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On Editing — Before the fact

1/25/2018

You probably don’t think about editors when you first sit down to write. You’re driven by the strength of an idea, you’re in love with words and eager to see them pour from your keyboard or pencil tip. You may be immobilized, intimidated by a blank page or screen. Either way, you begin to write your story or make your claim and you may realize that you already have an editor — perhaps more than one — perching on your shoulder.

The more you write, the better you’ll get to know these editors. They’ll bark at you, coo at the grace of your prose, haunt you with questions, call you an idiot or a genius. Whoever they are, regardless of your doubts and dreams, you will want to shape them, train them to work for you because — before you submit your work to an editor — you will want to edit yourself.

Whether we’re writing fact, fiction, memoir, or poetry, we’re not looking for a thoughtful fellow with a bowtie, a pipe and leather patches on his tweed-jacketed elbows. Not yet. First, we’re talking about recruiting ourselves as editors, to win our editorial voice over as an ally. The plan? To develop our work as fully as possible before we turn it over to outside eyes.

To best estimate what we need to self-edit, let’s walk around the desk and sit in the editor’s chair. Editors exercise their skills in three areas. First, they scan the long lines of your work, its themes, content, and structure. They ask “what claim do you want to make? What story do you want to tell?” This long-line overview is particularly important in fiction, where writers must define their own format, structure and style. Along the way, don’t waste time with “I want to write in the style of…” Chances are, the author you wish to emulate did not start out with “a style.” Just tell your story. A writing style comes with time and should be dictated by content, not adulation.

Second, bow-tie editors review the lines of your prose, including syntax. What is syntax? Syntax has to do with the way you choose and arrange your narrative, “getting the words right,” as Hemingway put it. Syntax can have rhythm and tone, just like music. Tone in writing is carried by your narrative voice, the way you tell your tale. To self-edit your narrative voice, including syntax and tone, consider developing an awareness of your audience. As you narrate your story or support your claim, you will want to bring your audience with you.

When we write, especially at the beginning, we tend to write for ourselves. We have an idea — vague or clear — of what we’re trying to say, we’ve been thinking about it, we “get it.” But does your audience get it? You’ve been tossing your story around in your head for days, weeks, months. Your audience is reading your words for the first time. Out of consideration for your readers, scan your work for clarity and simplicity. Do I need all those “due to the fact that[s]…” or “To tell you the truth[s]…”? Do I need all these adjectives and adverbs? Sure, some of them add color or essential focus to a description but too many can cloud the picture. You don’t need them. You are the author, i.e., an authority. Have faith in your core narrative and the power of your ideas.

Have your self-editor check for logic, too. Writing is a linear form. Therefore, sequence is a big deal. Do your sentences unfold sequentially, with strong transitions between images, actions, ideas? Stop here, get some distance and ask once again — am I bringing the reader along with me? Clarity, simplicity, and logical sequence will help keep them turning the pages.

As you work, your tone will begin to emerge. By tone, I mean that sense of how your writing would sound. In fact, a great way to gain distance from your work is to read it aloud, or have others read it to you. Listen. You’ll be looking for your work to fall somewhere between two extremes — conversational and lofty. Conversational tone often sounds as if you’re talking across the table from a friend who knows you well, having a glass or two of wine. It’s chatty, full of starts and stops, slang, and “… do you know what I mean[s]?” It’s you thinking out loud. If you’ve ever transcribed a conversation, you’ll know that spontaneous chatter reads like gibberish. “Ahs” and “ums” and “do you know what I mean[s]?” are fine in conversation, but on the page, even dialog needs to be shaped.

The other tonal extreme is the lofty tone. It’s usually the result of authors being anxious or uncertain of their credibility, so they fill the narrative with big words, often incorrectly used, flowery adjectives and adverbs, long-winded introductory phrases. Try to find a middle ground, a thoughtful, personable balance between the two poles of lofty and conversational tone. In time, this balance becomes your narrative voice and your self-editor will recognize when you’re being authentic and when you are not.

Finally, your self-editor will want to check punctuation, grammar, typos. Don’t neglect this stage. Details do count. Nothing will flag writing as amateur as too many commas, sentence fragments or run-on sentences, using “its” when you mean “it’s,” writing “1” instead of “one,” describing an African American man, rather than African-American man. Don’t leave this work for the editor. Don’t expect them to pick these things up. Of course they will, once you get your work to them, but before that, you want to make sure that you have edited your own work as thoroughly as you possibly can on every level.

Now set your work aside. If you can, let it sit for a night, a week, a month. Get up from your desk, stand on your head, run around the block, get a friend to read your work, or simply change type fonts — anything to give yourself a different perspective on your work. Then, go back, and do it all again. Writing is rewriting and rewriting requires editing. The more you edit before the fact, the more control you will gain over your creative process.

More on writing...
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Trump, Haiti, and tremendo aché

1/13/2018

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Macbeth, Lafayette Theater NYC, 1936

Intruder Trump’s recent shit-for-brains remarks about AIDS in Haiti and his dismissal of ‘shithole’ African nations prompted me to revisit a little-known tale that periodically circulates through the international theater community.

In 1936, an ambitious young Orson Welles conceived a radical version of Shakespeare's ghostly M-cbeth. Welles auditioned and hired an all-black cast and set the jinxed and bedeviled play in a fictional 18th-century nation, modeled on Haiti. Integral to the production was a troupe of Haitian voudon drummers and singers.

Welles and his producer John Houseman mounted the controversial production at the Lafayette Theater in NYC with full support of the WPA and the Federal Theater Project. The voudon production received critical acclaim despite its radical, re-contextualized interpretation of Scottish witchery.

One critic, however panned the vulnerable production mercilessly, revealing his racist bias. That night, M-cbeth's Haitian drummers remained in the darkened, post-show theater, singing, dancing, and chanting until dawn. Shortly thereafter, the critic was found dead in bed without a mark on him.

Many cultures consider coincidence as a random phenomenon. Other cultures perceive authentic, other-worldly connections between coexisting people, places, and events and often act upon these more subtle constructs.

From one perspective the Haitians and the critic had no causal connection. From another perspective, the midnight dance in the Lafayette theater and the critic's death were linked through aché, a mystical life force that permeates the Universe. Without aché, no life could exist.

With this feces-slinging Bonobo despoiling our spirits from a defiled White House, I'm driven to recall the powerful coincidence that vibrated between the critic and the Haitian musicians of Welles’ M-cbeth.

Maybe those who today possess tremendo aché today will commune with the voudon performers of Welles’ M-cbeth. Together, they could sing, dance, and drum out a response to Trump’s racist obscenities.

With the power of good spirit, such a powerful gathering might bring aché to this President, for he — not AIDS — now hosts the world’s most dangerous, deadly, and despicable disease.

Red light, baleful eye — Trump encased, Marine One

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Recollections: Rocked in Time

12/10/2017

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The boy rocked in time to the music, rump bouncing against the back of a ruptured easy chair. He pushed a mouth harp across tiny teeth, accompanying a blues singer over the pops and scratches of a fast-revolving 78-rpm record. The harmonica’s discordant moan caught the rhythm, modality, and feel of the music and bounced it back to singer and guitar. The boy wore a striped jersey, baggy blue corduroys, and brown oxfords. Soft-rounded cheeks, nose, and chin glowed beneath a bowl-cut thatch of dark hair. Brown eyes revealed amazement and delight, as yet unscarred by any perceptions of what might follow.

As he played, the boy stared into the album propped open against the bookcase. A Negro man in a white shirt stood in the ruins of a burnt-out prairie home, his back to the viewer, the carved neck and body of a guitar strapped over his belly. Charred planks and timbers reached toward the night sky. They reminded the boy of witch fingers.

The only structure left standing in the painting was a scorched brick chimney. On the mantelpiece, a clock stood intact save for the heat-shattered glass face. Across a sea of prairie grass, a passenger train shone silver in the moonlight, windows radiating warmth into a dark night. In the foreground the man embraced a guitar, black strap diagonally bisecting a white-shirted back. The lonely man, the dark night, the unreachable warmth and movement of the train all cried loneliness, abandonment, and missed chances. Desolation was lost on the boy. He was four years old and was busy making music with the man in the picture.

*

Months earlier, the boy’s family had moved into a federal housing project in an ancient Boston neighborhood. Red-bricked, thick-walled, and sensible, the apartments stood in ordered contrast to the crumbling wood-framed dwellings that surrounded the projects. The boy’s new home hunkered at the foot of a rounded hill where colonial citizens once withstood redcoat assaults. Now, its sacrosanct bronze plaques, statues, and cannons suffered attack from a burgeoning phalanx of post-war families. In good weather, hordes of kids swarmed up the hillside and onto the obsolete battlefield, its ancient solemnity disarmed by freshly laid footpaths, sand boxes, pipe-framed swings, park benches, and water fountains with spigots that the boy could reach without being lifted by his mother.

Inside the projects, blue steel railings bracketed the stairways and blue fire doors protected each apartment. Everything was shiny and new and there was a cared-for air to the place. A man in green coveralls, Patrick sewn onto one breast pocket in red thread, kept the hallway floors polished and smelling of wax. Patrick had a dent in his balding head. “A war wound,” the boy’s father called it.

There were plenty of kids around, even after they dragged the boy’s big sister off to first grade. The boy took charge of the situation whenever she left. He had his mom to himself and Billy O’Brien and the two Guerrier kids would come up and play. The boy owned an indestructible set of building blocks; he and the other boys built forts or stacked the blocks end-to-end in big, wobbling piles until they clattered to the floor.

*

The boy finished shredding the tobacco from the white paper cylinders nested in a pack of his father’s Pall Malls and crawled onto a chair to claim the second pack off the bureau. From his elevated position, he could see his father standing on the sidewalk below, foot perched on a black sedan bumper. The boy’s father worked as an engineer at an electronics company in Boston. During the war, he had helped develop underwater listening devices for the navy. A scientist, yes, but he prided himself on political prowess and his working-class sensibilities. During the Depression, he had joined the American Communist Party out of hope, out of desire, and in response to a call for justice in a troubled world.

After World War II, his left-wing fervor unabated, he loved talking politics to the people who lived in the projects. Now, he was doing just that, chattering at a big man with red hair. To the boy, the man’s red head looked small and his shoes looked big, the way they do in the funny papers.

The red-haired man nodded his small head.

His father took his foot off the car bumper. He gave the red-haired man a slap on the back.

The red-haired man laughed and stuck his thumb in the air.

The boy’s father laughed and stuck his thumb in the air, too. Then he walked away.

The red-haired man stopped laughing. He looked at the boy’s father, then looked up at the sky and rapidly touched his forehead, heart, and each shoulder.

The boy’s friend, Joey Guerrier, made the same sign when he got scared. “Keeps the devil away,” he said. The boy didn’t know from the devil. His family didn’t nail crucifixes to the bedroom walls or hang honey-toned portraits of Jesus in the living room. Nobody used the word “evil” at home, he didn’t grapple with devils and sins, and when asked, he had explained that god was the first part of “goddamn.” But now, when the red-haired man touched himself, an imaginary shadow passed over the boy, making him shiver. The tall man had just made the devil-go-home sign at his father and his father didn’t even know about it.

*

That night, the kitchen bulged with visitors. They leaned against counters or crowded around the table, drinking beer and drinking wine and talking about the world over platefuls of spaghetti and salad. Afterward they smoked cigarettes and stubbed out the butts in the leftover juices on their dinner plates. Ladies came as well. They smelled delicious and wore trousers or dresses covered with splashy flowers. They smoked and drank and talked right along with the men, but the boy was mostly fascinated by the big fellows in tall, pleated pants and suspenders, the men who wore hats in the house, the men who had dark whiskers and spoke with foreign accents.

The boy’s sister liked to hover in the kitchen when people came to visit. She was already seven. She would sit the men’s laps and listen to the conversation, her wide-open eyes moving from one speaker to another.

While he watched his sister, the boy’s mother told the visitors about the shredded cigarettes. “He loves to take things apart,” she explained as if he was not there.

“And records,” the boy’s father said. “Give that boy a Rachmaninoff concerto and I swear…he will reduce it to fragments, better’n any critic I ever read.”

The men laughed. The ladies sucked in their breaths. “Oh John, give the boy a break,” one said.

Sitting on a big man’s lap, the boy’s sister shook her finger at him. “Bad, bad,” she minced. “Naughty, naughty boy.” Then she kissed the top of his head the way a grownup would.

“You’re just a kid, too,” the boy said and drifted away from the ensuing laughter. The cigarette smoke made him cough. He took shelter in the living room, a favorite place, warmed by clanking radiators and illuminated by the light of shaded lamps, crammed with books and records in shelves. Paintings, photos, and sketches covered the walls.

His mother stepped into the living room and stood by the door, hands folded at her lap. “I’m sorry I told people about the cigarettes.” She turned on the phonograph. “But you made a big mess.” The boy looked up at her; she was very pretty.

“It was just between you and me,” she coo’d. “I shouldn’t have said anything.” She handed him the harmonica and kissed him. “Pick a record.”

The boy pulled chose the one with the Negro man and the train. He handed it to his mother. “No broken ones.”

“No more broken ones,” his mother repeated. “Good.” She placed the fragile graphite disc on the turntable. “There,” she said and set the needle in the groove. “Josh White sings the blues. Just right for a man with a harmonica.” She lifted him onto the easy chair, kissed him and rejoined the clamor in the kitchen.

The record played itself out in four minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Conversation, thick with voices, continued in the kitchen. Its task complete, the phonograph needle hissed in the final record groove, putting out its own ragged syncopation. His mother did not reappear. The boy kept playing, bending the tune to his mind.

*

After the last visitor had said goodnight, after the kitchen was cleaned, after the family turned out the lights and all had fallen asleep, a wicked racket shattered the boy’s dream. Men pounded fists on the front door, the blows echoing hollow in the apartment. Slurred voices pierced the fire door.

“Open up in there, yuh god-damned communist.”

“Get yer fuckin’ commie ass out here, yuh friggin’ red bastad.”

The boy heard his mother’s voice, worried tones, ends of phrases floating upward.

“Mom…” the boy’s sister called out, fear in her voice. “What’s happening?”

“It’s nothing, dear,” his mother called down the hallway. “Go back to sleep.” Her voice shook a little.

“Go on home now.” His father’s voice sounded low and smooth, as if he was reading the funny papers to the boy and his sister. “You had your party. We all like to tie one on once in a while.”

“Come on out. Show yer face, yuh friggin’ commie coward.” The voice sounded angry, frustrated. More pounding, louder.

“Go on home,” his father warned. “You won’t want to remember this tomorrow.”

Laughter. “Remember this, ya friggin’ anarchist.” A pause, a giggle. “Piss on you.”

“Yeah. Piss on you, ya friggin’ fuckin’ anarchist.” Rumbles of laughter rolled away outside. Silence crept back into the apartment.

The boy crouched under the blankets, listening to his sister’s quick, shallow breathing. Who were these men? Why did they pound on the door? Were they his father’s friends? The red-haired man who made the devil-go-home sign — was he there, too? Why were they so angry? What were those names they shouted? What happened if the door broke?

He heard the urgent hiss and murmur of his parents’ voices. His father climbed out of bed and walked down the hallway. He rattled the doorknob and relocked the deadbolt. The footsteps padded back to the bedroom.

No one came to see the boy and his sister. Nothing relieved the blackness of the chamber. Eyes wide open, he lay awake, heart pounding.

*

Months later, a fleet of zeppelins passed over the projects. Relics of the war, they flew in formation on some indecipherable maneuver. Their slow-moving shadows crept across the bare trees and the snow-patched ground. Steady, fanlike, the whirring of propellers fluttered, the beating wings of a swarm of mechanical insects. Their bloated carcasses floated low in the sky, shutting out the sunhe boy covered his eyes and ears and ran for his mother’s legs. She laughed sweetly and embraced him, uttering words of comfort. He took no comfort from the shelter of her body. No comfort in her words. No comfort at all.

That night, the boy stood against the back of the armchair and peered at the Negro main on the album cover. He heard the wind that rippled the long grass. He heard the sound of the train clacking across the prairie. He felt the dark blue night surround the man in the picture and separate him from the warm train, the clacking, clattering train that pulled its passengers to safety.

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Memoir: A Father and Son Reunion

11/28/2017

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Humidity hung in the New York air like wet laundry, rendering the city blurred and misty. Summer trees drooped green and heavy and red-brick facades shimmered out of focus in the background. I felt as if sweat was falling into my eyes, the salt blinding me. In reality, I sat in air-conditioned comfort in a fern bar at 81st Street and Amsterdam Avenue halfway through a lunch of white wine, French bread, and salmon.

While I chatted with my partner, a shock of recognition kicked at my chest: today marked the anniversary of my old man’s death.

On this day, decades earlier, he had thrown one end of a quarter-inch rope (he would have called it “a line”) over a pipe suspended from the ceiling of his cluttered Boston laboratory, knotted a noose into the other end, dropped it over his head, and stepped off his worktable. He never said goodbye: no note, nothing.

Now, my old man was dying again, this time inside me, his consciousness slipping down a nightmare slope into the unexplored water of an imagined River Styx. Desperation raced through my system like adrenaline and my gut recoiled from the sharp kicks of his long-dead homunculus.

His life force pressed against my heart and lungs as it gasped for breath, fighting against the choice it had made. The dance progressed in paroxysms and I felt a strong pulse of regret in the blind, violent attempt it made to save itself. Slowly, the bucking in my organs weakened, subsided, then stilled, the body still warm, the spirit lingering, not wanting to go.

“Not a good way to die,” the spirit gasped with a familiar irony. I lost the signal. It was gone, leaving me alone opposite my partner in a fern bar at 81st and Amsterdam. I had reunited with the unrequited spirit of my father.

Tears fell on the back of my wrist and onto the cool, pink flesh of the salmon, sacrificed on a bed of greens. I dropped the fork from my shaking hand. “Either the fish is bad, or I’m about to keel over,” I told my partner. “I just felt my old man die… again.”

We left money on the table and walked outside into the pressurized mist of the underground day. Her compassion embraced me, but I could still feel my old man inside. “Look at what this guy decided to do,” I said. “What if …?”
“But you won’t.” She took my arm. “Let’s go to the museum.”

Inside the black rock of the crosstown tunnel, a creature barked once, loud, close at hand. A shadow roared past in darkness, moving ahead of us toward the wet green light of trees hanging over the tunnel’s mouth.

“It’s just Anubis, the gatekeeper of the afterlife,” my partner assured me.

“Yeah, well,” I said. “But that was still not a good way to die.”

We walked in tunnel darkness and I returned to my reunion, rerunning it, determined to find a solution, to ease the pain. “But I get to live,” I said out loud. “I get to go on and experience all this.”

We emerged from the tunnel into the rich, green light of Central Park. When we reached the museum, I sat on the smooth, green slats of a bench and sucked in the people, walking pretty, graceful, and alive under the shelter of trees.

Streets, trees, people, dogs, cars, cabs radiated light along Fifth Avenue, survivors, reaping the benefits of the program, talking with one another, reaching out to strangers and finding common ground in place, imagery, sentient existence. The moment felt unique, an opportunity to experience life, the unique arrangement of people, the words they spoke, the blare of taxi horns.

I was ready to accept it, this moment, not angry, sitting alone. I urged my partner to visit the museum. I wanted to sit on the bench and write. Passersby revealed their secrets to my eyes, my practiced eyes, experienced with viewing, out in the world, alive.

My old man had died long ago. I suffered his loss but survived to taste the rich broth of all things terrestrial, each precious object throwing off its own unique light, the patterns spiraling, morphing in front of me like a kaleidoscope.

My partner walked back down the green-tree corridor from the museum, carrying a shopping bag full of art books. She dropped the bag on the bench and sat down beside me.

“Survival,” she said. “Now that’s the key to the benefits program.”

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Too Many Books — Stalked by madness in the time of Trump*

11/14/2017

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elephant celebes, max ernst, 1921

The bistro fell quiet in the lazy interim between lunch and the happy hour. A bartender took time to wash glasses. Laughter burst from the kitchen, a ball game buzzed on the TV. Sitting in the cool, semi-darkness, the author had time and space to contemplate his bewilderment. Before the great robbery, the author had wielded his writing for decades, a modern David, slinging word stones. In the past, he'd gotten his licks in, drawn blood, celebrated the marches through the meadows. Why not now?

A guy sitting at the end of the bar morphed into a hawk. Perched on his strategically placed bar stool, the guy's hair molted into a hawk's sweptback feathers. His bright eyes leapt from person to person as if he was looking for prey. At any moment he might spread his wings, swoop across the room and land on a cheeseburger or the tender shoulder of a tank-topped damsel.

The author looked away. Take a deep breath, he muttered. Act natural. He ordered another beer. From his perch, the hawk darted a black-eyed glance at the author. He could feel talons sink into his own neck.

The birdlike apparition made the author feel woozy. He swallowed the last of the draft, paid up, and left without waiting for change.

Back on the avenue, he cruised past a line of kids waiting to file inside an improv club. Five bucks a show, fifty minutes of raunchy laughter, grab a stack of three-buck sushi to go from the joint next door and tear off into the Saturday night. Kids have all the fun. The author remembered youthful misery and corrected: No, kids do not have all the fun.

The author edged past the comedy queue snaking along the sidewalk. Elephant trunks, tails, and other fleshy appendages mushroomed out of young faces and torsos. A slim, bearded kid turned simian. The features on a grinning, red-faced boy melted into a pig snout. Maybe it's the heat, he thought, but the air was perfect.

One transmogrifying hawk he could understand but — as when the second airplane flew into the second tower — similar events unfolding in sequence demand analysis. First the hawk, now the rows of kids sporting rhino horns and elephant trunks? No. There are no coincidences. Bob Dylan wisecracked in his ear. "There's something happening here, but you don't know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones…"

Leaving the grotesque crowd behind, the author fled down the sidewalk to familiar territory, a used book and record store. No one else was taking notice of hawks on bar stools or elephants in a ticket line. Why am I seeing this way? Who's doing this to me?

He felt as he had decades earlier in a San Francisco park, when a small man with a wispy beard had slipped a little white pill into his performer's hat. "You'll like this," the man had said. After the show, the author had proceeded to Haight Street's Straight Theater to commune with Janis Joplin. He had danced in a great circle with all the others. He, Janis, the spinning galaxy of his brothers and sisters, all had become family under the influence of the ecstatic little pill. But today, there had been no pill.

The author pushed through the bookstore doors and proceeded straight to the vinyl rack full of old albums. Neil Young, Martha and the Vandellas, Creedence Clearwater, Lightnin' Hopkins and Jimi Hendrix stared up at him from worn record covers — his music, his rebellion, his reason to write. But the world is very different from what it was then. Current circumstances smothered any notion of writing about the past.

Nobody must suspect I'm freaking out, the author thought, struggling to measure his paranoia. Weird. Usually disorders run along genetic lines. His old man had suffered from deadly depression, but the author's current state was surreal, not depressed. Still, there are no coincidences. So who — or what — had dispatched that barroom hawk to drive the author into this bizarre wilderness?

Stabilized by the vinyl and his clever ruse as a browser, the author dared lift his head. Long, straight lines of bookshelves curved along walls, warped under the weight of their payload — books, books, thousands of books. Books, all shapes and sizes, thicknesses, books written, rewritten, published, and reviewed or not. Books from the millennia, books from now.

Books.

Hardcover tomes leaned against paperbacks in undulating rows of titles, authors, words, so many words, so much effort… for what?

Too many books.

For five thousand years, authorial voices have flowed through fingers to sand, stone, paper, keyboard. They been collected, revised, proofread and corrected, published, purchased, read, stacked to gather dust on brick-and-board shelves, thrown into cardboard boxes, and brought to this book store to languish or illuminate.

Why would he want to contribute his fragile work to this painful bookseller's ritual, stained by hope and frustration? Yeah, the idea that he'd never write again did cross his mind but this stalemate extended beyond the cliché of writer's block. Over the years, through prolific and empty times, he had changed. His back, shoulders, and knees ached. His writing now embraced deeper realms. Had his psyche and spirit grown stiff along with his knees? Who knew? Despite his growing alarm, despite his savvy politicized take, despite his efforts to sound the alarm, the world had undergone a paradigm shift.

*Excerpted from a work in progress

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A Modest Proposal* — To alleviate stress caused by the threat of nuclear war

11/3/2017

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For over seventy years, citizens of the world have struggled to accommodate the prospect of nuclear annihilation. Regardless of how imminent or distant the threat may seem, fiery images of an H-bomb endgame glow radiant in our hearts, minds, and sinews.

We’ve all heard the nuclear news: After decades of proliferation, an escalating atomic firefight could incinerate us within seconds.

The atomic era’s brief but impactful history has drawn humanity into an existential freak out. In response, we’ve constructed all manner of defenses to insulate ourselves against the terror of The Bomb.

We’ve been told that those who control nuclear weapons systems have developed elaborate fail-safe mechanisms to prevent a nuclear “mistake.” We’ve woven our own byzantine web of bomb-bred gallows humor. We’ve laughed at our plight, shrugged our shoulders, and mumbled “to hell with it.” A lucky few resolve to live for today and forget about tomorrow. Over time, many of us, aided by the end of the Cold War and media denial, have allowed nuclear fears to fade… until now.

Today, the specter of thermonuclear devastation has raised its ugly heads. No, that’s not a typo. The doomsday scenario has doubled down. Two nuke-wielding leaders currently prance across the world stage, lending a macabre significance to the phrase “two heads are better than one.”

The two heads are screwed into the necks of two bumptious males licensed to commit bilateral nuclear annihilation. Both Leaders have terrible haircuts, odd sartorial preferences, and an inclination toward cruelty. Both are impulsive, reactive, unpredictable, and — despite the power they wield — tightly wrapped in dangerously thin skins. Together, they have resurrected our terror of nuclear holocaust.

Consider our plight. Thugs have already kidnapped our government, creating all manner of waste, destruction, sadness and disgust. Now the public is expected to accommodate two nuke-wielding lunatics. To alleviate this near-intolerable anxiety, I propose that we encourage Our Leader be the first to drop The Big One.

Of course, it’s possible that encouraging such an act could result in uncontrolled retaliation. According to a new report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), nine nations — the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — possess approximately 16,300 nuclear weapons. The above mentioned, preemptive gambit might spread to other nuke-wielding nations.

Therefore, I’d like to add another element to my proposal. Rather than risk retaliation and planet-wide extinction, I propose that Our Leader should ignore the threats of his counterpart and bomb one of his own cities...now.

A preemptive, self-inflicted nuclear attack would remove any element of surprise from Our Leader’s Asian counterpart. Such an attack would eliminate all possible hit-and-miss missile mishaps and ensure that we didn’t give the other guy a chance to sucker punch Our Leader and his citizenry.

On a more sophisticated level, a national genocide by Our Leader might partially alleviate the hostility he bears toward the American people, whom he profoundly mistrusts and hates. Accordingly, he might experience a newfound sense of benevolence.

Before we dismiss my proposal out of hand, consider the consequences of a unilateral domestic nuclear attack. The most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated, Russia’s 50-megaton Tsar Bomba, would only destroy a single city. Chances are the weapons thrown by Our Leader would be much smaller.

A 20-megaton weapon would ignite a fireball with a radius of just 260 meters, only the size of a few football fields. Yes, it would create a deep crater, fatal nuclear radiation would embrace a 12-mile radius, and the resulting fireball would inflict third-degree burns to creatures in a larger area.

However, if detonated over lower Manhattan, a 20-megaton device would kill only about 600,000 people and the fallout would barely reach central Connecticut.

Perhaps a less populous area of our nation might provide a wiser target for our Leader’s domestic outburst. Instead of targeting Manhattan, why not nuke Kansas City or any other mid-sized American metropolis? Better yet, why not drop The Big One on a rural area, for example the state of Nebraska. Yes, the loss would be difficult to absorb in the short run, but after only a few decades, life could resume in all but the most devastated areas.

Imagine the relief: It’s often more practical to confront a reality than to wallow in theoretical fears. The survivors of a self-inflicted nuclear attack would adjust and find resourceful ways to go on living, knowing first-hand that the scope and scale of a nuclear blast was limited, in contrast to the relentless and continuing contemplation of such madness before the fact.

Finally, even if Our Leader failed to find his lust satiated by attacking his own nation he could be impeached for treason and executed for war crimes and that, dear reader, would put an end to this misery.

In closing, I wish to underscore the sincerity of my intent. I am not involved financially in any aspect of nuclear technology for war or for peace. I have no affiliations with contractors, large or small, that might profit from sealing off the irradiated areas of a nuclear blast. And, to the best of my knowledge, I have no enemies residing in Kansas City or Nebraska. I make this modest proposal only in the interests of the greater good.

*Based on Jonathan Swift's satirical essay (1729).

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Nuclear Myopia — We'll all go together when we go

10/20/2017

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Today, we may be on the verge of nuclear war, perhaps closer to a midnight endgame than ever before. But a strange complacency seems to snooze behind this horrific possibility. Many Americans don’t seem to mind the prospect of a nuclear shoot-out.

According to the Washington Post, a recent poll found that a whopping 46 percent of Republicans would support a preemptive strike on North Korea.

In addition, a heart-pounding 36 percent of Democrats and Independents would support dropping The Big One on Kim Jong Un and — of course — the brat dictator’s countrymen and women.

Do current nuke enthusiasts understand that a nuclear attack incinerates everything — flora and fauna, country and city, earth and sky in a blinding orb of heat (540k degrees farenheit) traveling at near the speed of light? That the radiation scattered by a nuclear blast remains fatal for decades, centuries, and millennia, causing cancer, birth defects, and mutation?

Baffled by this “whatever” nuke-‘em attitude, I explored the demographics of the poll above. Who wants to nuke Kim Jong Un?

Seventeen percent of males aged 18 – 34
Twenty-six percent of males aged 35 – 49
Thirty-four percent of males aged 50 – 64

Not surprisingly, women, blacks, and hispanics were less trigger-happy and — most telling — far fewer males over 65 wanted to unleash nuclear holocaust.

Pondering these figures led me to speculate: Many of the people featured in the percentages above were too young to experience the nuclear madness of the 1950s and ‘60s. Without the visceral portent of thermonuclear war, are younger citizens more liable to shrug off the prospects of nuclear cataclysm?

As children of the Cold War, we spent much of our youth surrounded by the threat of nuclear warfare. We watched dozens of 50 megaton mushroom clouds blossom fiery orange, red, and yellow across the covers of Time and Life magazines.

We sat in front of the television and watched the Nevada desert light up with nuclear tests televised with great joviality by NBC's morning show talk host Dave Garroway and his simian sidekick, J. Fred Muggs.

At school we were taught to duck and cover under our desks, as if holding your head down and sticking your ass in the air was a survival technique.

The Khruschev-Kennedy kiloton dual delivered more fiery fears. Our bomb had to be bigger than their bomb.

These early threat-fests terrified us. The awesome power of the bomb struck us all deep in our preteen hearts and minds. Duck and cover seemed the height of folly. We were all going to die in a millisecond of blinding light.

We shivered, lay awake at night, wrapped our psyches in denial, or rendered nuclear annihilation as absurd, hilarious, incomprehensible. Regardless of our contortions, the warheads proliferated, a nuke-driven space race accelerated, but the specter that hung over us never quite disappeared.

Perhaps, for those who came later, now in their fifties and early sixties, the threat of nuclear war has grown dim. During the nuclear-free Vietnam War, today’s nuke enthusiasts would have been infants or children. Reagan scared the world with his Star Wars proliferation plans but the Cold War ended — not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Today, we are back head-to-head with the Russian remnants of the former Soviet Union. We have two lunatics vomiting nuclear bombast.

Perhaps, without that deep-seated sense-memory of mushroom-cloud, Cold War terror, younger Americans have no way to comprehend what might happen if either Donald J. Trump or Kim Jong Un decided to plunge us into the nuclear darkness.

To them, I offer a light-hearted but ominous tune by Tom Lehrer, MIT mathematician and Cold War musical satirist as a wake-up call from the past. "We'll all go together when we go," folks.

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Sputnik

1/23/2016

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We lived at the edge of a forest in Massachusetts. The hay field across the road served as our own planetarium, surrounded by stone walls and maples. From there, the night sky unfolded for us: an unusual moon, the northern lights, an eclipse, but now. . . who could predict?

“Tonight!” My old man shouted. “Sputnik! It’s going to orbit right over our heads. We’ll be able to see it.”

“I thought it was the size of a basketball,” I mumbled. “How’re we gonna see it?”

“It’s a sphere,” my old man said. “It magnifies reflected light.”

“Come on,” I said.

“Look it up. Plug in the ratio of lumens as a function of sphere circumference and distance. . .”

“Distance?” I grumbled. “Distance to what?”

“In this particular situation, my boy. . .” My old man liked to imitate W.C. Fields, Groucho Marx, Jack Benny. That night he was W.C. Fields. “The distance from satellite to earth and sun to satellite, the circumference of the sphere. From our vantage point (nobody said POV back then), it should look like an orbiting Venus.”

“Won’t that be lovely,” my mother chimed in. “Venus. Like Botticelli, in that clamshell, for the whole world to see.” My mother was an exhibitionist.

My old man pushed away from the table. He lit the sticky-sweet, cherry-stink tobacco in his five-dollar, Huckleberry Finn, corncob pipe and gazed up at the darkening sky. “For the whole world to see.”

Most people looked upon the unblinking mini-moon as a threat. The Soviets had shot the damned thing up there with a super-powerful spaceship, proving they could send anything anywhere. The Ruskie satellite orbited the heads of humans worldwide, a lighthouse for the devil. “If the commies can do that,” our authorities told us, “they can do whatever they want.” They would then elaborate, giving specifics about whatever aspect of the communist threat was being featured that week.

My old man was beyond all that. “Paranoid bullshit,” he said. A backhand flick of the wrist dismissed the partisan fears. “Give it time. That little ball is going to unite the world.”

Now the family stood in the meadow gazing upwards into the sprawled bowl of stars. Would Sputnik drift? Would it float? Would it crawl so slow as to render its orbit imperceptible, the way the planets sidled across the night sky? Or would it fail, descend, and burn out like a meteor?

“There!” I shouted, my voice adolescent and shrill. A small orb, gleaming with mercurial clarity, broke over the treetops from the east and glided, slow, smooth, and silent across the cold New England sky.

“Jiminy!” my mother said.

“Just like a tiny Venus,” my sister said.

“That’ll make the Pentagon crap in its pants,” my old man said.

Amid Cold War infestation, my old man managed to impart a love for the patterns and structures and physics of astronomy in his son. Despite my resistance, my father’s spiritual, non-religious enthusiasm for the music of the celestial spheres had infected me with curiosity about the world, the planets, the solar system, the galaxy, and how the entire Universe might operate.

I thought sputnik was beautiful beyond belief.

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Digger Bread — you had to give it away for free

1/19/2016

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I graduated Harvard and never looked back. The previous year, I had auditioned for the San Francisco Mime Troupe (pronounced ‘meem,’ not ‘myme’ — a long story in itself) and had been invited to join this wild radical theater company that performed free shows in the parks of the city.

Caught up in San Francisco’s free-city anarchy and resistance, seduced by its poets and folksingers and revolutionaries, I had been eager to turn my back on the red-brick traditions of Harvard. To hell with the diploma; I was gonna make radical theater.

The Mime Troupe’s director, R.G. Davis, a theater visionary with a penchant for rebellious thinking, got wind of my intentions. He kicked me down the stairs of the Troupe’s second-story studio and told me not to come back until I graduated. I thought it odd that the radical R.G. was so adamant about a college degree. Wasn’t this the ‘hip’ thing to do? I argued. Turn on, tune in, and drop out?

My question enraged R.G. That’s media bullshit, he growled. Drop out and you disappear. Turning on is irrelevant. Grow your hair, shave your head, no matter. Get high, just don’t forget to bring the ammunition. We commit, he continued. We engage. We breathe the fresh air of the parks and give free shows to the people. Drop out and you won’t be good for anything but smoking dope and playing guitars. We got plenty of that. We need thinkers. So get the hell out of here and learn how to think.

Can I come back after I graduate? I asked from the bottom of the stairs.

Yeah, yeah, Harvard, Davis replied. Come on back… next year. If there is one. Things were feeling pretty apocalyptic in those days, with napalm news clips coming back from Vietnam and American cities burning with uprising.

I finished my final year at Harvard, glowing with the expectation of joining the Troupe when I returned. I gave no thought to grad school or the draft. There was a war to stop and they could put me in jail before I’d kill farmers in a third-world country. Hell no. I was headed back to that rag-tag group of actors and poets, anarchists and carpenters, communists and comics who had set out to change the world with theater. A tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

At the dawn of the over-publicized Summer of Love, I trucked back to San Francisco in a rattling red GMC pickup that consumed more oil than gas. I rejoined the Troupe and landed in a Digger household in Diamond Heights.

The Diggers featured a loose collection of wanderers, free spirits, and anarchists who took their name from a movement in Cromwellian England. The English Diggers had believed in economic justice, an egalitarian contract with the flora and fauna of the planet, and open sexuality. The English Diggers lived largely in rural, utopian communes and developed a self-sustaining livelihood.

In the 1700s, the landed aristocracy descended upon the Diggers when the utopians “liberated” English common land originally granted to the underclass for grazing and gardening. As Europe collapsed and Guy Fawkes rose to prominence, the aristocracy clamped down on the poor. The Diggers were attacked and executed for their liberating behavior. Three hundred years before the Summer of Love, the English Diggers had opened the door for my San Francisco brothers and sisters to liberate San Francisco.

So the Diggers re-birthed themselves in San Francisco, this time in urban communes, largely in the Haight Ashbury. They had taken the name, spirit, and philosophy from their British forebears. The latter-day Diggers launched a contemporary assault on the bastions of private property, conventional thinking, and repressed libidos. Armed with the slogan “one percent free” they set out to create alternatives to the rules, regulations, and expectations of a big American city at the pinnacle — or nadir, if you will — of post-war hegemony.

As the ranks of dreamy hippies descended on San Francisco, the kids found that life was not as Timothy Leary or the Beatles had described. They descended by the tens of thousands and found themselves at the mercy of city and a culture that was simultaneously amazed by and terrified of the roaming youngsters who were looking for the Yellow Submarine.

In resistance to the still-expanding consumer culture, Diggers maintained they could create an alternative society that would depend on neither profit nor war. They set up a Free Store to distribute contributed clothing, blankets, appliances, and abandoned furniture. Need a change of clothes after escaping Kansas City? Head for the Free Store. They set up a Free Clinic, a coterie of Free Presses, helped spawn the Mime Troupe’s free shows in the parks and…

… the Diggers launched a Free Bakery.

Ecstatic with my post-graduate work, studying mime and movement, building shows from scratch, stomping on the boards of a commedia stage before a lawn full of laughing freaks, I lived happily on Mime Troupe wages — twenty-five dollars a week, raised by passing the hat after the show. The Troupe worked nonstop at the gritty warehouse studio leaving no time for a job and no money for food or clothing. No matter, I dropped by the Free Store to exchange one blue-jeaned, plaid-shirted uniform for another. I fought off several bouts of social disease thanks to the ministrations of the Free Clinic, and broke my bread free of charge in the Golden Gate Panhandle, thanks to the Free Bakery.

The first Digger Free Bakery began in the basement of a church on Waller Street. To make Digger bread for free, you need to scavenge free but healthy ingredients and tools. Baking bread for free took ingenuity and the Diggers were long on ingenuity. The church lent its ovens to the endeavor and Digger bakers hustled free whole wheat flour from a Hunters Point wholesaler who gave them damaged sacks. Whole wheat Digger bread broke the mold [sic]: at that time, whole wheat flour and organic foods were largely a thing of the future.

The most ingenious characteristic of Digger Bread was its shape. With no money to buy large baking pans — bakery brothers and sisters collected one- and two-pound coffee cans. They’d grease the cans with vegetable oil and mix flour and salt in warm water to nurture the yeast. The yeast they kept in cultures so they wouldn’t have to buy more. They’d add sugar, honey, molasses, anything sweet, even dried fruit that they collected on their early- morning runs to the city’s sprawling produce market.

The produce marketeers looked forward to visits from the Digger scavengers. They began to applaud the Digger mission. After all, the wholesale workers shared common purpose with the colorful diplomats from the Haight-Ashbury — to feed the hungry. They set aside fruits, vegetables, and grains that quietly dropped off the market’s loading docks and found themselves joining bubbling soups and stews in the cauldrons that Digger cooks brewed, lading out a bowl to anybody hungry, daily in the parks.

In the beginning, you had to slice the first Digger bread by hitting it with a hammer. Some folks claimed that Digger Bread could also be used to build retaining walls and walkways. Nonetheless, it was free and for many that meant sustenance where none other was to be had.

Gradually, the Digger bakers improved their technique and Digger bakeries opened up, six or seven of them around Northern California. Anyone could become a Digger baker. The only stipulation? You had to give it away.

In the spirit of their ingenious determination to create a free society, Diggers brought food to the Americas, those who had been spit from the belly of the beast and those who chose to walk away from the American Dream. Digger bread was tough, nourishing, went down warm, smelled of molasses, and it was one hundred percent free.

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What is to be Done? Discovering climate change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior

9/7/2015

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Did you know that monarch butterflies flew south in the winter, just like birds? As with many of her novels and essays, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior sails on the wings of the novelist’s scientific alter ego. Flight Behavior excels in using the microcosm of small lives in flux — human and otherwise — to explore how we grasp and respond to macro concepts and realities so daunting as to appear overwhelming, e.g., the consequences of climate change.

But in Flight Behavior, Kingsolver doesn’t stop at exploring impact. With typical courage, the author explores how living beings confront seemingly impossible phenomena and struggle to address the universal existential question that presses all species…

What is to be done?

Flight Behavior follows Dellarobia Turnbow, a young mother of two who — en route to an uneasy assignation — discovers a migration of Monarch butterflies that has flown astray and crash landed by the millions in the Appalachian forest above her home.

Kingsolver introduces this environmental calamity with mystery, through the eyes of her bright, quick-witted, poorly educated protagonist so that the reader struggles alongside Dellarobia to understand the powerful apparition that has landed in her familiar forest.

The unhappy young mother’s bewilderment is tinged with irony: Dellarobia left her glasses at home to please the manifestation of her restlessness — a local lineman hunk. As she climbs through the forest, the newly arrived Monarchs appear to her as a lake of fire, unidentifiable, anomalous, possibly a warning against her sinful intent.

The clandestine tryst with the lineman is never consummated but a new love begins for Dellarobia — the discovery of her rapacious curiosity and deep-running wonder for a world beyond her child-father husband, overbearing in-laws, and the demands of survival in a churchy community ravaged by chronic rural poverty.

Word spreads quickly. Something odd has happened in Dellarobia ‘s hardscrabble farming township. The community first responds with denial and pragmatism. How will Dellarobia’s husband and father-in-law log the mountain top with an infestation of bugs covering the trees? Who cares about a bunch of butterflies? There’s plenty more where they came from… right?

Ironically, Kingsolver sets the Monarchs demise —an event of sudden and gigantic proportions — in a community long-besieged by soggy, deviant weather that has delivered a near-Biblical saturation to the delicate landscape, ruining crops and making life tougher than ever for its hard-working tenants.

The unprecedented rain also serves to introduce Kingsolver’s exploration of how humans cloak themselves in denial and blind faith in a world where life had been defined by everyday life and the predictable cycle of the seasons.

Denial and lack of understanding play major roles in Flight Behavior. Her characters are not dumb; they’re complex and worthy of high regard. The women are stoic or whipsaw sharp, the men stubborn but often thoughtful and surprisingly vulnerable. But Kingsolver’s butterflies numb their sensibilities and intelligence, despite their deep understanding of the prominent role nature plays in their lives.

So now, when nature goes awry in Dellarobia’s world, Kingsolver serves up folks too busy, too poor, and too religion-bound to recognize the significance of the Monarch's confused arrival. Besides, what are you gonna do? How do you fix a world that has run amuck?

Enter the dialectic forces of the media and science. Feathertown’s citizens may be annoyed by their majestic, orange-winged squatters, but the outside world has gotten word of the aberration. The beleaguered insects' newsworthiness appears in the form of an inevitably blonde, disinformed, and ambitious broadcast journalist who corners Dellarobia.

Dellarobia awkwardly spills her jumbled but intelligent reflections for the charming lady, with Kingsolver making sure we see both versions: Dellarobia’s awkward truth versus the media-ized outcome where our journalist personifies Dellarobia as a simple but intuitive native, a sexualized witness to the profundity of the Monarchs, her words yanked from her mouth and twisted into a separate reality.

Science arrives in the form of Ovid Byron, a tall, Jamaican lepidopterist who appears unannounced in Feathertown, makes a preliminary foray into the forest, and returns with a research party and a field station. Ovid’s return brings with it the realization that the aberration in the forest is earth-shaking. Ovid’s exhaustive scientific focus also provides Kingsolver a voice that explains what the Monarch’s distorted flight path means for the planet and with a scientist's mind that gives us a window into the deep, darkness that often comes with knowledge.

Ovid’s exhaustive scientific focus also provides Kingsolver a voice that explains what the Monarch’s distorted flight path means for the planet. For Dellarobia, Ovid reflects the claustrophobic inadequacy of her own life and reveals the excitement of an urgent new world represented by the troubled Monarchs and the exactitude of scientific inquiry. Through Ovid’s carefully moderated response to the Monarch displacement and Kingsolver’s detailed and fascinating description of how a scholar studies a natural phenomenon, we see Dellarobia begins to absorb and codify her own response to this earth-changing butterfly visit.

The Monarch’s presence resonates throughout the tight community. The local pastor labels Dellarobia’s discovery as a vision. Her judgmental mother-in-law struggles with the concept of no return in a world where seasonal repetition and weekly sermons has established the rhythm of the universe. Her husband opens his eyes to his child-bride’s power, and the village patriarch yields his forest clearcut plans with grace and dignity.

Perhaps the high point of the novel comes when Ovid Byron locks horns — or antennae — with the blonde, assumptive media maven. He shoots down her media clichés and assumptions and banishes her from the scene. But always, Dellarobia’s heart and mind beats at the center of Flight Behavior, giving us a window into the reality of the unrealizable — that our planet is changing, fundamentally, drastically, and forever.

Kingsolver is one of my favorite novelists: she inevitably weaves deep social meaning into the fabric of her skilled and gorgeous works. But, as with many writers who have reached well-deserved heights, she needs editing. In Flight Behavior, she indulges us — and possibly herself — with a near-endless chapter in a goodwill store, describing in revolving detail the items for sale, the speculated-upon origins, and her kids' reactions to her 'yeses and nos. The scene serves a purpose, Dellarobia discusses plot points with her sidekick, Crystal but ten pages would have covered the territory; the other 40 seem over the top.

Conversely, toward the end of the book, Kingsolver seems to rush to the finish, using narrative to briefly describe life-changing scenes and circumstances.

Editorial problems notwithstanding, As Dellarobia moves into her next chapter, beyond the end of Flight Behavior, the reader is left with Kingsolver's subtle but definitive answer to the question "What is to be done?" Plenty.

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<<Previous

On Editing — Before the fact

Trump, Haiti, and tremendo aché

Recollections: Rocked in Time

Memoir: A Father and Son Reunion

Too Many Books — Stalked by madness in the time of Trump*

A Modest Proposal* — To alleviate stress caused by the threat of nuclear war

Nuclear Myopia — We'll all go together when we go

Sputnik

Digger Bread — you had to give it away for free

What is to be Done? Discovering climate change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior

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