Literary Persona

Irene Koronas, poetry editor for Wilderness House Literary Review, posed the question: what mythology do you create for yourself as a writer? your habits: the way you dress, write, where you take vacations, who you associate with, etc.?

My parents and grandparents had a thing about writers and being a writer. My grandfather wrote several dozen books and my mother was a freelance journalist. I don’t think either was particularly good at it but for me their major impact was their absolute reverence for the profession or avocation of writer. They held the title of author in total awe. As part of our religion of the author my mother dragged me to readings and lectures for years. I met Carl Sandburg, Saul Bello, Robert Frost, and a few other luminaries whose names escape me now. They didn’t mean much to me then. 

On Sunday afternoons, after church, my grandfather would sit us down, my cousins, my brother and I, and read stories and poems before a formal dinner that lasted well past my bed time. He would reverently read Keets, Kipling and e e cummings as if they were the latest books of the bible. The word of God. Alleluia. 

 

Saturdays were far less formal and not universally observed. In the summer my grandfather would hold court on his expansive porch. There were three or four wicker couches and another four or five chairs scattered casually around three glass top tables. Forty feet of fragrant unkempt roses marked the edge of the overhang. People came and went while my grandfather drank martinis from a cut crystal glass in his overstuffed chair just outside the door to his study. They would congregate in small groups, two or three at a time. The police chief and the head of the union negotiating at one table while the three selectmen played cards with my grandfather at another and the president of the garden club gossiped with my grandmother on the last. Bessie MacDermott, the aging and very scotch ‘member of the household,’ served hors d' oeuvres. 

My mother would prepare for these Saturday gatherings by typing up “talking points” and carefully packaging her creations both literary and culinary before heading over to “the big house.” We lived in the coachman’s cottage at the back of the property. Once town business was over and the local luminaries had left my mother would charge over to my grandfather, sit down and start reading something she had written. He would nod thoughtfully, perhaps make a comment or two before pulling a sheaf of papers from under a table next to his chair and proceed to read his own scribbling. I mostly fell asleep on one of the sofas to the drone of someone’s voice reading a newly minted story or poem. It wasn’t hard to decide that I too wanted to be a writer. 

 

Later, after my grandparents had died, after my father had died, after the town placed a tax lien on the property and after the water main to our cottage broke we were finally forced to sell and move. I went up to the attic in the big house the day before the estate auctioneer emptied it. There were 23 crates full of books, three feet by three feet by eight feet, my great grandfather’s library, to be sold by the linear foot. I broke into one crate and removed from the top layer, a first edition of Shelly’s collected works signed by Mary Shelly, a first edition of the Lewis and Clark expedition and a few other books. I took all that I could carry on the back of my Yamaha 250 motorcycle as I headed to Cambridge in the fall of 1970. 

 

I knew I wanted to be a writer when I walked into the Grolier Poetry Book Shop that fall (Gordon Carnie remind me of my grandfather) but I was not a writer. I had not written a single published word. That was, strictly speaking, not true. I had written a story in Junior High School about the formation of social cliques at puberty that won an Honorable Mention in some national writing contest that all 8th graders in my school were forced to enter and it was printed in the Hartford Currant. But just because I could write better than most 7th graders who entered the competition didn’t signify my arrival at the sacred alter as a published writer. I felt humbled walking into the great libraries of Harvard and MIT as well as the Coop and Harvard Book store, I still do. I felt the same way walking into the Grolier. There were live writers there. When Alan Ginsburg walked in I unescorted was dumbstruck, when Robert Creeley, Charles Olsen and others casually wandered in I studied them: how did they become writers, how were they different? 

 

There were a lot of “writers” hanging around the Grolier in those days. Some went on to actually write things of note but many, if not most, preferred the acclaim accorded a “writer” more than the labor and passion of actually writing. I learned that most of the people who called themselves writers were not. The same was true when, years later, after I had written four or five books and deemed myself ready to be called a journeyman writer, I joined the National Writers Union. We would meet once or twice a month for beer and schmoozing and I was surprised to discover that only three or four members, out of twenty or so who regularly attended, had actually published anything. I became a seasoned professional (in some eyes) overnight. It was embarrassing. 

 

However in the grand order of things a technical writer (which is what I had become) sat only above advertising copywriters in the world of literary distain. My works were not creative. (Says who?) I quit the union, stopped going to poetry readings and ceased calling myself a “writer” and only fessed up, if pressed, to being an occasional scribbler and poet of no great regard. This change in outward persona did two things for me. I didn’t have to live up to be a “writer”, whatever that meant (and I wasn’t sure) and I stopped trying to write anything of significance. This was quite a relief. It freed me to actually enjoy what I wrote. I wrote a column in a technical journal about an over caffeinated, sleep deprived computer geek who worked for the mob. I wrote a column on local politics, covered school committee and planning board meetings and acquired a taste for Scotch which I drank in copious quantities hours before my deadlines. I had fantasies of becoming a beat journalist. It didn’t pay. Eventually I stopped writing altogether. No one would pay for it and even the freebees were being rejected. For years I was a consumer of literature not a creator

 

I returned to the world of the scribbler when I first met when I first met Irene Koronas she looked at me and said, “You don’t look like a poet.” And so it goes.

Merry/Happy/Peaceful

Hanukkah/Christmas/Kwanzaa/Solstice/
--
Steve Glines
ISCSPress.com
145 Foster Street
Littleton MA 01460

Review of Jennifer Eagen’s “A visit from the Goon Squad”

I didn't like it. There is something about the last few Pulitzer winners that I haven't liked. I read the books and think, "how the hell did this ever get published?" Such is the case of A visit from the Goon Squad where we learn the story of an aging pop music promoter and his entourage but each chapter takes place somewhere different in time. We bounce forward, backward but when the disjointed chapters are brought together there is isn't much of a story.

The only book I can compare it with stylistically is Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. The book is written almost as a stream of consciousness with independent scenes that do nothing for the story. Faulkner at least started in the present and flashed back. Egan starts somewhere near the present and flashes back to high school and forward to some science fiction future where everyone talks like a text message and eschews tattoos.

While here isn't much of a story as conventional novels go I will admit to enjoying the almost flawless narrative. This is a literary novel. I would love to know the chain of events that lead to its being published.

I'll be at "The Writers Confrence at Hunter College" June 4th

Writers' Conference and Intensives The Writers’ Conference, now at Hunter College, is widely considered one of the finest fiction and non-fiction conferences. In addition to keynote speakers Nelson DeMille and Walter Mosley, the Writers’ Conference will feature twelve panels with a total of seventy distinguished writers, editors, publicists and literary agents promoting hope for the new age of publishing. Meg Wolitzer, Betsey Lerner, and Bruce Friedman will be conducting intensive workshops in the days leading up to the conference. 

http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/ce/the-writing-center/writers-conference-and-intensives

What's next?

For the past two years and then some I have been writing a novel which is why the number of blog entries here have been few and far between. It takes a lot of mental energy and concentration to write a novel. Over that period I have not written a single poem and only one or two short stories that popped up spontaneously. This novel was long overdue. Poplar Hill, this particular novel started out as a chronicle the life of my mother and her family. They were an American aristocratic family. There aren’t many of them left and they have mostly been replaced by the gouache vulgarity of the Donald Trumps of the world. 

I abandoned the first attempt at writing this story when it became apparent that the main character was not going to be Kitty Stevenson but her nanny Bessie MacDermot. I am tempted to make Bessie’s story the second in a series. Bessie’s real story is that my grandparents, as was the custom, made a pass through the orphanages of Ireland searching for intelligent children about to be cast off into the wild at age 12 but willing, grateful even, to be offered a life of service.  Bessie, at age 11 plus was whisked away from the orphanage she grew up in and sent to New York where she was trained to become a nanny. The book is written from the perspective of the 104 year old Bessie living alone in a nursing home in Florida having outlived all the children of those she served. It wasn’t the story I wanted to write then so I stopped writing it.

The second attempt clicked. Here is the briefest possible synopsis:

Poplar Hill is in the middle of the biggest ice storm in a century and Kitty Stevenson is having a heart attack. Her friends and neighbors mount an effort to save her. As she winds her way through the medical system, Kitty decides that as long as she has a story to tell she won’t die, so she tells her life’s story to Barb Barb is Kitty’s closest friend, confident and ultimately caretaker. Kitty came from a wealthy New York family. When Kitty was six she was put in an austere French convent school. During the Depression Kitty was told to leave the convent and find her own way home. After high school Kitty went to Germany to study opera and spend the money her father had invested there after World War One. Hitler had blocked the Mark. Since Kitty couldn’t take the money out of Germany she spent it. She lived the Cabaret lifestyle, she was Sally Bowles but with money. She photographed the Dachau concentration, shook Neville Chamberlains hand and met Hitler face to face on the eve of “Kristallnacht.” When thugs broke the windows of Jewish shops, she took in and protected her Jewish neighbors. As one crisis followed another, she found herself on a Jewish refugee boat heading to Palestine, in a Swiss chalet and on a train to Vienna during the Austrian Anschluss. She escaped Germany, just days before Hitler invaded Poland, arriving in New York on a German ship that had been ordered back to Germany by Hitler. Kitty’s quick thinking convinced the ship’s Captain to continue on to New York.

Of two dozen literary agents only one has sniffed at it and asked to see more, many have dismissed the proposal with a curt form email while the majority are as yet silent.  The literary ecosystem is badly broken but that’s not a windmill I’m going to spend much energy tilting at, at least not today.

So the story of Kitty Stevenson is largely done. While I wait impatiently for my readers to tell me where I need to polish I am confident that it won’t need a major overhaul. So while there is still work to be done on Poplar Hill my mind is wandering elsewhere. It wonders indecisively examining all the projects I’ve started and abandoned or simply outlined. As I said before Bessie MacDermot is high on the list.

The idea that I think I will do next is Tale of the Dragon. If Poplar Hill is based on the life of Kitty Stevenson Glines, then Tale of the Dragon is based on the journal of my father, E. Stanley Glines as he worked in China in 1920 – 1935. Think of a more sedate American version of Harry Flashman showing up at every major event in the history of modern china. He lived the life in 1920 Shanghai, shot his way out of a train robbery on his way to Peking, discovered that he was an unwitting gun smuggler and ran for his life as Cossack army bore down on Ulin Bator in Outer Mongolia. It’s the wild, wild west but in China. Sun Yet Sen, Mao Tse Dung and other characters wander through this work of near baroque art.

Also on the list and the nearest to completion in terms of words written (about 25,000) is War Stories. War Stories takes place in a run down bar in Watertown Massachusetts. The narrator is the bartender who listens to two old veterans and a civilian tell war stories. Most of the stories revolve around a vet who is never present but is the former roommate of the only civilian in the crowd. The story is fashioned after The Waves by Virginia Woolf, which has five characters and a very present, yet absent, sixth character around which the conversation revolves. In War Stories Jack and Peter Grimsey start out as roommates right after Jack returns from Vietnam. Jack and Peter both love sailing so they buy a sailboat together and there the problems begin. Jack is always almost sinking their boat and has adopted a fatalistic approach to life. The other two Vets are an old Navy Chief who served during Korea and the other, the owner of the bar is a ROTC marine Captain who spent the Vietnam War as an embassy guard. They have their stories to tell but none compare to the stories of Jack who lives to talk about it, he has 5 purple hearts, a bronze star, a silver star and is nominated for a Congressional Medal of Honor and is also charged with attempted murder of an officer and escapes Vietnam by blowing opium smoke in the face of an Air Force colonel.  

War Stories is a must finish book but it’s not the next one I want to work on, I have three more. The first novel I started changed names many times but the last title was “A brief history of Avalon.” Avalon for short, is about the history of Newfoundland after Québec succeeds from Canada and the United States breaks up and balkanizes after defaulting on its debt. Obviously this story takes place in the not too distant future. Québec is determined to not only become a major force in North America but to reclaim the lost French territories in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. France having become an international superpower after taking over the EU intends to join with Québec in reclaiming dominance over North America. Only Newfoundland can stop this from happening and Johnny D., an expatriate American history buff and engineer, is called on to defeat a French juggernaut. Since novels take on a life of their own once you start to write them I had to quit when I wrote myself into a corner where Johnny D had to be killed. I think I have more discipline now and can control the story. 

The next idea is the one I’m most passionate about, besides Bessie, and the least developed idea is Jury Duty. Jury Duty is based on my experiences with the U.S. Judicial system. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been in any serious trouble but I’ve made it a point to watch how a trial went and how my petty dealings with the court system unfolded. I’m not encouraged. Petty corruption is rife and when I was called to jury duty for a murder trial I let loose my thoughts on the presiding judge. He was not amused and threatened me with contempt. I dared him to hold a juror in contempt when all I did was truthfully answer his questions. I told him I had seen cops blatantly lie on the stand, prosecutors knowingly make false statements and defendants’ attorneys so incompetent Perry Mason, or the actor who played him could have done better. I told him that a tie goes to the runner and to convict there could not be the slightest shadow of a doubt in my mind regardless of his instructions. When he objected I reminded him of the principle of Jury Nullification. That’s when he got mad. The tenor of the novel would be that of Twelve Angry Men but aimed at the system instead. I need to develop an outline and plot.

Finally, I have a Creative Non-Fiction project started years ago but abandoned when I realized how much research it would take. I spent about 2 years developing this project complete with a detailed list of items I needed to research: The Arc Effect.

What if the lost Ark of the Covenant of Israel were real? What if how it worked could be demonstrated? What if it could be shown to exist today, hidden in a church in Africa? What if the lost Ark of the Covenant were just the tip of the technological Iceberg?

In 1990, Graham Hancock published a book titled “The Sign and the Seal.” He detailed, via literary evidence, the travels of the Ark of the Covenant from its creation on Mt. Sinai through its disappearance and subsequent possible travel to Ethiopia. There is also just enough evidence in the literature to deduce how the Ark may have worked. If I am right I can not only recreate the effects of the Ark I can also confirm if the Ark is indeed in Axum Ethiopia as Hancock suggests.

Chapter 1 - The Nature of Insight

Chapter 2 - The Tablets of Moses - The literary effects of the tablets of Moses are illuminated, as are the effects of radiation. They are shown to be identical.

Chapter 3 - The Design of the Ark - The literary design of the Ark is discussed, as is the design of the cloths and accouterments that accompany the Ark. It is shown that the Ark displays a different set of attributes from the tablets themselves. The origins of the ark and the history of its behavior and migrations.

Chapter 4 - The Enigma of the Ark - The problem of reconciling two different phenomena is discussed and a solution proposed. Historic precedent is shown.  A verity of cause and effects are looked at and rejected. The Ark with the tablets enclosed display the attributes of a highly charged body. The effects of the Ark are can best be described as St. Elmo's fire.

Chapter 5 - The Ark Effect - The mechanics of the Van De Graff generator are shown. The mechanics of radiation induced charge is documented and shown and a theory of how the ark worked is displayed.

Part II - History Reconsidered

Chapter 6 - The Challenge - The accepted view of the History of Science is presented.

Chapter 7 - History Reconsidered - Evidence that the accepted history of science is wrong.

Part III - History Reconstructed

Chapter 8 - The Egyptian Scientist - Imenhetop and the gods of Khnum.

Chapter 9 - The Ancient Scribe - It is shown that there are ample literary allusions to radioactive substances.

Chapter 10 - The Travels of Moses - Placing Moses in the right place at the right time; means motive and opportunity

Part IV - The Philosophers Stone

Chapter 11 - Finding the Right Stuff - Geological explorations in Sinai and Egypt

Chapter 12 - Modern Alchemy - The simple chemistry of turning ore into the tablets of Moses

Chapter 13 - The Ark of the Covenant - Building a modern prototype

Part IV - The Quest

Chapter 14 - The Search for the Lost Ark of the Covenant, a trip to Axum

Allegedly perpetrating a crime

It was the third time this week the reporter had stood in the middle of the street to report a bank robbery by saying, “The alleged perpetrator exited the building, hopped in a getaway car and took off at a high rate of speed and is still at large.” The first time I heard this I laughed. This was a professional reporter whose eloquence is supposed to set an example. Where did this guy learn his English? By the third time he said this I called the station to complain. There must be hundreds of English teachers cringing every time they turn on the news and listen to a reporter trying to sound as tough (and as stupid) as the first cop on the scene. “The alleged perpetrator of the crime,” he said. Is he really questioning the commission of a crime? According to Merriam-Webster word alleged means “said without proof, to have taken place.” He could have just said, “After robbing the bank the perpetrator hopped in a car and left the scene.” Not as dramatic but more accurate if you actually believe the cops that someone robbed the bank.

Why did the perpetrator have to take off at a “high rate of speed?” Allow me to parse this abomination. Speed is already a rate as measured in miles per hour, inches per second, etc. So a high rate of speed should mean that the speed is changing quickly. Isn’t that called acceleration? The reporter could have said: “The robber ran out of the bank, hopped in his getaway car and got away leaving a trail of burning rubber in his wake.”

He could have said that but then he would have sounded smarter than the cop he interviewed.

Understanding Libya

Everything I know about Libya I know second hand from an ex-pat petroleum engineer who lived in Libya for almost 20 years. This is what he tells me:

The Libyans are considered to be the hillbillies of the Arab world; in general the Libyans aren’t well educated, they still live in a tribal culture and generally behave like spoiled children when traveling abroad in other Arab countries. They are not well liked. What is well liked is Libyan money and they have a lot of it. So much that it attracted petroleum engineers from around the world more than willing to violate their own government’s embargoes to go work there. A Texan once said, “Oh yeah, the US government is going to tell me where I can and can’t work. Right! Can they tell me where I’m going to find a job in Dallas? No!”

There is no native Middle Class in Libya. The professional classes are imported from other Arab countries as guest workers or are members of the now permanent Palestinian Diaspora. It’s these last that form the bulk of the Libyan professional infrastructure. Having no place to go home to so these Palestinians have taken root in Libya and form the bulk of middle management in both industry and the Libyan military. Indeed while the majority of the officers in the Libyan army are members of the tribes loyal to Kaddafi it is also true that the bulk of the non-commissioned officer ranks, the sergeants, are well trained and disciplined Palestinian mercenaries. Their loyalties are clear; their well being is, for the present, tied to Kaddafi. Change that and you change the outcome of the civil war in Libya.

When the revolt began there were reports of large numbers of military units defecting to the opposition only to turn into the undisciplined rabble being reported in the media today. There should be little wonder why this happened when most of the officers as well as all the NCO up and left leaving a hollow core of undisciplined recruits.

So why hasn’t Kaddafi crushed the revolt? I suspect the revolution is as much a palace revolt as it is a genuine uprising and Kaddafi is reluctant to let any large army assemble so he is content, for the moment, to use his mostly mercenary air force on obvious targets while allowing small units of his Army to prove their loyalty by local butchery. If I’m right then Libya will descend into the kind of lawless chaos we see in Somalia. I think one of Kaddafi’s sons said as much.