
April 4, 2016, Kevin Canty, “God’s Work”: Sixteen-year-old Sander helps his evangelistic mother deliver door-to-door colorful pamphlets about God’s salvation. ¶ Canty’s narrative about the abstractions of religion is rooted in the concrete of our world: hot summer days more like spring because of clear skies and beautiful flowers, the incessant heat, cool creek water in the park where a young girl reveals the flesh of her thigh to Sander. Heat, in particular, Canty emphasizes, especially as poor Sander’s body does what adolescent bodies do best: become tumescent when stimulated. This Sander is fractured into two persons:
 
“‘I’ll pray on it,’ Sander says and his mother radiates approval, and at that exact moment he splits into two people, the one he has always been and some itchy, wayward newborn” (71).
 
The former Sander belongs still to his mother, is faithful to all she holds dear. The “newborn” Sander contrives to obtain his mother’s consent to meet alone with Clara, a girl with a very Eve-like snake rising over her shoulder in the form of a tattoo. From here to story’s end, one feels what has been present all along, two invisible but opposing forces fighting for dominion over this lad—most of the conflict beneath the surface of his everyday life. It may be one of the most revealing stories concerning the power of religion that I’ve ever read. Many of us likewise have been split into two personages: one who believes and one who simply cannot. Kevin Canty’s forthcoming novel, The Underworld, comes out later this year.
Photograph by Elinor Carucci
Design by Christopher Brand

NEXT TIME: My Book World


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READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

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Levin is Paul Revere of Cyberspace

4/1/2016

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A WRITER'S WIT
For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. It's satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.
Francine Prose
Born April 1, 1947

My Book World

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Levin, Adam, and Beau Friedlander. Swiped: How to Protect Yourself in a World Full of Scammers, Phishers, and Identify Thieves. New York: Public Affairs, 2015.
 
When you aren’t an expert in a particular field, you can be cowed by someone who  is (supposedly) an expert. That’s how I feel as I read Levin’s book Swiped. It’s a clever title. You think at first: Oh, he’s talking about how you swipe your card in a reader when purchasing an item, and then you get caught up in the pun. He’s really talking about when someone else swipes your card and swipes it in a reader or uses it to swipe your data. As a student of rhetoric, I’m always suspicious of what seems like hyperbolic speech, oversell, overkill. At the same time, Levin could be Paul Revere, and most of us just haven't heard his cry. Although Levin’s book provides a great deal of usable information, I do believe he could have honed it down to one well-edited magazine article, and it would have been just as effective. You be the judge.
 
Let me share a few of the nuggets I found interesting:

“More than 500 million photographs are uploaded to major websites every day. More than 2 billion pictures are taken on mobile devices every day” (Kindle Location 85). Elsewhere Levin cautions against using geotagged photos at websites like Facebook because it can give thieves clues to your PII (personally identifiable information). It probably begins with the settings in your camera or iPhoto. I think it makes sense NOT to geotag.
 
“Debit cards increase your exposure to fraud. Use a credit card” (Kindle Location 578). Levin asserts that “carefully placed cameras” (by thieves?) can record PIN numbers as you enter them in an ATM or device at your favorite store. Not sure what his authority or source is on this assertion, and he’s assuming that thieves could EASILY install their own cameras at ATM stations. Seriously?
 
He warns against the free release of your social security number: “With your Social Security number in the wind, whoever finds it—or, more likely, whoever buys it on one of the many black-market information exchanges on the deep web—holds the keys to every part of your life. What that means—plain and simple—is that you’re going to need an efficient way to keep one eye over your shoulder, all the time” (Kindle Location 591). The paranoiac tone notwithstanding, Levin’s advice is probably good. Elsewhere in the book, he directs the reader to keep only a COPY of your Medicare card in your wallet with all but the last four numbers blacked out, the “M” or “F,” as well. This way, you can still inform someone who needs the number (medical personnel) but protect yourself from unwarranted use if someone should steal your wallet. He also warns against carrying your Social Security card (or copy) for the very same reasons.
 
At one point Levin makes a list: “We expose our most sensitive personal information any time we
 
Pick up a phone, respond to a text, click on a link, or carelessly provide personal information to someone we don’t know;
 
Fail to properly secure computers or devices;
 
Create easy-to-crack passwords;
 
Discard, rather than shred, documents that contain PII;
 
Respond to an email that directs us to call a number we can’t independently confirm, or complete an attachment that asks for our PII in an insecure environment;
 
Save our user ID or password on a website or in an app as a shortcut for future logins;
 
Use the same user ID or password throughout our financial, social networking, and email universes;
 
Take [online] quizzes that subtly ask for information we’ve provided as the answers to security questions on various websites.
 
Snap pictures with our smartphone or digital camera without disabling the geotagging function;
 
Use our email address as a user name/ID, if we have the option to change it;
 
Use PINS like 1234 or a birthday;
 
Go twenty-four hours without reviewing our bank and credit card accounts to make absolutely sure that every transaction we see is familiar;
 
Fail to enroll in free transactional monitoring programs offered by banks, credit unions, and credit card providers that notify us every time there is any activity in our accounts;
 
Use a free Wi-Fi network [i.e. cafés or even airports] without confirming it is correctly identified and secure, to check email or access financial services websites that contain our sensitive data” (Kindle Location 668-678). These tips are all good advice. I only question whether we need to check our accounts EVERY DAY. Perhaps every second or third day, even once a week?

“The deep web is a hidden part of the Internet. It consists of a vast number of sites, most of them thoroughly boring, that can’t be found by a traditional search engine like Google. To access these sites, you need a password, a specific URL, a sophisticated understanding of how computers communicate, or sometimes all of the above. The deep web is four hundred to six hundred times larger than the ‘surface web,’ that is, the familiar sites you can access via search engines and see every day” (Kindle Location 781).
Hm, yes, okay. On the one hand, I want to run screaming into the street. On the other, I want to laugh. So . . . the deep, dark web is LARGER than our mere regular Internet? But it is also harder to break into? Perhaps the underworld of crime has always been that way, but something about Levin’s tone makes me wary. Moreover, he repeats many, many times that everyone, EVERYONE, will be hacked or in some way attacked by parties wanting access to our personal digital information. Mathematically, that doesn’t seem possible. It’s like saying EVERYONE will have a car accident in his or her lifetime, or EVERYONE will contract TB or AIDS. Some people just won't.
 
All these admonitions, in a nutshell, are what Levin’s book is about. If I were to liken it to a musical form, I would say it is a rondo: Theme ABACADA or perhaps Variations on a Theme. He keeps repeating the same themes in slightly different ways. A full quarter of the book consists of five appendices, which repeat oft-harped-on information presented earlier.
 
Again, Levin seems to offer the reader/consumer/citizen-of-the-world valuable data, but his Paul Revere appeal could have been reduced to bite-sized pieces. He could have skipped many of the useless or situation-specific anecdotes and provided the reader with a little card to keep in the wallet or purse. Sometimes too much information can also be too little.
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

Picture
READ MY ‘BEHIND THE BOOK’ BLOG SERIES for My Long-Playing Records & Other Stories. In these posts I speak of the creative process I use to write each story. Buy a copy here!
 
Introduction to My Long-Playing Records
"My Long-Playing Records" — The Story
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"Ghost Riders"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Blight"
"A Gambler's Debt"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Engineer"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"The Age I Am Now"
"Bathed in Pink"
 
Listen to My Long-Playing Records Podcasts:
"A Certain Kind of Mischief"
"The Best Mud"
"Handy to Some"
"Tales of the Millerettes"
"Men at Sea"
"My Long-Playing Records"
"Basketball Is Not a Drug"
"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
"Bathed in Pink"
Also available on iTunes.

0 Comments
    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

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