Editing/writing life

25 Bad Writer Behaviors: commentary

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The subject article is by Chuck Wendig of terribleminds.com, and each point is amplified therein. Since I’ve long found a lot of fault with the way writers and authors behave, what I plan to do here is repeat the points (all of which are taken nearly verbatim from Wendig’s post, thus credited to him) and offer observations. Note: Wendig swears a lot, and some of it is gratuitous. If that bothers you, don’t go there. He’s a noteworthy science fiction/horror/thriller author with a long list of credits, and you can check out his work at his Amazon author page.

Here are Wendig’s bad writer behaviors, and what I had to say about them.

1. BEING AN UNPROFESSIONAL F’ING A-HOLE

This is pretty important, though I find it ironic that Wendig seems to consider terms like “cock-waffling” not to be unprofessional. He has a point, though. Even when you’re off duty, in public, you need not to damage your ‘brand’–a word I dislike as business-speak, but can’t avoid.

2. RESPONDING TO NEGATIVE REVIEWS (WITH MORE NEGATIVITY)

Writers who submit their work for public comment will usually receive it. Some of it will be stupid. If it’s stupid, ignore it. If it’s critical yet intelligent, you might learn something.

3. FIGHTING WITH OTHER AUTHORS

In addition to making you look insecure and unprofessional, it makes you look jealous. Don’t fight with other authors, but especially don’t fight with your readers.

4. NOT READING SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

That is, of course, assuming that you’re still buying into the model of begging for notice. But if you are, then at least show that you could and did read their guidelines. Acq-eds get a lot of material, and whatever makes it easier for them to winnow it is what they’re likely to do. They can start by throwing out everything from everyone who didn’t read what was asked of them, or didn’t care.

5. QUERYING AN UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPT

There’s a greater problem with this than the half-cooked chicken analogy: what if they say “Yes! Send us the whole thing! This is the best idea we’ve had all year and we have plans to release a book like this!” What would you say? “Uh…welllll…sorry, but I’ve only written four chapters. But it’ll be really really great when I get it done!” There is no logical reply to this on the part of acq-eds except dismissal.

6. ANNOYING EDITORS AND AGENTS

Again, the piece somewhat assumes that you’re still following the ‘beg and hope’ model. However, it’s a valid point outside that model. I did a lot of literary mercenary work, in which I worked for/with quite a few editors. At any time, they could have stopped sending me more work. They kept engaging my services. Since I’m not a lights-out writer, I suspect that I kept getting hired because I made their lives easier rather than harder. I didn’t bother them any more than I could help. Instead, I did my work.

7. RESPONDING TO REJECTION WITH RAGEFACE

If you can’t take rejection, you’re not ready to submit anything to anyone. In fact, you’re not ready for life. Applying for jobs entails risk of rejection. Asking people on dates, same. Playing a sport. Anything that is competitive. You can’t befoul your panties and lose your mind over rejection.

8. RAGEFACE, PART II: REVISION TIME

As an editor, I deal with some of this. It’s fairly common for someone to send me a portion of ms for a sample edit. Often the sample proves that the person a) can’t write, and/or b) is over-enamored with his or her prose. I fix it and send it back. They like their own version better, and decline to hire me. Am I enraged? Nah. It really isn’t that much fun to have to rewrite something lousy. And if the individual has shown that s/he is not interested in improvement, it would be a contentious relationship in any case. I prefer a collaborative relationship in which I help, teach, discuss, support, and advise.

9. DRUNKENLY TWEETING AWFUL THINGS TO PEOPLE

Not sure this needed to be on the list, but Wendig saw it happen. If your basic personality is rude, alcohol probably won’t improve it.

10. SPAMMING ANYBODY WITH ANYTHING EVER

A lot of this comes from authorial narcissism. Seen a ton of that. It says: “To me, there are two categories of humanity: the believers and the infidels. Believers are those who accept my writing as the center of the literary universe, buy my books, push my books, praise my books, adore me, and otherwise embrace the True Faith. The infidels are everyone else, including those who respond tepidly to the True Faith when its light first falls on their faces. Because mine is the True Faith, anything is justified, and if it annoys anyone, well…why don’t they pull their heads out and convert?” Amazon reviewers of any note will encounter this at some point. Several have spammed me, ignoring my polite “I”m just not interested.” This was not to their advantage.

11. ACTING RACIST, SEXIST, MISOGYNIST, ANY OF THE HATEFUL -ISTS

Also, bear in mind that your own definition of an ‘-ist’ isn’t what matters. It’s the public’s definition. That’s pretty unfortunate, because these -isms have warped definitions in the public mind. Reality: ‘redneck’ is a racial slur, for example, and thus should be objectionable. The public doesn’t object to it. Even though I’m right, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I (and other authors with public presences) do not say things that the public might interpret as racist, whether they truly are or not. Same for other -ists. Vile terms for the penis and testes are just vulgar in the public mind, but acceptable to deman a male; vile terms for the vulva and vagina used to demean a female are not merely vulgar in the public mind, but tend to draw accusations of sexism. If one is, both are…but in the public mind, they’re not. You can’t win this with logic. You can only refrain from doing yourself professional harm. Or don’t refrain, and see where it gets you.

12. THE AUTHORIAL MELTDOWN

Remember that you can always melt down in private. It’s much better for your career.

13. PLAGIARIZING SOMEBODY ELSE’S HARD WORK

It’s one thing to cite, attribute, quote and otherwise credit another author, as I’m doing here with Wendig. It would have been another to jack his piece. One is easily caught these days at all forms of plagiarism. Even if you do not refrain from it out of pride, refrain because you aren’t a professionally suicidal idiot. At least, I hope you aren’t.

14. BLOWING OUT YOUR DEADLINES

Professionals are timely, and that makes them pleasant to work with because they’re considerate of others. It also may mean some bleary-eyed late nights, early risings, and other minor hardships. But professionals produce on time without excuses, often enough that a real emergency or disaster will be pardoned as the exception. Amateurs always have an excuse: their computer broke down, the cat got sick, the kid threw up, car wouldn’t start, books didn’t arrive, etc. Professionals get the job done anyway–on time.

15. IGNORING YOUR ASSIGNMENT

Absolutely. Wendig is dead-on. One time, I made the mistake of failing to read my guidelines with great care. I ended up sending in work in a style completely at variance with what I’d been hired to do. So I’d already worked on twelve projects of the (in this case) mistaken style, to great acclaim and encore. That didn’t absolve me of the duty to read them afresh this time. Happily, my acq-ed pardoned this brain spasm and let me rewrite them. And I did, real fast, and with very great care.

16. MAKING A BUTT-TON OF EXCUSES

This might be Wendig’s best point. Amateurs are full of excuses. Professionals produce.

17. WRITING WITHOUT EDITING

This applies even to writers who also get paid to edit. Your first readers (I hate the term ‘beta reader’) are not editors. Your spouse is not an editor unless other people pay him or her to do so. I have an unpublished travel manuscript I may one day publish. It needs extensive revisions before I’d consider it worthy of publication. When I consider it worthy of publication, it’s ready to go to an editor, who will show me why it wasn’t yet worthy, and help me make it so.

18. SELF-PUBLISHING YOUR WORST INSTEAD OF YOUR BEST

I guess some people do this. I think it’s foolish, as does Wendig. I admit that here, at times, I don’t bring my A-game. I do bring my A-minus game. I’ll let myself get away with an occasional clunky wording usage. Then again, this is free content to the reader. What I’d never do is self-publish a dog of a book, thus making me look incompetent while proposing that people pay me. Unacceptable.

19. FIGHTING IN THE TRENCHES OF THE ANY IMAGINARY WAR

Yes. While I think trad-pub has cancer and that the radiation and chemo won’t take, I have nothing against anyone going that route. I question what they are likely to gain, but we all define gain differently. Same for all the other battles.

20. FLINGING SOUR GRAPES AT AUTHORS MORE SUCCESSFUL THAN YOU

Nicely positioned by Wendig in sequence, and addresses an elephant in the room: self-published people who secretly wish they were traditionally published and resent that it didn’t happen. Don’t envy or resent. I knew Cornelia Read and David Abrams back when they were writing at Epinions. They’re now traditionally published, and to significant acclaim. They’re great at what they do and they seem happy with the result. I’ve read books by both and I hope they keep enjoying the success they deserve.

21. BLUDGEONING FOLKS WITH YOUR EGO

This relates to several previous points, since it is often the source of bad behaviors. You need a certain amount of ego in order to think you can write something that people would pay to read. Just that much, and no more.

22. ACTING LIKE A BULLY

Is always contemptible.

23. “HEY, WILL YOU READ MY MANUSCRIPT?”

The biggest problem with this is that most people aren’t self-honest about what they want. Most will say they want honest feedback, when in reality they want praise. As Wendig points out, it also leads to intellectual property concerns. There’s a reason Weird Al Yankovic doesn’t even look at song ideas sent in by fans. He can’t afford to, even if he didn’t have plenty of ideas of his own. If you want a reader for your manuscript, don’t seek out an editor or author. Seek out a reader, someone you know and trust who might buy the sort of thing you propose to publish.

24. FAILING TO APPRECIATE YOUR AUDIENCE

A big one for me. I always say, “Like your reader.” Much follows from it. If you like your reader, you will be motivated to write things s/he will consider worth his or her time. You will respond courteously to him or her. You will treat him or her with respect. You’ll enjoy writing more, because you’ll be thinking of how you might entertain, educate, uplift, encourage, or some other positive verb.

25. TALKING ABOUT WRITING WITHOUT ACTUALLY WRITING

Why I’m not in a writers’ group, and don’t go to writers’ retreats. If I want to talk about writing rather than write, I’ll go to a themed convention with panels where I can pick what I’d like to talk and listen about. I have often said that at any given time, you want to write or you do not. Right now, I want to write, and am doing so–I’m writing about writing, which counts. (Wendig also was, though he doesn’t consider it writing; we differ there.) Later tonight, I will probably not want to write. I will probably watch a trashy reality TV show and a crime drama while hanging out with a dear friend who is visiting us. One reason to have a blog is to have a place to write when one wishes to.

In short, Chuck Wendig said a lot of things I might also say, though our styles would differ. If you think you want to write, I can’t see how any of his guidance will do you anything but good.

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What D&D meant

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Dungeons & Dragons, the original fantasy role-playing game, came out in 1974. I played it off and on for thirty-five years through four major revisions. Unless you’re that old and played the game in its early days, you may not fully apprehend its impact. Someone had better explain that while some of us are still alive.

In what we may call B.D. (Before D&D), there were two species of games. The casual species included party games like Monopoly, Risk, Life, Clue, Parcheesi and such. They were not meant to be realistic; they were just for fun, could be learned in minutes and finished in an half an evening. The serious species included strategy boardgames, mostly by Avalon Hill, Simulations Publications, Game Designers’ Workshop, and so on: mostly focused on accurate historical simulations and hypothetical wars. If you wanted to know how the Warsaw Pact might have done against NATO, or felt that Auchinleck and Montgomery were boobs, or imagined how the Canadian Civil War might go, they could help you explore. Their research was generally of high quality. The rulebooks were voluminous, but for those who put in the time and wanted to spend several weekends refighting Gettysburg at regimental level, they had you covered.

My own first experiences with B.D. games were the former as a child, then the latter in about 1975. Historical and hypothetical simulation games may have saved me from going completely mad in a small lumber town. They would, in 1981, send me to college with at least the fundamentals of an education in military history. But they weren’t the only external force that contributed to my teen sanity.

In 1974, the original D&D first came out. The publisher was a firm from Wisconsin called Tactical Studies Rules, better known as TSR. Think on that for a minute, what it says: “We publish rules. That’s it. The rest is on you. Invent the milieu yourself. Tell the story you wish, and act it out with players who do as they do.” It was a fantasy role-playing game (RPG). The most important rule, and the one that defined D&D, was a simple one: the rules were for guidance only. They were not definitive. The game referee/world creator, aka the Dungeon Master (DM), had carte blanche to change some or all of the rules at will. If players tried something not covered in the rules, the DM had jurisdiction and final say as to how that was resolved.

Suddenly, the imagination was the limit. Digest this, those of you who never knew a world without role-playing games. “Hello, Ms. DM. I would like to play as a member of this race, which has this specific character class that mixes the magic-user with the druid. Can I do this?” DM: “Write it up, with all the spells and so forth, and I’ll take a look.” Rules? Those were for the grognards who spent whole weekends refighting the Battle of the Bulge. The rules were what the DM said they were. She could invent new monsters, worlds, races, types of characters. The game was breeding future fantasy authors by the dozens.

We had never had this before. That’s why D&D was so revolutionary. It came out and said: “Play the game the way you like. If you like your DM, play in her game. If not, well, keep looking.” It unleashed thousands of youthful imaginations. Of course, society called us freaks, weirdos, Satanists (D&D had demons and devils; never mind that most players considered them enemies, not allies). Like most teen fashions, it was considered the Sure Downfall of Society. Our 1950s-raised parents had little idea what to make of it. To them, games were like Monopoly. However, if it kept their weird intellectual kids from smoking dope and getting pregnant, it had merits. Most sighed and didn’t worry about the havoc that evangelicals suggested D&D might wreak upon our youthful brains. Was it for nerds? Clearly. Anti-social nerds? Please. Let’s drive a stake through the heart of that ridiculous charge while we’re at this. D&D was social at its core, a group activity. It could not be played solitaire. It was not mainstream social, but it was social without question. It just wasn’t the sort of social that the yuppies, jocks and so forth expected of us. It brought us together with our own kind. It showed that we weren’t fundamentally anti-social; we just failed to adore the popular kids. We were social among people with whom we considered it worthwhile to socialize.

Of course, D&D inspired many other RPG concepts. Games took us to space, to dystopian post-apocalyptic eras, to the age of sail, and wherever else we might want to imagine. We grew up. We got jobs. We had kids, most of us. Many of us left RPGs behind, though some stayed with them. Those born after 1970 never knew a world without D&D, just as they would not know college without the personal computer, just as those born after 1900 knew no world without the automobile and aircraft.

Some of us knew the world before and after D&D, and experienced the revolutionary open-ended creativity that its arrival spawned. Our lives would never be the same. To grasp this is to grasp the effect of D&D on a twelve-year-old brain. Imagine being an artist with only graphite pencils and notebook paper, and suddenly being handed oil paints and canvas. Imagine making homebrew movies with old Super 8 cameras and a film splicer, then getting a modern camcorder and video editing computer. That’s the magnitude. That’s what it was like.

Of late, D&D has schismed into two versions. In essence, the owners tried to hand players a game that didn’t feel like their good old D&D. Players mainly rejected it, hewing to a competing version. Consider: it is surviving even the complete mismanagement of its owner, in some form, nearly forty years gone.

I can only imagine what the teens of the fifties and sixties did without the change in options my generation experienced thanks to Dungeons & Dragons. Those of the eighties take it for granted, something that was always there, like the telephone for me. We were privileged to watch the veil of possibility lift and drop away, and told to use our imaginations. And one day, the last of us will be gone.

Someone had to tell how it was. Otherwise, social history will lie, told by people who never felt the experience–and will get away with it, warping perception and memory. As I approach the boundary of half a century of life, that life has taught me that most of us live to see history lie about our times. Are you in your twenties? When you are my age, you will watch them lie about your times, too. By then I will be gone, so if anyone is to tell the truth, it will fall to you.

I seek no homages for us. Hey, if anyone should do homage, it’s us to Gary Gygax, who was the prime inventor of the game insofar as I’m aware. He, and those he played the game with, lifted that veil. All I ask is that the kids don’t take RPGs wholly for granted, as if they were always with us. They weren’t. Weird intellectuals were thus trapped in their own minds, forced to seek some other outlet.

None had the impact of D&D.

Adventures

How not to deal with high altitude summer sunshine

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Or, one of the dumbest things I have ever done in my life. Even dumber than the ill-fated Everclear experiment. Please note: this story has disgusting parts. If you have a weak stomach, you may want to skip it.

Back around 1994, my good friend George and I decided to do a road trip. We were both about thirty. George was on a yearlong self-discovery adventure in his Jeep, driving around the country. I hadn’t been back to Colorado, a place of famous scenery and an old stomping ground, since 1990 when I went back to help my mother scatter my dad’s ashes at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. That trip hadn’t gone well, mainly because the combination of my impatience and my mother’s personal foibles were not a good travel recipe, but we did what we set out to do. This would be better. I have been around much of Colorado and I’m a good tour guide, and it was a place in which George hadn’t done much sightseeing. I’d meet up with him and join him for the final leg of his yearlong journey back to Seattle.

The plan was for me to fly to Denver and meet him at the airport. Now, this took trust. This was before cell phones went really mainstream. He knew my flight information, but I had to count on him to be there. If my flights got messed up, the only assurance I had of connecting with him was twofold:

  1. I knew he would not leave the airport without me.
  2. I knew I would eventually reach the airport, and would not leave it without him.

If he knew the same things, we would somehow connect. So happened that my flight got canceled, and the most realistic way to Denver was on another airline. Other than the highly questionable airport PA, all hopes rested upon us wandering through the airport until we ran across one another. About five hours after I was supposed to have arrived, that occurred. In those days, that’s what you dealt with. Kids, next time some old person tells you how much better the old days were, ask them how fun it was not to be able to call people to let them know your flight was delayed/canceled/rebooked/otherwise messed up.

The next day, we set out for the glorious old video arcades of Manitou Springs, then Cañon City and the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas. I was a good tour guide, but I’d forgotten a couple of things. While Colorado doesn’t get all that hot, much of it is over 5000′ in elevation, and a good percentage is over 6500′. The air is thinner, with far less atmospheric protection from sunlight. Temperature means nothing; it could be 40º F outside, but at 13,000′, you will roast. I’d also managed to forget that I was a white, predominantly Nordic guy living in Seattle, where sunlight is infrequent and a sunburn is actually something of an achievement. Summers had been blistering where I’d gone to high school, but that was thirteen years in my past.

If you can believe this, I decided that the way to travel was in tennis shoes, shorts and a bandanna. No shirt. No hat (even though I knew I was already starting to go bald). George suggested some sunscreen. Macho man declined, pooh-poohing a little bit of reddened skin. By the end of the first day, I had the start of a decent burn. You’d expect that in an open Jeep. Day two came, with more of a burn, and by day three we were at Mesa Verde. I was scarlet. Still I wouldn’t put on a shirt, hat or sunscreen. By now this was really starting to hurt.

A funny side note: what I did not know at the time was that George was gay, and that this yearlong tour was more or less his coming-out tour (at least, to himself). Not that there weren’t signs, which I’d have seen had I possessed enough gaydar to detect a Pride parade. Rather, I simply didn’t make assumptions, and wouldn’t have cared anyway. I wasn’t concerned enough about it to stop and consider it. None of that is funny; what’s funny is that in the motel room each night, for amusement, I’d pull out the Gideons’ Bible and start reading all the sexual prohibitions in Leviticus. “And if a man lieth with mankind…” I was laughing the entire time, and George seemed to think it was a great joke as well. One of these days I need to ask him what he made of this comic proclivity of mine. I know it didn’t offend him, because he knew I wasn’t serious. It’s one of those things that makes one wonder if the subconscious picks up on stuff that we don’t process. We’re still laughing about it.

By the Highway to Hell, as we dubbed US 666 toward Monticello, Utah, I wasn’t laughing about much. I was broiled alive. My face, scalp, tops of arms, chest, shoulders and thighs were almost maroon, and the first burn was beginning to peel. Almost half my body was burned. Felt pretty much as if I’d been dunked in acid. This all could have been prevented, if I hadn’t been one of the world’s greater fools. Perhaps worst of all, it was detracting from my friend’s enjoyment, which I had zero right to have done. I have a photo of myself at Arches National Park, and it’s scary.

We headed for Salt Lake via Green River, and by that time it was getting disgusting. The second layer was coming off, leaving very raw skin exposed and weeping amber fluid. Did you know that the skin on your scalp is really, really thick? It was coming off like cornmeal mush, in big crispy slabs. I had amber fluid leaking out of my hair and much of my skin, drying in gross crusts. It hurt, rather badly. I finally yielded to a shirt, hat and sunblock. In the shower in Green River, I made the powerful error of trying to take a hot shower. I have a rather high tolerance for non-dental pain. This pain exceeded my tolerance by several notches. Half my body had second-degree burns, with blisters all over the place. It wouldn’t have been far-fetched for me to seek medical attention. For the rest of the trip, it was cold showers all the way.

In spite of my acute discomfort, we had some semblance of a good time. George wanted to go to Temple Square, and I’d never been, so we paid it a visit. For those who imagine bevies of missionaries bugging one non-stop, take it from me: that couldn’t be further from reality. It did have greeters (all young women, in pairs), and people walking around to help folks find stuff, but there was no hassle. This is the epicentre of the LDS Church, and you can see their pride in the attentive landscaping and appealing architecture. They also let me in, with my unappealing visage and very casually immodest dress. They were not required by law to do that. It is a beautiful place, and I was impressed by the way its caretakers express their faith through dedication to keeping it spotless, bursting with flowers, and welcoming to guests. Even if you aren’t Mormon and disagree with nearly every official and unofficial position taken by the LDS Church, the respect with which they maintain Temple Square inspires admiration for their industry.

George’s goofiest notion of the trip was yet to come. He wanted to head out to the Great Salt Lake, and gods knew I was in no moral position to obstruct anything he was eager to do, so we headed out there. There’s at least one causeway across part of it, leading to a peninsula where they have a wildlife refuge. It was simple to tell when we were getting close, because the lake smells like a paper mill. You can smell it for miles. As you go down to the ‘beach,’ you learn the second reason that lakefront property is not in demand: the brine flies. At first, I thought that the beach had brown sand. I then walked down to it, and saw the brownness scatter away from my feet in a circle that followed me. It was a literal carpet of brine flies. It’s a good thing they don’t bite, or one would be devoured. George then decided this was a great day to go wading in the lake, a pleasure I declined. (With half your skin charred away, would you willingly dunk yourself in water six times saltier than the ocean?) He then learned that the water leaves a fairly slimy scum on the skin, which ruded him out a lot. As a result, we had the one real moment of the trip where my judgment had been better. While he went into the men’s can at a Dairy Queen to scrub the slime off his legs, I relaxed with an ice cream treat and waited, far more smug than I had any right to be.

The last haul, from Burley, Idaho to Seattle, was a blur of pain for me. It was the sixth day, the first layer was long gone, and the second was bubbling off me. When we got back, for extra fun, I had some baseball games before I was recovered. Sweat-soaked uniform caked with dust which got ground into very raw flesh? I don’t recommend it. I’m not sure how I even managed to play. Somehow, in one game I was 4 for 4.

It’s been nearly twenty years. I still have the tan lines on my upper thighs; I can tell which they are, because I haven’t worn shorts that short in a very long time, and I don’t spend large amounts of time in the sun to begin with. The burn permanently darkened my skin. For the rest of my days, I’ll have to watch very carefully for melanoma. I simply can’t ever allow a serious burn again.

And I’m passionate about sunblock. I’ll trowel on the heaviest stuff I can find. Hatless in summer sun? Not unless I want to go through that again. I’d just as soon not.

Last year George and I celebrated our thirtieth year of friendship. We need to go on another road trip at some point. This time, I promise not to do anything imbecilic.

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When dominant powers assume that they make the rules

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My friend Adrienne Dellwo (if you are in search of fibromyalgia info, she’s the authority) today posted a worthwhile article on how Wizards of the Coast has managed to lose the Dungeons & Dragons market. For those of you who don’t want to read it or have never cared about fantasy role-playing games, a few years ago WotC decided on a complete remake of the tabletop game (which is still popular). Whether the new edition was a good one or a bad one was up for debate; most players a) didn’t think it felt like D&D, and b) weren’t very interested in repurchasing all the basic books again. It’s safe to assume the move was revenue-driven in a saturated market (declining sales of expensive source books), and one empathizes with the need to keep customers buying stuff, but planned obsolescence always creates a crossroads. When deciding whether to buy the new thing, and annoyed about it, people may decide on someone else’s new thing.

It isn’t the first time that’s happened in some way. We can learn from the trend, which spans most aspects of human life. The pace has sped up as communication and transportation have accelerated.

The Roman Catholic Church defined religion in Europe for centuries, with an authoritative hand in economic, political, military and social life. A variety of reformers decided that heresy wasn’t nearly as sinful as venal, oppressive, centralized ecclesiastical leadership, and today a good chunk of Europe isn’t Catholic–and a good chunk of what remains nominally Catholic really doesn’t care.

In the Civil War, the South starved because “cotton was king!” Thus, wealthy planters kept growing the stuff rather than food, even though getting it to its European markets was problematic. A primarily agrarian population, with a healthy chunk of the workforce that didn’t have to be away at war, found a way to starve. The South also insisted on going to war to preserve slavery, when a quick look around the world would have told them it was unsustainable. The Confederate States are no longer a country.

Chrysler, GM and Ford forgot how to make cars that people wanted to buy. Never mind: buy Murrican! In Detroit, social pressure (patriotism, union allegiance) worked. Everywhere else, people bought cheaper, more reliable Japanese cars. They still don’t get it. The American companies remain at the top of the Consumer Reports recall lists, people who value reliability buy Toyotas and Hondas, and the whole industry had to be bailed out. Detroit? Not much left of it.

IBM popularized the personal computer and set all the standards. Just eight years later, it was flailing about helplessly as it tried to dictate that the market pay double for a new architecture and operating system that were mostly incompatible with all the previous IBM stuff. Everyone told IBM to pound sand and bought Compaqs, Epsons, Acers, HPs, and ASTs running the same OS in evolutionary form. Do you own an IBM computer?

AOL looked poised to redefine the Internet. AOL startup CDs were a primary form of junk mail. For a great many people, AOL was the Internet, despite the steady grumbles of the tech-savvy libertarian-leaning old school who had thought typing Unix commands wasn’t too bad and viewed with fear and loathing the influx of screaming, clueless newbies with their text-speak and tendency to call IRC channels ‘chat rooms.’ Then AOL users began to learn about the Internet, and came to realize that AOL was now more in their way than paving the way. How long has it been since you got an AOL CD ride-along?

CNN was all the rage after the first Gulf War. Now it’s just one of three incompetent news entertainment stations. Those who want their existing perceptions reinforced now watch the version of the competition whose slant they prefer. People who plan to think read it online. CNN may still be in business, but they aren’t really in the news business, and their reputation is lower than ever.

Flush with the market dominance of Windows, Microsoft insisted on shoving a lousy web browser at its customers. It became the Web Browser Most Often Used to Download a Real Web Browser. Microsoft can still make the rules for Internet Explorer; it’s just that no one will care. Microsoft also kept repackaging a boondogglier boondoggle and calling it the Next Great Windows. Apple’s stock sells today, as I type, for $483/share. Five years ago it sold for about $160. You can get a share of Microsoft for $32/share. Five years ago, you’d have paid about $26 for it. New Microsoft product announcements don’t change much, especially as many are flops that drive the stock price backward.

SEIU, one of the dominant labor unions, truly believes that it got Barack Obama elected. It neglects to consider that organized labor, so long accustomed to having its way and having its sloganeering taken at face value, no longer has the power to get anyone elected. It has lost the battle for public influence. It has allowed its enemies to convince people that they are better off without the right to bargain collectively. That’s like convincing landowners that polluted water is actually better than clean water. Today, maybe 10% of American workers are in a union, and many of the other 90% would object strenuously to the concept.

Google perfected the search engine, then broke its “Don’t Be Evil” motto all over the place. People are increasingly open to search engine solutions that don’t feed the Google data hydra. Google Plus was rolled out to a tremendous yawn. Everything Google does raises the question: “in what way is this meant to spy on me?” No one will lament its downfall, when it comes.

USC college football had a motto: “Win Forever.” At one point, that looked likely. A private school, it treated NCAA inquiries with disdain. The resulting sanctions sent the Win Forever coach packing his bags for the NFL, led to the hire of a mercenary coach who has floundered, caused a demoralized team of stellar athletes to lose a bowl game to a team with a losing record, and lost the program its star power. Last week, USC struggled to defeat Utah State, a team with few athletes that USC would have recruited even when it wasn’t under scholarship reductions.

Adrienne commented to me: “To add to your list of companies that toppled themselves, I think the Big Three TV networks are next. When a show gets knocked off of my DVR and I can’t find it either on the network’s website or On Demand, and they don’t show it again for several months, it’s just plain stupid.” She’s got a point. The major networks have become increasingly less relevant, in large part because they’ve been difficult about content. Faux is the worst. Increasingly, the most compelling TV content is not on the major networks at all.

The American mindset continues to insist that its system is the world’s greatest, that its military might is unchallengeable, its currency is the world standard, and that every country’s most important relationship is that with the United States. This, as it: lags the developed world in most quality-of-living categories, tucks tail from Afghanistan, and tries to decide whether its worst enemy is a a) major world religion with a few extremists, b) people who want to sneak across its borders to pick fruit and mow yards, or c) two old Cold War adversaries who watch its missteps with bemused anticipation. It requires an enemy, lest its people look inward and see that its own government and corporations are a greater threat to them than all of the above in union. And in the meantime, increasingly, it fails to adjust to a changing world and falls behind, losing relevance and prestige.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life, Scumbag studies

SS: Roll of Infamy by Christopher Ailsby

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I’ve had this encylopedic/coffee table book for a while. The subject alternately interests and repels me.

Some people may need some background. In Nazi Germany, the Schutzstaffel–the dreaded SS, emblemized by the twin S-runes that looked like lightning bolts–was nothing less than a state within the state. The Waffen-SS, or armed SS, was the military formation. Its units ranged from ferociously brave and competent to mutinous and cowardly, and from decently fierce to culpability in some of the most loathsome atrocities of the modern era. Quite a few were hanged or shot after the war, the vast majority of whom had it coming. What is less known about them can be summarized neatly:

  1. The SS was much more than an armed force. It was an industrial conglomerate, which one might also call a greed machine. It generated many billions of fiat money Reichsmarks that would become worthless upon the defeat of Nazi Germany, whose war lasted about as long as it takes most people to get a BA and MA. And yes, a great percentage of that wealth was gotten from means such as slave labor, robbing the murdered, blackmail, ransom and so on.
  2. For all its Teutonocentrism, it found excuses to include a lot of non-Germans and even non-Aryans. There was a British Free Corps, the only SS unit with a cuffband in English. It had a Turkestani unit. There were whole divisions of Bosnians, Croatians, Galicians, Latvians, Estonians, Frenchmen, Russians and more. Performance varied from valiant to awful, from honorable to the very worst of the German military (and in World War II, that worst was the type of thing decent people have a hard time imagining). You had the 9th SS Panzer Division “Hohenstaufen,” for example, a capable formation not implicated in any atrocities. At the other end, units as despicable as what became the 36th SS-Waffen-Grenadier Division “Dirlewanger,” the SS penal unit commanded by an alcoholic child rapist and guilty in numerous appalling deeds.
  3. The SS were not the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo), although the SS-SD intelligence service was surely as terrifying as the Gestapo. This confusion is common.

Ailsby treats noteworthy SS personalities in encyclopedic format, which makes lookups easy. In many cases he has located worthwhile minutiae, such as most entries’ Party and SS numbers (it was hardly rare for an SS soldier to be a member of the Nazi party), and for winners of very selective decorations, the number of the award. What I don’t grasp is the number of entries for highly decorated individuals implicated in no vile deeds. The author can’t cheat with his title. An SS corporal who died earning the Knight’s Cross, for example, was indeed part of a force that has earned infamy for may good reasons, but that’s not enough reason to list him in a book whose title suggests that it’s full of cutthroats. Odilo Globocnik, Alfred Naujocks and Joachim Peiper belong here, among quite a few others. A few highly decorated enlisted men with no record of atrocities really do not.

I also find some of his research sloppy, seemingly hasty. There are a few SS personalities I have researched as extensively as my resources would allow, and I used them somewhat as benchmarks. Terms are misspelled; details are at times glossed or inaccurate. I don’t lack empathy for the effort involved in the book, and the shortcuts it might require. Shortcuts will mean missed details, errors and such; I have made some myself in my own historical writing, not that I pardon myself for them. I see this book as someone who might have written it: hundreds of individuals to include, with a limited amount of time to spend on each, and without the resources to do academic-quality work.

That, friends, is the reality of historical writing. Academic-grade work involves the kind of research that the book’s proceeds cannot possibly recoup, and that’s why the books cost a lot, and why they are credible as sources. Mass-market-grade work is profitable, but will vary in quality. In the historical writing I have done, I’ve prided myself on coming within perhaps 90% of the credibility of academic grade, without the travel costs and months of focus needed for the latter. But I’m no expert on WWII, and to write the book, Ailsby must fundamentally purport to be such. If he is, it follows that I should not catch him in many, if any mistakes. I do. That leaves me no choice but to find this fault.

In the end, Ailsby has produced an okay book, but no better, even allowing for the research practicalities. He has collected a fair bit of good information, gotten some wrong, and misnamed the book with a misleadingly lurid title.

Beards, Social comment

Beard comparisons and visible minority

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The other day, I was with some people I didn’t really know. Okay, I was in a community education geography class that consists of a nice elderly gentleman telling stories from his life at 1.5 mph. Which may well be very entertaining in its context, but is not what I paid $36, trekked half a mile through a junior high school, and squeezed into a child-intended seat for. But that’s why I was with people I didn’t know.

For some reason, the social necessity arose to comment upon my facial hair. I guess it’s the main visible marker for me, much more important than perhaps my education or work experience (which one might infer from my speech, but which can’t be shaved off). Black people might tell me: “Try being the only one with a difference that Norelco can’t fix.” A fair point. However, it’s not that big a novelty. I’ve heard that sentiment from minorities too: “Am I the first one they’ve ever seen?” Women, when alone in all-male groups, probably ask themselves the same thing: Why are the men all acting weird? Was the last female they ever saw, the one who squeezed them out?

No, I don’t directly compare my experience. Too much differs. But I no longer wonder why people in minority situations have made the observations they did. They make sense to me now, even after an incomplete comparison. And I’m beginning to understand why they’d rather it went away, because maybe the damn subject is just old to them. If you’re fifty and Asian, Asianness has probably come up a time or two in your life. You’ve already learned all the perceptions, stereotypes, heard reactions thoughtful and ignorant alike. Maybe you’re ready to just be Joe, rather than Asian Joe.

That said, I also don’t think it stops. Not with newly met people in visible minority situations. So that means that, until people become friends with me or I shave it off, in groups my beard is my identity. And maybe I should be grateful for that, come to think of it, because I’d rather be noteworthy for my beard than for my weight or my bizarre voice. So mostly, I’m not too annoyed, until the comparisons go to undesirable places.

You know, being compared with ZZ Top as a form of beard association wasn’t bad. I can deal with being confused with Santa. This Duck Dynasty comparison crap, however, will meet with icy and obstinate resistance. Yes, I know you like the show. No, I do not see what’s amusing about it. Yes, I realize it’s wildly popular. No, that fact has never influenced my preferences in nearly fifty years of life, unless via contrarianship. Yes, I have watched it. No, I don’t think it’s amusing. In fact, I see little difference between Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Booboo. It’s only funny because they have drawls. If you made either show with North Dakotans or Oregonians, it would be off the air, because much of our society associates a drawl with comical ignorance. (Although in Oregon, of course ‘Duck dynasty’ has a rather more different and literal meaning, one inimical to loyal Huskies.)

It’s one thing being compared to a mythical figure who brings kids joy. It’s one thing being compared to bearded Southerners whose rock band and look are so iconic that people half my age know who they are. It’s quite another being compared to a bunch of guys noteworthy mainly for making duck callers. Who even eats duck meat anyway? I assume people are not buying the duck callers so that they can feed or befriend the ducks.

Rasputin? Da. ZZ Top? Reckon so. Santa? Ho, ho, ho. Duck Dynasty? No. Just don’t.

Married life, Social comment, Sports

Our college football ritual

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It’s not very writer-nerdy to love college football. Don’t care. My nerd card has far too many punches in life for any pencil-neck to criticize. I do care about graduation rates, education, safety, and conduct within the community, in addition to football. I care that football essentially pays the way for most other sports at most schools, which has made Title IX’s equality requirements financially doable.

The NFL, I don’t much care about. Wake me up if the Broncos make the AFC Championship, especially if it’s against a real team (read: not a newfangled Southern team named after some monstrous feline).

The great thing about college football is that one can have many likes and many hates. However, one’s undergraduate allegiance is nearly always one’s home program, one’s favorite, because you are one of them. They walk the same halls and pathways, fellow participants in history and tradition. So, I like Kansas because I’m from there and my father went there, and Colorado State because both my folks went there, and varying other schools for various reasons. But even though I’m not a Washingtonian, I went to Washington, and thus for me college football begins with purple and gold.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

My wife’s varying undergrad schools did not offer football, though for many Alaskans, UW is a sort of default allegiance (and a dream academic destination), like people from Montana who root for the Denver Broncos. In any case, my enthusiasm has somewhat rubbed off on Deb. Husky football has become one of our fall rituals, something to do together. I doubt she’ll ever be a big student of the game, but sometimes this is the way for women: their psyches flex and adjust and adapt better than ours, probably one reason they live longer than we do. It has become one of our marital rituals, Husky football on TV, and she loves her I BARK FOR SARK t-shirt.

The way it works is through nachos. A lot of nachos. Pure nachismo. A whole pizza plate full of them. We make a massive plate of nachos, sit down and watch the game. I believe she likes it partly because I participate in the production (I normally am not much of a cook, though on request I will always take responsibility for providing food). I consider myself an advanced placer of tortilla chips, and am always willing to grate cheese, oil the pan, chop stuff up, whatever strong-back-weak-mind task I can do. This year (or this week, anyway), I am taking a greater role, because I’m making my version of her chorizo chile to put on the nachos. That covers the beans part, the hamburger part and the sauce part.

I do not believe in lame nachos. Nachos are the place to go all in. The only reason to stop putting stuff on top is if it will a) insulate the cheese from melting correctly, or b) cause problems in the oven by bumping against the burners or pouring off the pan. We all know that most cheese tastes better when heated/cooked. There must be no chip not coated in good things. I wouldn’t feed most sportsbar nachos to Deb’s dogs, which I don’t even like.

The general custom is to consume gallons of beer while watching football, but I don’t. It’s emotional for me, sometimes very disappointingly emotional (even depressingly, as in the Tyrone Willingham era), and for me, drinking and being unhappy don’t mix. After it’s over, of course, if I’m pleased with how things went, I’ll definitely have a few celebratory belts, but I don’t like to get really drunk even then.

We’d have people over more often (no way can we eat all that), but we have not really lived in places where there were a lot of Husky fans. Tri-Cities was hardcore Coug country, and the only reason for them to watch UW is to root against us (and even against Oregon, I don’t openly root against my host’s team…some things are best kept to oneself). Boise is hardcore Boise State country, and we haven’t yet met many other Dawgs here. So it’s not really a social tradition, more of a marital one. But it’s a good one, especially when attending games in person is now more cost- and time-prohibitive than ever. (Eight hours of driving, each way. At least one motel night, probably two. Meals. $150 for tickets. Total, maybe $700–which I read as 2/3 of a house payment. Not happening.

So Husky football returns. Go Dawgs.

Let me close with a bit of outspoken opinion on the changes in football, especially with regard to concussion prevention and increasingly stiff penalties for targeting and helmet-to-helmet hits. Yeah, I know this isn’t how we played football in high school, or when my father played in high school. However, please consider these salient realities:

  • Players are stronger, faster and bigger than before. Don’t believe me, look at the rosters then and now.
  • The impacts are harder, and have outstripped the ability of equipment to protect any part of the body completely. In any case, no protection will keep a brain from sloshing around in the braincase.
  • College is for education first and foremost. The goal is to educate young brains, not scramble them.
  • Look at the numbers in education. At some schools, enrollment approaches 60% female. It’s hard to avoid the strong suspicion that, when opportunity is equal and all is based purely on demonstrated academic merit, the women are smarter than we are. If we are on balance dumber than the women, does society need us to get even dumber through repeated head trauma?
  • Look at the later impact on families. We want our young men to grow into good men: good fathers, good husbands. Brain trauma can cause disastrous, erratic behavior, especially later in life. I’ve known of once-decent men who had head injuries and became brutal animals toward their families. With as much domestic violence as we already have, must we not do all we can to prevent more of it? Was my father’s violently abusive behavior partly a product of the three times he was kayoed playing high school football?
  • Football produces people we often admire, some of whom deserve it and some don’t. What about after football? Let me spell this out. Do you want your school’s greatest hero inducted into his school’s pantheon of standouts in a wheelchair, drooling, unable to stand up and thank alma mater and the community for the opportunity and affection? At forty?
  • We live in an era of fanatically overprotective parents. Many will not let their children play football at all. We’ll never know how great those kids might have been. Do you want to make that even worse? My father didn’t want me to play football. It went like this: “Dad, thinking of going out for football. What do you think?” “Lousy idea, son. You’ll wreck your knee, and limp around in pain for the rest of your life, like me.” This from a high school standout in a town where football was king, a lifelong fan of college football. I told him I was going to do it anyway, and he said he wouldn’t stop me, but I can only imagine what my parents were thinking when we’d kick off. I’d pick a target and ram that helmet in there. Broke the bolt holding my face mask in place one time. Hit people with it so hard that I could hear the collective feminine gasps of pained shock from the stands. May well have injured a reasonably gifted mind–for life. And that wasn’t even people hitting me. It was self-inflicted. I already have some memory issues. How much worse will they be as I age? Did I do this to myself? Will I one day find myself tending toward domestic violence I cannot control, and have no honorable alternative but to exit life on my own terms?
  • And last: it takes thirty years for us to know how bad it really is. We are only now learning how much brain damage was done to the sons of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the meantime, the hits got harder. We won’t find out until thirty years from now what it did to our current generation of young males, but we can expect it to get worse. It cannot begin to get better until we fix it, and wait our thirty years for the payoff. Those thirty years must begin now.

Against all this, the only argument is ‘the pussification of football’ and grumpy old deprecatory stuff like ‘might as well just play flag football, why even bother?’ You tell me which argument makes more sense, that or mine. For my money, if those are your responses, maybe you yourself had a few too many concussions and they’re starting to show, because the weight of all measured reason argues for taking whatever steps necessary to quit turning kids’ brains to granola.

Let me close by mentioning that this is not the first time we’ve confronted this. Do you know why the NCAA was formed? It was because, by the turn of the century (when football still looked a lot like rugby or ‘soccer football,’ as it was called), there were over a dozen deaths on the field nationally in high school and college football. Many more were paralyzed for life. Theodore Roosevelt stepped in and said, paraphrased: “Your choice. You can fix this blood sport, or I will ban it.” Roosevelt was not known as a man who ran from fights, nor discouraged physical trials of strength and guts. In fact, he was a pretty macho president. Yet in this case, he took a stand for rules changes and protective gear. Pussification? You wouldn’t say that to T.R.’s face. He heard the same complaints, and came to the same conclusion I have: if it kills the kids, or ruins them for life, it’s got to be fixed or gotten rid of.

If that means ejecting and suspending anyone who spears, targets the head or whatever, I’m for it. The alternative is the potential decline of the sport.

I want to keep our ritual. I love Husky football enough to save it.

Editing/writing life

A library book’s long strange trip

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When it comes to library books, I’m a borderline fascist. Woe be unto he who sells me a used book on Amazon and it turns out it’s a stolen library book. If there’s any doubt, I’ll hunt up the library and call to check. I don’t give a damn if it’s thirty years old. If it doesn’t say WITHDRAWN or DISCARD, or have some other official thrown-out stamp, I assume it’s still theirs. I’ve mailed them all the way across the country. I have also made more than one Amazon seller refund my money–in one case, presenting the alternative of charging him with trafficking in stolen property. It’s their job to inspect their merchandise before they market it. If it just turns up, and the library tells me it’s thrown out, I’ll write the date of the conversation inside.

My library is large enough to qualify as a very small, specialized bookstore, so at times I’ll find an old library book whose markings I never noticed. This happened as I was unpacking one of about thirty boxes of books here in our new home in Idaho. It was The Second Ring of Power by Carlos Castañeda. It had been in my religion/metaphysical section all this time. I saw the stamp on top of the dusty pageblock: BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY.

Well, how about that. I remembered this book. Back in the late 1980s, I was eking out my low-paid existence in a studio apartment on the third floor of a building at NE 50th St and the Ave (aka University Way NE) in Seattle, and I was sort of the apartment manager. That wasn’t fun and didn’t pay well; I was responsible for cleaning out storage lockers, running the trash compactor and kicking bums out of the stairwell. One abandoned storage contained a motherlode of interesting books, many of which were college texts on archaeology and ancient history, ancient drama, and some literature. Among them was Castañeda’s book, which I thought I might read someday, or maybe not. I’ve been carting it around for a quarter century, give or take.

By the time I got it, it was some eight years gone from its proper location, as I learned when I opened it up to check for information about discard status. Nothing. In back was an old school checkout card in its manila sleeve, with date stamps from the late 1970s, the last being in 1980. Students had signed with their student ID numbers. Children, this was before bar codes and scanners and databases ruled the library. Libraries had big batteries of drawers containing what was called the card catalog, enabling you to look up books by author or subject. Librarians would help you; they knew where to find stuff.

And any time some elder (the PC term is ‘senior citizen,’ but when I reach that age, I think I’ll prefer ‘old person’) tells you how much better the old days were, ask him or her about whether the old card catalog was more efficient than a search through a modern database. There was college before an Internet; everything just took a lot longer, with a lot more dead ends and lines for registration, checkout, and such. It was more tactile. By my college days (1981-86), some fortunate students had computers, and some went to a computer lab to do stuff, but the rest of us typed our papers on electric typewriters. Often three drafts. No. That was not better. Anyone who thinks it was, I assume, never had to write a college paper.

So here I am, just moved to Boise, and one of the first books I unpack is a BSU library book thirty-three years gone from its proper home. Every student who ever checked it out is now over fifty, as I soon will be. A few have probably passed on, too young. Anyone who cataloged that book is probably retired by now, if even still with us.

I sent it back with a nice young BSU student who lives in the house/room where Deb lived for six months before we made our relocation complete.

Wish I could see their faces when they pull it out of the return bin.

Book reviews, Social comment

Eat, pray, love?

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This book is not the sort of travel book that draws me in, but I ended up starting to read it anyway while unpacking our library (a lengthy, back-wrenching task at our house). It is by Elizabeth Gilbert, and in case one can’t read the stuff on the cover telling one that they made it into a movie, there’s a picture of some actress on the cover. I know I’ve seen her but I don’t recognize her name. Erin Brocovic, maybe.

Eat, Pray, Love. Three things a lot of us do every day without high drama, though it’s a more promising title than Pee, Swear, Groan.

Not sure what makes me recoil from books whose titles sound like idylls. I am sure that Frances Mayes is a delightful lady. Even so, when I wrote a manuscript about travel in Ireland, my working title parodied that of Under the Tuscan Sun. It all sounds so effete, so fragile, so froufrou, so gritless. I am far too affected by names in this regard. I battle this weakness; in fact, I forced myself to read Mayes’ book simply out of respect for what I was going to parody. And it was about like I thought it was: another book about fixing up old Mediterranean properties and cooking food in them. Not a thing in the world against an author who seems like a very nice lady that can probably spend an hour preparing an artichoke in just this special way she learned from an old grocer named Beppe so that it tastes like ambrosia delivered by angels and served by cherubs, but if I’m going to read about idyllic Tuscany, my kind of travel book is Dario Castagno’s Too Much Tuscan Sun, a Sienese tour guide writing about how ridiculous some of his clients are. The highlight of the dude’s life is when his social fraternity wins an annual horse race for the first time in decades. (Imagine: “Hi, my name is Joe, and I am a Ravens fan whose team won the Super Bowl last year.”) He actually puts that in the blurb; how much class does that require? A true character, and if you think about it, a much sharper cultural portrait of his region than you imagined you might get.

So I’m not much impressed by ‘now a motion picture!’ or an idyllic title everyone’s heard of, much less a picture of a Serbian actress. Most of my travel library, most of you haven’t heard of. Imagine someone who has combed used bookstores for ten years, and in each one, has bought only the single most unique, interesting travel biography. Paul Theroux? I read a couple and liked them well enough, but he’s nowhere near as fun as Tim Cahill. Bruce Chatwin? Couldn’t tell you. I read one and nothing about it stands out in my memory, which is not true of the incredibly ballsy and laconic Tim Severin. Redmond O’Hanlon? Another one whose titles turn me off, this time for pretension. ‘No Mercy.’ ‘In Trouble Again.’ Not only do those tell me nothing, I can’t help thinking the author considers himself a vast badass. Maybe he does. Maybe he is. If so, I won’t need the title to tell me that. A real travel badass is Tony Horwitz throwing up in a bucket on a tall ship, or the Australian woman who went on a camel trip and just stopped wearing clothes at times. She has the guts to describe how she just let her menstrual blood seep down her bare thighs, out in the middle of nowhere. I forget her name, but I’m not done with my coffee and I can’t remember it offhand; I’m hiding out here from the twelfth annual 9/11 garment-rending, sort of hunkered down for the day. A search for “Australian camel travel woman” should fetch her.

At least I don’t judge the book by a cover. If Mayes had pictured a stack of hockey pucks on her cover, or a shot of herself in a bikini, it wouldn’t have changed a thing for me. Titles affect me abnormally.

Of course, you can’t review a book based on reading a quarter of it, nor merely its title, and you can’t hold against it that it was popular enough to be a movie. I fought off all my biases and started reading, because I needed something to read, and this was something I hadn’t read. So far, it’s basically: woman who serially gives too much until she can give no more, then gets all depressed about it and finally decides to spend a year doing something good and selfish for once as therapy. It’s a much better Lifetime plot than most of what they show, that I’ll grant you, because to me Lifetime movies are a steady stream of shows about women being hurt, abused, scared, cheated and killed. I’m not sure how that helps anyone to watch, but evidently those are very popular themes with some women, or there wouldn’t be a movie channel devoted to them. Then again, I’m not sure how an annual self-laceration helps a whole country, but evidently once again I’m in the minority there as well.

I’m sure the events in the book are very interesting and formative to the author, and probably to people who have been in similar situations and wished they could just hare off somewhere else for a year. To me, maybe not so much. It does beat hell out of the rest of what I’m reading around the net this morning.

Book reviews

Why you missed out on Hornblower, and need to fix it

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The original Star Trek was described as ‘Hornblower in space.’ Do you understand what that means? If not, a great experience awaits you, one I had long ago. You missed it because, in a world of endcaps and trash, C.S. Forester is often forgotten. The closest you ever got to a view of the age of fighting sail was Russell Crowe’s utterly un-naval, chin-challenged persona, which you were led to imagine authentic because the effects were so impressive and realistic-looking. For my money, Master & Commander was to Hornblower as an average drag performer is to Sandra Bullock. As in, don’t even. You cannot ‘pull it off.’

You’ll like the process of fixing your Hornblower deprivation. Think of it as a dental procedure in which you feel no pain and vague arousal, and can eat solid food that very night.

The English are by nature a seafaring people. In the UK, the Royal Navy is the senior service. Royal Navy captains and admirals were expected to win, whatever the odds. These people produced Admiral Sir John Jervis, who risked the fate of an empire at 1:2 odds at Cape St. Vincent; for that he was Lord St. Vincent. They produced Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, pivotal commodore at Copenhagen and victor of Trafalgar. They produced Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, later Earl Jellicoe, victor of Jutland. They produced Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, later Viscount Cunningham, who covered the Commonwealth evacuation at Sphakia, Crete at great risk, even as a world away, my mother was being born in Colorado, with the words: “It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition.” If I have not convinced you that the Royal Navy comes to do battle, nothing will.

Want to feel it? Read C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels. Not kidding.

They came out in non-chrono order. Begin with Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. (Sorry, but WordPress’s link adding is currently broken. Try http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Midshipman-Hornblower-Saga/dp/0316289124/ .) Should be easy enough from there. What you gain:

  • Obvious and wondrous knowledge of the age of sail. The art of sailing was heart and soul of capable naval maneuver in those days, and you will walk away understanding much about what sea captains faced in the Napoleonic era.
  • A great and protracted adventure and romance story spanning the Pacific coast, Caribbean, eastern Mediterranean and Baltic.
  • A savagely self-deprecating Royal Navy officer who never accepted less than anyone’s best, especially his own.
  • Often hilarious reading of the best kind: that which avoids pushing it, and lets the reader find the comedy.
  • A picture of the times, credible and textured. Excellent political and historical detail, nestled perfectly in the times.
  • While not many women in the story, one key female character is very strong and inspirational.

Flaws? I think Hornblower’s escapes and linguistics a bit convenient, especially his quick mastery of two romance languages despite terminal tone-deafness. However, my rule is that fiction authors get one area in which they bend credulity a bit. Forester uses this token on language knowledge and absorption in his protagonist. Okay, fair enough. Given that, the escapes are less suspending of our disbelief. Artful.

The whole series is artful. It is also fantastic international adventure, with some warfare but not at all constant. Some of the language reflects prejudices of the era, and there’s nothing for that. Some feel that such things must be excised. Others, among them myself, believe that to excise them is selective denial. If you take the racial slurs out of Huckleberry Finn, for example, you take away the authenticity. We should not try to pretend our forebears were better than that, and lived by modern standards of our day which would have shocked them. Yeah, there’s one jarring moment where Hornblower yells at his crew for a feeble effort, and says that he’s seen it done better by ‘Portuguese niggers.’ Dislike button. But if you’d read Mark Twain in spite of that, you’d read this in spite of that, I should hope. Plus, if I recall, that’s the only use of that term in all the series. Use of deprecatory slang for adversaries (Spaniards, French) is far more common, and is part of military culture. Unless we’re going to denigrate the WWII generation for all the times they said ‘Krauts,’ ‘Jerries,’ ‘Huns’ and so on. No takers? Didn’t think so.

It is also great military fiction. To write top-grade military (including naval) fiction, the author must have a firm grasp of military culture: the varied attitudes and competencies that make up an armed force. This will mean some crazies, some saints, some spuds, some plodders, some fools, some cowards, and mostly pretty competent people doing the best they can. It will mean cumbersome regulations and constant worry about career impairment. It will mean good people sometimes getting a bohica, and bad people sometimes getting benefits they do not deserve.

I read a couple of the Bolitho novels by Douglas Reeman (as Alexander Kent), and one other in the same genre whose name now escapes me. None compared to Forester in authenticity, storytelling or flavor.

The books came out in a strange order, beginning in the middle, but are best read in the order of Hornblower’s career. The only weird one is Hornblower During the Crisis, which is an unfinished novel with some previously published stories included. I’d save that one for last, and accept the jumping around that is in it. The rest of the books, if read in story order rather than order of release, will tell the full tale of our hero’s career.

Blogging freelance editing, writing, and life in general. You can also Like my Facebook page for more frequent updates: J.K. Kelley, Editor.