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.

“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).

“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.

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

Edith Carron

“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).

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

“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 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

Rebecca Mock

“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).

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

Yorulmaz | Strick & Williams

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

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

Carucci | Brand

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

“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.