TST ORIGINAL POEM: "Clerihew for Tom"

Clerihew for Tom

The inimitable Mr. Cruise
Has bought into ol' L. Ron's ruse.
You can too, if you're wealthy and willing!
Just don't think about taking top billing.

Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 14

Septuagenarian on Campus

For the last couple of weeks I have been working, very slowly, on the Prologue to my story, in which Father Luke Brogan, son of Walter Brogan, wanders about the campus of the university he is retiring from, receives one more assignment from the university president, and enters into a dialogue with a former student. The setting is a fictional college in northeast Pennsylvania called JUNEP (Jesuit University of Northeast Pennsylvania), VAGUELY modeled after the University of Scranton, although I have only visited that university twice and very briefly at that. Father Brogan will be drawn into a lengthy reflection on his past, specifically his father's life and legacy, prompted by the insightful questions of the ambitious young journalism student (previously mentioned) who has been assigned to profile him for the campus newspaper.

So far, it's been a struggle to do this early writing, but that's not so bad. First of all, it is just very difficult to find time to commit to it, with my busy work schedule, two children, etc. If I actually do write an entire novel manuscript, it is going to take me a very long time. Especially since I am planning to rewrite sections of it as I go, instead of trying to rewrite and edit the entire thing once a draft is done. This is a method I have never used before, so it will be interesting. I am looking forward to having sections finished that have already been rewritten and worked on with some degree of seriousness and intensity. It will take much longer to progress through the story, but in theory, when a draft finally does emerge it will be that much closer to where I want the book to be ultimately in terms of quality.

Secondly, it is not easy for me, for obvious reasons, to write from the point of view of a retiring priest in his 70s who also happens to be a university professor. I don't know anything about what it's like to be a priest, don't have a clue of what a person in their 70s feels, thinks, and likes to do, and I certainly don't know anything about being a theologian on top of all of that. I'm a 35 year old Dad with an office job. What can I do to make Father Brogan even remotely believable? I can get a little assistance in this matter from watching/listening to/talking to my own father, who happens to be the same age as Father Brogan (75) and is somewhat similar in temperament. In a way, as I've said, Brogan is based on my father, but he's not the same. Yet, my own father has an interest in theology, if not actually being a theologian, and he's a septuagenarian himself of course, so I can take some of my character's actions and thoughts from my observations of my old man. This helps, but it doesn't get me there. I mean, there is also Brogan's whole identity as a Jesuit, and I am totally winging it there, as is pretty obvious when I review what I have written so far.

It is an interesting spiritual exercise, in a way, to attempt to create a character that is a member of the clergy and fill their brain with thoughts that the writer thinks a religious person would think. And have them say things I think a religious person would say. This part of it is frought with peril, because what one thinks a person in the clergy is apt to do and say may not be, of course, the reality. You don't know what it's like unless you've been there, I am sure. I alternate between giving Father Brogan words and thoughts that I think sound overly pious and cliche, to having him think and do things that any clergy member worth their salt wouldn't think or do. It's a fine line and I'm not at all qualified to negotiate it, really.

So how to deal with this problem? How do I write from the point of view of a 75-year-old priest? I think the answer is not to worry about it. Easier said than done in my case! But the same thing is going to apply when I switch gears and attempt to write about what a young man in the 1920s and 30s thinks and feels. If I worry too much about it, I will not get anywhere. Nothing is going to sound or feel authentic. And the operative word is 'feel' there. What i want to do is not so much create an historically detail-perfect character or setting, but get into what it FELT like to live and work in that time. If I can focus on that, I will be able to make either Brogan credible. It's a huge challenge, since after all I don't have any idea what it felt like to live then, but I think I will just have to continue to read things and work on it until I have something that sounds and feels authentic. Other novelists have done this before me, so I know it is possible.

The book is ultimately about Water Brogan, not Father Luke, but it is through Father Luke that we are going to be taken back in time. For now, my job is to attempt to write from his point of view, and to attempt to relate how a man like him would react to questions from a young and curious journalist that force him to think back on his past - to a time long gone, to a father long dead, whose long shadow nonetheless continues to cast itself over him no matter how much time goes by and no matter how old he gets. Young man, old man, you can't escape the influence and memory of your father. He is always going to be there for you to measure yourself against and attempt to understand. Perhaps somewhat reluctantly, Father Luke Brogran is going to be coerced into going down this road one more time, and the story he tells the journalist is the one I want to write for anyone who cares to read it.

It's great to be writing again, no matter how slow it goes.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #30

Here are two absolutely exquisite little snippets of poetry from one of America's foremost living poets, Galway Kinnell. The first is a complete poem... and the second is only the first stanza of a much longer poem, but is so beautiful in and of itself, and so meaningful to those of us who have small children, I had to include it here.

These poems are so well crafted, it seems to me any extra commentary from me could only mar them. Wondrous word-paintings such as these, that penetrate swiftly past the brain to the heart (where they belong), require no further elucidation. To the second little fragment here, I can only add my own weak but fervent "Amen."

*******

Daybreak

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfisheswere creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it as slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and, as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity, they sank down
into the mud, faded down
into it and lay still, and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.



Stanza 1 from
Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight

1

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.

Some Notes on the Work of One of my Literary Heroes

There will be nothing too scholarly or erudite about this post, but recently I have come across some hints about a new book from one of my favorite writers and a genuine literary hero of mine: the gifted novelist RON HANSEN.

Interestingly enough, there are a number of writers whose work I really admire who came from the same institution (the celebrated Iowa Writer's Workshop, who rejected my application in 1997 by the way) around the same time (mid-70s), some of whom I have posted about here. Stephen Wright, who I ended up studying under at The New School, and T. Coraghessan Boyle both attended Iowa in the 70s. Ron Hansen is another product of that school from that era, and his work more than stands up to the work of the others - and to that of anyone writing fiction today.

One major difference between Hansen and Wright and Boyle is that Ron Hansen is a practicing Catholic, and he writes from that perspective, which I relate to and admire. Hansen is a writer whose religious beliefs INFORM but do not OVERWHELM his fiction; they flavor it and give it depth and resonance without preaching or appearing to condescend. His identity as a writer is not distinct from his identity as a Catholic, they are one in the same, and I think this is as it should be. I admire this approach and I strive to achieve a similar, regonizable balance in my own writing. The way to do this is not to imitate Hansen's work but to be true and honest in pursuing my own, and if I stick to what I really have to say and don't try to write like someone else would write, my own beliefs and my own faith will also be evident in my work.

I would recommend any book by Ron Hansen to fiction readers, religious and non-religious alike. One of this novels, 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford', will become known to people later this year because it is being made into a feature film starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck. But for this post I would like to recommend two books for readers who are interested in Ron Hansen's books.

First, what I consider to be the essential Ron Hansen novel, 1991's 'Mariette in Ecstasy'. This is a superb book that has had a major, major influence on me in my writing. This may not be seen directly in anything I've written, but I'd nonetheless describe this as an absolutely pivotal book in my life. Set in the early 20th century in upstate New York, 'Mariette' tells the story of a young woman who enters the cloistered, isolated environment of a convent as a postulant, preparing to become a nun, and soon thereafter begins to be marked with the stigmata, or the wounds of Christ's crucifixion. She also endures spiritual visions and begins to have a divisive but profound effect on the community around her. The tension and drama of the book centers around the response her fellow nuns have to her spiritual experiences. There is an investigation which further fractures the community, while the reader struggles with their own questions of whether or not these experiences could be genuine or imagined. His Catholic faith notwithstanding, Hansen steers clear of answering these questions for the reader, but presents an objective, fascinating and brilliantly written narrative story. This novel is very impressive for the boldness of its subject matter, the fascinating spiritual questions it introduces, and above all else, the beauty and economy of its poetry-like prose. This book is equally impressive to me for mechanical reasons as it is for spiritual reasons. It is a truly unforgettable novel. I wish I had written it.

If you are someone who would be interested in the way Hansen's faith relates to his writing, then his penetrating and insightful essay collection 'A Stay Against Confusion' is for you. This book showcases Hansen's abilities as an essayist and is most notable for its insights on the relationship between good art and Christian faith. But it also explores other subjects, such as films, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Eucharist, and a riveting, frightening essay on the murdering of Jesuit priests in El Savador that occurred back in the late 80s. Hansen has a clear, commanding prose style and a great deal of wisdom and insight in matters related to writing and literature. His faith also rings true in this volume, which is a great supplement to his novels.

Finally, a little bit of a prediction. I mentioned earlier that I came across a little information about Ron Hansen's next book. It is a forthcoming historical novel about the previously-mentioned poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, particularly centering around the period when he wrote his most well-known poem called 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', in the late 19th century. I think this has the potential to be one of Hansen's signature works if not his masterpiece. Hansen has been work at this for some time and has all of the background and the motivation to write such a book. He serves as the Gerard Manley Hopkins professor of English at Santa Clara University, after all, a position that was created for him, and I think he is going to do this honor proud with this novel. I do not know much about Hopkins, but he is a deep and fascinating figure whose poetry is known to be difficult but is also renowned for it spiritual depth. I think Hansen will find a way to make this figure interesting and believable in the novel. He has proven he can do so before. This seems to be the ideal material for a novelist of this caliber to sink his teeth into. I predict this will be a superb novel, for I know that Hansen has the experience and the abilities to pull something like this off. I can't wait for it.

The novels, stories and essays of Ron Hansen are well worth the time of any serious reader of American literature.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #29

Best wishes to everyone for a blessed Holy Week... and to that end, here is a powerful poem that looks forward to the glorious resurrection of Christ, and with the eyes of faith wide open, hopes for our participation in that Great and Final Victory!

It's interesting to note that Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), a son of two slaves from Dayton, OH, was the first African-American poet to gain any kind of recognition for his gifts on a national stage. He was praised by the likes of Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and Frederic Douglas. His work appeared regularly in such prominent publications as The New York Times and Harper's Weekly, and he produced several collections of poems and short stories, as well as a novel, before his life was tragically cut short by tuberculosis at only 33 years of age. Dunbar is the originator of that oft-quoted, famous lament for the oppressed, "I know why the caged bird sings!"

HAPPY EASTER ONE AND ALL... HE IS RISEN! HE IS RISEN INDEED!

*******

An Easter Ode

To the cold, dark grave they go
Silently and sad and slow,
From the light of happy skies
And the glance of mortal eyes.
In their beds the violets spring,
And the brook flows murmuring;
But at eve the violets die,
And the brook in the sand runs dry.

In the rosy, blushing morn,
See, the smiling babe is born;
For a day it lives, and then
Breathes its short life out again.
And anon gaunt-visaged Death,
With his keen and icy breath,
Bloweth out the vital fire
In the hoary-headed sire.

Heeding not the children's wail,
Fathers droop and mothers fail;
Sinking sadly from each other,
Sister parts from loving brother.
All the land is filled with wailing,
Sounds of mourning garments trailing,
With their sad portent imbued,
Making melody subdued.

But in all this depth of woe
This consoling truth we know:
There will come a time of rain,
And the brook will flow again;
Where the violet fell, 'twill grow,
When the sun has chased the snow.
See in this the lesson plain,
Mortal man shall rise again.

Well the prophecy was kept;
Christ "first fruit of them that slept"
Rose with vic'try-circled brow;
So, believing one, shalt thou.
Ah! but there shall come a day
When, unhampered by this clay,
Souls shall rise to life newborn
On that resurrection morn.

Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 13

The Writing Begins

In this post, I will not go on at length as I have on the other recent posts. Fortunately for anyone who might be reading these entries. But I do think it is important to record for the sake of good "journaling" and posterity the following important milestone: which is that I have begun writing a first draft of the "novel" that I have undertaken to write, with the primary goal of removing the quotation marks and someday being able to say that I did write a novel, legitimately.

If my structure withstands the dual tests of time and revisionism, my novel will begin with a "short" - although the way I'm blabbering on early, it doesn't look that short yet - Prologue section, set in the present day of 2006. The time of year is early May. The setting is a small Catholic university in eastern Pennsylvania. And the first character we come across is a 75-year-old man nearing retirement, a resident of the campus, by the name of Luke Brogan, S.J.

In the Prologue, Luke Brogan will be given one final assignment before venturing off into the unknown of post-retirement life, and he will meet a youthful acquaintance one more time who will convince him to tell his story. But, as fate would have it, it's not his story that he will end up telling. Rather, Father Brogan will spend a week, in evening sessions with this young journalism student, talking at length not about himself, but of his father, Walter Brogan, of Bentonville, Indiana......

At which point, if all goes as planned, the novel will step back in time to the year 1922....

NEWSFLASH: DUKE ALTUM BREAKS INTO PRINT WITH CLEVER MUSE ON LIFE'S "PHRASES"

Congratulations are in order to The Secret Thread's own DUKE ALTUM, who has recently learned he will become a PUBLISHED POET for the first time. We here at the Thread consider this to be a celebratory event, and the editors send our fervent and well-deserved (we feel) congratulations.

Published under a different name, Duke's "Phrases I'm Going Through" is going to appear in the Spring/Lent 2006 issue of an online Catholic journal called "Dappled Things", which itself is named from the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

"Phrases" is an exceptionally clever collection of small poems that each begin with a common cliche - phrases we're all used to hearing so many times that many of them have lost their meaning. In Duke's poems, each phrase is taken as starting point to a new meaning, an often enlightening and revelatory one. This is truly one of Duke's most original and interesting works as an aspiring poet and they must be read to be appreciated.

The poems will be published online. "Dappled Things" can be seen at http://www.dappledthings.org. It's an attractive site and a great place to air out Duke's first published poem in a public setting.

Perhaps this post will lead TST's many readers to begin a groundswell of demand for Duke to share some of his "phrases", and the insights he's found in them, with Secret Thread readers in his celebrated, near-legendary POTW series. If enough of you write in......

CONGRATULATIONS, DUKE - WHO JOINS THE ANCIENT TRADITION AND UNIVERSAL ARMY OF POETS FOR ALL TIME........TST readers, it's only the beginning.......

Signed,
Mutt Ploughman
Secret Thread contributor and co-editor

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #28

The Nigerian poet/playwright/novelist/literary critic and first-ever black African Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka has never been one to shy away from shining a bright, harsh light on racial discrimination, hypocrisy, tyranny and other forms of human cruelty. His is a moving, powerful and sometimes bitter voice crying out from the wilderness of West Africa, and he has suffered through long periods of imprisonment and exile for his courageous criticism of various brutal governments in his home country. His work combines elements of the great Western literary tradition with African myths, legends and folklore.

Though I don't know it well, what I have read of Soyinka's poetry reveals it to be powerful work that is deeply emotional, at times very moving and tender and at other times, harsh and uncompromising (especially when attacking the injustices that have been inflicted on his own people over the years). This particular poem touches on all of these things, and serves as a real eye-opener for those of us who have grown up within the celebrity-obsessed entertainment culture, and therefore sometimes don't see how arrogant and air-headed we must seem to the rest of the watching world. By contrasting these two very different deaths (and the ways in which they were marked), Soyinka makes us question and ponder what truly makes a human life worth celebrating and memorializing (and what doesn't). These heart-stirring lines will stick with me for a long time:

Courage is its own crown, sometimes
Of thorns, always luminous as martyrdom.

IMPORTANT: Here is Soyinka's note that goes along with the poem, which is essential for we ignorant Westerners to grasp its meaning:

Kudirat Abiola, the wife of the elected Nigerian President M.K.O. Abiola, was assassinated by agents of the usurping dictator, Sanni Abacha, in June 1996, the year before Princess Diana died in a motor accident.

*******

Some Deaths are Worlds Apart
(for Kudirat)

No bed of flowers bloomed for Kudirat
She was not royal, white or glamorous
Not one carnation marked the spot of death.
Though undecreed, a ban on mourning spoke
Louder than cold-eyed guns that spat
Their message of contempt against the world.

Oh, there were noises from the diplomatic world
A protest diskette ran its regulation course -- but
She was no media princess, no sibling
Of hagiomanic earls. All too soon it was:
Business as usual. Dark sludge
And lubricant of conscience, oil
Must flow, though hearts atrophy, and tears
Are staunched at source.

Death touches all, both kin and strangers.
The death of one, we know, is one death
One too many. Grief unites, but grief's
Manipulation thrusts our worlds apart
In more than measurable distances -- there are
Tears of cultured pearls, while others drop
As silent stones. Their core of embers
Melts brass casings on the street of death.

She was not royal, white or glamorous
No catch of playboy millionaires.
Her grace was not for media drool, her beauty
We shall leave to nature's troubadors.

Courage is its own crown, sometimes
Of thorns, always luminous with martyrdom.
Her pedigree was one with Moremi,
Queen Amina, Aung Sung Kyi, with
The Maid of Orleans and all who mother
Pain as offspring, offer blood as others, milk.

She seeks no coronet of hearts, who reigns
Queen of a people's will.
Oh let us praise the lineage
That turns the hearth to ramparts and,
Self surrendered, dons a mantle that becomes
The rare-born Master of Fate.

'Bridge' Over Troubled Water: Celebrating an Unjustly Forgotten Literary Masterpiece

The "unjustly forgotten literary masterpiece" referred to in my grandiose post title is actually a work that, in my mind, could not be praised enough for its depth of feeling, wisdom and understanding of the human condition. It is, in its own way, a long love letter to a part of the world that has been torn apart over and over again -- like some figure in a classical myth -- by war, bigotry, ignorance and, it must be said, religious intolerance. It is also a vivid, compassionate and heartbreaking meditation on community, and could easily serve as an allegory for all of human history in its joys and sorrows. This novel, as has long been noted by past critics, more or less single-handedly won for its author the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, and yet somehow in our time, less than a half-century later, it seems to be almost completely forgotten. How could a book of such obvious power and significance for the human race be relegated to almost total obselesence in such a short time? That is a question I couldn't possibly attempt to answer here, although many knee-jerk responses come to mind, not the least of which is the simple fact that we as a culture simply don't place much value on reading in general anymore.

But to all you serious readers out there, anyone who still values and appreciates the significance of literature and its power to mold and shape our intellectual, moral and even spiritual lives (both as children and as adults), I have this urgent message, in case you hadn't heard: Ivo Andric's epic novel The Bridge on the Drina is without a doubt one of the most important novels of the 20th century, and deserves a place next to other modern national epics such as Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, Laxness' Independent People and Rushdie's Midnight's Children on the Great Bookshelf of Civilization.

Ivo who? The Drina what?

If that's your reaction to what I just wrote, well, I can only nod and admit that I reacted the same way when I first heard the novel referred to (when or where, I can't for the life of me recall now). As should be obvious by now to readers of TST, I am drawn to books (fiction or non-fiction) about other countries, other races and other cultures, because I believe that no one people or ideology holds a monopoly on truth, and that because we share a common human condition, we can all learn from each other's accumulated wisdom. I feel that my world and my consciousness have been expanded by reading authors such as Dostoevsky, Hugo, Marquez, Shusaku Endo, Tarjei Vesaas, Kafka, Laxness, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Wislawa Szymborska, and others that have already been discussed in this blog. If I happen to read about a novel or non-fiction work from another culture that seems to be highly regarded or is considered a classic, I'm almost certainly going to be interested in it, and in the author. Some examples of writers from other countries that I have heard much about and look forward to reading one day are Bruno Schulz (from Poland), Orhan Pamuk (Turkey), and Ismail Kadare (Albania).

Regardless of where I may have heard about Andric's book, as soon as I was able to get my hands on a copy and begin reading it, I knew I was reading a world classic. There are certain rare books in which you can tell, even within the first few pages, that you are reading something that will stay with you for a long long time, maybe even for the rest of your life. This is definitely that kind of book. One thing that is interesting to me is that very often, when it comes to the kind of book I'm describing, it's very hard to actually put one's finger on precisely why the book is so valuable and rewarding: is it the complex plot? The vividly drawn characters? The quality of the prose? Usually it is all of that, yes, but it's also a case of the whole being so much greater than the sum of its parts. Literature is an art form, and like any art, its effect is more to be felt than analyzed. The ultimate aim of any true work of art is always the heart, not the head.

Some books strike you in an intellectual way, such as the one I am reading now (The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture by Shane Hipps). But some books grab you by the heart and don't let go, or they punch you in the gut, or both. In the case of The Bridge on the Drina, I can't think of a book that's more successful in terms of getting the reader to relate to and empathize with the people of a specific region -- people of not only different races, but different religions, ideologies, and generations as well. And we all know that this particular region of Eastern Europe, the area comprising the countries of Bosnia, Yugoslavia and Montenegro, is one that has endured almost unimaginable sufferings over the course of many centuries. Andric's epic of course brings us face to face with these brutal realities, yet it somehow still maintains a hopeful outlook, even though its central symbol (which is in many ways the protagonist of the book, the bridge itself) meets its inevitable destruction in the final chapters of the novel. How is this possible? It's possible because Andric is so skilled at getting us to know and care for the poor, longsuffering Muslims, Christians and Jews that inhabit the villages surrounding the bridge, that we quite simply believe in their inherent goodness and will to survive, no matter what tragedies befall them. Andric never shies away at all from the political, religious and racial rivalries and animosities that continue to threaten to undo all that has been built up in these regions, yet he penetrates far deeper beneath these layers and gets to the soul of the people -- the common ties that bind us to one another, whether we want to recognize that or not.

This is an incredible novel that deals with issues of great complexity, and yet manages to remain at heart a very human story. It covers several hundred years of history and touches on politics, religion, love, death, local mythologies and folklore, fear and hatred, acts of incredible self-sacrifice and unthinkable human cruelty. It vividly conveys a sense of place, love of homeland and the sustaining power of community. It justly celebrates the endurance and vitality of not only the people of Bosnia/Hersegovnia, but also of the human spirit. For this reason I am confident that it will long endure as a classic of world literature, and I hope that anyone who reads this post will seriously consider reading the book for themselves. I can guarantee that if you do, it is a decision you will not regret.

Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 12

Well, my man Duke has been tied up with other stuff, so.....

Walter Brogan: Early Sketches, Indiana, 1920s

In this edition of my journal, I am going to put the concept to work a little bit by recording some earlier speculations/sketches of the story of Walter Brogan. Hopefully I won't be giving away too much of what will eventually become my story, but I have a lot of just vague ideas and concepts kicking around my head, and I'd like to air some of them out. This journal seems to be the place to do it. And hey, nobody reads this anyway.

Originally my intention was to write exclusively about the 1930s and the Depression, and that is where most of my research has taken me. But I see now that you can't just take the Depression years of 1929-1942(3?) and put them in their own little box and that's it. I could limit the events of the story chronologically only to the 1930s, but there would still have to at least some backstory from the previous decade. And for that to happen I need to know about the 1920s also. Some of this I have read about already. I am hoping I will get a lot more specifics from the next book I read, coming up soon, Indiana Through Tradition and Change, 1920-1945. Seems reasonable to expect that I will.

The part of that era that really interests me, at least at the moment, is the period between 1929, when the stock market crash first occurred, and say, 1932, when just about everyone knew and felt that there was a Depression going on. It doesn't seem to have been an instantaneous thing in small town, middle-Western America. I think it probably took at least a year for the effects of the crash to ripple out to an area like western Indiana. But it also has to be remembered that this area was largely agricultural, and the farm community was already in hard times when the Depression hit. The 20s didn't roar for farmers, they were already getting hammered. It just got worse in the 30s. So a lot of the people in the part of the state that Walter Brogan would have lived in were already living under economic hardship. What about Brogan himself? What kind of situation was he in?

Warning: Early Story Fragments! This may ruin some parts of a story that has not yet been written by a writer who's never written a real novel before! Ask yourself if it is worth the risk!

Brogan's no farmer, not having come from that sort of background. His father, Claudius, was a salesman. He died, however, when Brogan was 18, and Brogan did not attend college, opting instead to return home and work to help support his mother and other siblings. Brogan kicked around from job to job until meeting Greta Heinricks, his eventual wife. Her father, H. L. Heinricks, was a restaurant owner in the Indiana town of Bentonville, but he was also an entrepeneur and opportunist. When it becomes clear that Walter Brogan and his daughter have intentions to be married, Heinricks conceives of a plan to add to his businesses by purchasing a gas station and a small motel in the same town. He has foreseen the boom of the automobile industry and realizes that the town is a potential pit stop for those on the road between Chicago, IL and Indianapolis. As a means of assisting the young couple, soon to be married, Heinricks tells Brogan he will offer him the job of running the gas station. This employs the young man and keeps his daughter in the general area. This is how Brogan is able to establish himself in early adult life, thanks to the vision of his father in law.

My story, then, would open in the early 1920s with the wedding of Walter Brogan and Greta Heinricks. Things would begin optimistically. I picture a small town stone church, little wedding ceremony and a restaurant reception. Brogan and his new wife settle down in Bentonville in a tiny house and begin a new life, with Brogan ganifully employed. But then certain pressures come to bear on the young man. It's 1924 or so and the Ku Klux Klan has rapidly risen to power all across the state. Surprisingly, their main target is not black people - there are very few of them in Indiana. No, the Klan's main targets are Catholics, and also Jews. Brogan's father in law is not only a prominent businessman, but he is also a Catholic - and German. Anti-German zeal lingers from the end of the World War. Of course, that makes Brogan's wife Catholic and German too. What might have happened? Did the Klan take action against Heinricks? Did they try to run him and his businesses out of Bentonville, and thereby attempt to ruin Brogan in the process?

I think you start with questions like this, and your story becomes a way for you to find some answers. At least, that's what I am hoping will be the case. I don't think anything like I suggested above happened to my own grandfather, at least not as far as I know, but it's possible that some things like this could have. That's all I wanted to get into in exploring this material. What was going on in that part of the country during that era. Because these are the conditions and situations that my own Dad came out of, and I just find that to be interesting. They're so fundmentally different from the way things were when I grew up, in a totally different place and in a vastly different time. And they're NOTHING like what my kids are growing up into. Writing this kind of story is a way to go back and rediscover an era that is lost to us now.

Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 11

FDR, Walter Brogan, and Floyd Lovell

As I make my way through to the end of Stud Terkel's lengthy oral history of the Depression called "Hard Times", there is a great deal there to consider and muse on, but some things come through more strongly than others in reading about the stories of so many different Americans. One of those things is that the views people had of the President of the United States through most of the Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt, were ALL OVER THE MAP. The opinions of this man seemed to vary so widely across the United States, even though he was popularly elected four times, that you can't possibly conclude anything other than that he was a complicated, ambitious, enigmatic man. Depending on who Terkel was talking to, I have been reading about him as a savior, Communist, hero, criminal, devil, angel, visionary, complete buffoon, savvy politician, outright lunatic, or just about anything else. Kind of reminds me of what people say about Ronald Reagan too, closer to my generation.

Roosevelt was a man whose fate led him to the perfect moment in time when the nation needed someone, ANYONE, to step up with some fresh ideas and provide enthusiasm and optimism, and he had the ability to see the moment for what it was and seize it. He was the Democratic governor of New York who rose from relative obscurity on the basis of his observation that the people wanted their government to take ACTION, and they were not getting any of it from the guy sitting in the White House (Herbert Hoover). Hoover exacerbated the problem by assuring people that brighter days were "just around the corner" and that they should basically hang in there and stay the course and the ship would right itself if you allowed the system to work. His famous "chicken in every pot" comment came back to bite him when people were all out of work and something that looked a lot like poverty descended on much of the country. FDR stood up in Chicago in July 1932 to accept the Democratic nomination for President and said he was propsing a "new deal" to the American people, and the rest has become history.

This is the guy that made my Dad into a lifelong Democrat, I would guess, a guy who came in and took some steps to make things better rather than what the Republicans of the time were doing, which was not a whole lot. It's interesting how there were similarities between the philosophies of the respective parties towards the role of government to what you find today: Democrats were for broad, large-scale government intervention to the point where the Federal Government played an every day role in people's lives. This is the period that Social Security and Welfare came from. Republicans, on the other hand, wanted the government to interfere with people's lives as little as possible, and to leave as much as they could in the hands of the working men and women of the country to guide their own lives. The problem was, nobody was working. And this was a case in time where the government, in hindsight, clearly HAD to intervene. They did, passing tons of legislation in the first 100 days of Roosevelt's presidency and essentially putting millions of people back to work. From this era the Democratic party came to be seen as "on the side of the little man" by rescuing a great number of people from poverty and unemployment. From the time my Dad was 2 years old to his early 20s, Democrats ran the country and led us through Depression and colossal World War.

Thinking about all of this made me wonder which side of the fence my grandfather, Floyd, would have been on, and hence to try to imagine what sort of view a guy like Walter Brogan might have towards FDR and politics in general. I don't really know the answer. My grandfather wasn't a farmer, and it doesn't seem like he ever suffered from unemployment outright, even in the 1930s, so it's tough to say whether he directly benefitted from any New Deal programs. He seemed to have steady employment in the oil industry throughout the 1930s and early 40s. And the oil industry itself went through a massive boom in the 1920s, moreso in states like Oklahoma and Texas than Indiana, but I don't think that industry in particular ever had it very rough because of the industrialization of the country and the emergence of the automobile. So he had a job. He didn't have to apply for federal relief that I know of, and he never had to stand in a bread line. I doubt there were any bread lines in a small town like Fowler, Indiana, and I don't know if any other grand sign of the Depression hit in that town such as the failure of local banks. But did Floyd feel sympathetic to those who DID have to stand in lines, or did he think more down Republican lines that Federal relief was a hand-out, a free ride, and one that eventually would steal away the fight and spirit of the American worker, to the point where they expected it? The Welfare State, in other words - which DID come to pass in some places and in some times. What did Floyd think of the New Deal? Did he even think about it at all or simply try to get by and provide for his family and roll with the times?

Something makes me feel like he might not have liked FDR much, that he might have been disillusioned by his charismatic speeches, his "fireside chats", but I really don't know if that's the case. Perhaps he saw him as the hero others did. It would not surprise me if he would not have agreed with the politics his eldest son would, but I seroiusly doubt they ever got into it very much. They seemed to have little to talk about whenever they were together, which, after my Dad turned 18, was not very often, from what I can tell.

If Brogan was in the oil industry, keeping a steady job, trying to keep his company in the black in a time when the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, was given unprecedented powers to regulate the oil industry so as to keep the economy rolling steady, then it seems to me that there might be a good chance that he wasn't a big fan of Roosevelt or the New Deal. But was he necessarily a Republican? Would he have voted for someone like Alf Landon in 1936 (Governor of Kansas, who got severely pummeled)? Or would he have been attracted to more radical points of view, such as socialism? Remember, this was a time when many people thought that the "American system" was in its death throes, and bound to collapse entirely.....people were becoming organized, radicalized.......

I am going to have to question my Dad about what he knows about Floyd's politics. It seems to be some crucial background for the formation of the character of Walter Brogan. Stay tuned.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #27

Here's a mindbender from a writer known for mindbenders, the great Argentinian poet and short story wizard Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is probably best known for the latter (his short stories), which don't seem to have any parallel in modern times... but he was also a prolific and gifted poet. He loved to plumb the depths of the ineffable, the unsearchable mysteries of realms physical and metaphysical, in his art... and few mysteries this side of heaven are more deep and profound than the darkness of the night. Here is his fascinating take on a natural phenomenon that has been vexing us since the first man stepped out of his cave and gazed dumbstruck at the stars. (I love the inspired phrase "inexhaustible/like an ancient wine".)

*******

History of the Night

Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
they sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhaustible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 10

Still Researching!

Research for my fiction project continues unabated, and it has been a great deal of fun and informative as all get-out so far. I feel as though I have learned quite a bit about the Depression and the solutions/steps taken by the government and by regular people to combat its effects. Right now I am working my way through a lengthy collection called "Hard Times", not the Dickens novel (Dickensfest V is later this summer or fall), but an oral history of the Depression compiled by the legendary Chicago radio man Studs Terkel. Oral histories may seem touch and go, depending on who is doing the storytelling I guess, but it is a great way to get multiple voices on whatever the topic is. And in the case of Terkel's book, which was published in 1970 (the year I was born), "multiple voices" is putting it mildly. He interviewed literally hundreds of people for the book and they are from ALL walks of life, different races, social classes, occupations, and even different generations. He frequently talks to children of people who made their way through the Depression (like I am) and gathered their impressions together as well. Reading the stories of people from such a diverse cross-section of the United States is fascinating and helps me to glean a kind of general picture of the "state of the nation" during this era. It is interesting to note that in a lot of cases, people didn't suffer financially from the Depression. Some people, fortunate ones, had the opposite experience. The movie industry flourished, for example (they could probably use some of that excess now given the box office figures in this day and age). Some businessmen made a lot of money from selling stocks 'short'. Those who knew how to take advantage of the situation did the best, but most Americans just wanted to be put to work and make a living for themselves and those close to them. A common theme in the stories is the desire to be working and the dignity and self-confidence that having gainful employment brought to people.

Next up for me in the research is the Indiana-specific volume "Indiana Through Tradition and Change: 1920-1945" which should really help me narrow down on the specific region I want to set my tale in. I am looking forward to that a great deal. I probably know next to nothing about Indiana history, but my father sure will recognize a lot of things in the book, I am sure. Since it focuses on the state itself, and doesn't address the national situation as much, I am sure it will give me plenty of details to make my story, set in Indiana, credible. At least, that is the hope, and it sounds good on paper (or online)......


Question: How Am I Going to Do This?

I saw a friend over the weekend who knows I am involved in research for a "novel". He hasn't read much of what I write and I am sure he is wondering how I could possibly expect to pull this off, to really write a credible novel. He said to me something down the lines of, "It is going to be interesting to see how you plan do this." He's right, it is going to be interesting. I don't think he doesn't think I am capable of doing it. But he's right to wonder how.....the next logical question, which he didn't ask, is "How ARE you going to go about it?" That's a darn good question. If he had asked me I would have said, "I'm looking forward to finding that out."

By way of response to this question, I will attempt to make a few observations. I think the way to get to where I want to go is not to have a map. Or at least, not a formal one. Over the years I have thought very, very often - probably more so than is healthy, really - about how to write a novel. That's just the sort of thing I think about, what can I say. Another friend who I went to grad school with me once observed that he lives "constantly" in his "writer's world". I think I am like that too. It doesn't mean I am a "real" "writer", but it means I think of things more often than not in terms of story or writing or future writing or what it would be like to write about whatever that thing is. Odd stories I hear, true or not, will suggest writing topics to me. Gatherings or family events almost always suggest journal writing or some kind of way to preserve experiences in some written way. Reading books suggest new topics for exploration in fiction in nonfiction. Ditto films. What I am trying to say is to confirm that adage that "everything is grist", which I don't remember who to attribute to. (Duke probably would know.)

With this kind of brain, for what it is worth (to this point, not much), I also spend a lot of time reading the work of and learning about other writers: those gone before me or masters of the present that I admire. And one of the things I always hear from the writers that I admire the most has to do with how one gets a novel or work of fiction going. Many writers may work with a complete outline or a chapter-by-chapter "plan". But the ones I admire the most either for their artistry or their values (and in the best cases, both) don't seem to. They seem to begin with an idea, an impression, a small 'scene', a moment. They attempt to write that down, and then follow it where it leads. Sounds easy, right? Of course it is not, as anyone who has ever tried to write fiction can attest to, but nonetheless I think that this is the way to work. There has to be an allowance for the creative process of writing to do what it does - both on the page itself, when you are writing, and off the page, when you are NOT writing. The subconscious mind will work on your story even while you are not actually writing the story. I have learned this to be true through my experience with writing stories. You think about it, you work it over day by day, and it kind of works you over at the same time.

So, I am not saying that I have absolutely no idea what I want my Indiana story to be about; this blog has stated otherwise. I have some general ideas as far as the period of time I want it to cover, and who at least two of the main characters in the book are - Walter Brogan, the main character, and his son, Father Luke Brogan, S.J. [Names subject to change] And I also have some vague ideas around how I want the book to be structured, where the part of the "novel" that centers on Walter Brogan's life will begin (circa 1922 or so) and where I want his story to end (circa 1960 or so). But I don't want to do a WHOLE lot more 'planning' about the plot of the book or the specific events that will take place in it. I just want to begin writing about this character and let it flow. My hope is that with enough research I will get some sense of the world I want to create for these people, and with that some ideas of how they might have gone about their lives. Then I want to find a place that might be a good place to begin - a particular setting and scene, make an attempt to write that scene, and go with that.

Will it work? Hell, I don't know. But I think it is as good a method as any. I think there is a whole subconscious part of this story waiting to be unearthed from my imagination. I think these characters can be brought up from my mental substrata and breathed through with life. The question is whether I will have the stamina and the will and the vision to actually do that digging. The persistence to ride through those days, and I know them, when NOTHING you write works and the entire story seems like it's empty, meaningless and trite. Or when you just do not know WHERE to take it. I think persistance is the main quality that is needed with a project like this - perseverance, determination, drive, whatever you want to call it. I don't have this in a lot of areas in my life but I feel like I do have it when it comes to this.

Does that mean I am going to get this done? Not necessarily, time will tell if I have what it takes. Someone I know once commented to me recently that what I am talking about doing is a "major undertaking". And so it is.

That's how I want it.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #26 -- Lent 2006

Well, I suppose this had to happen some time... summon up all your courage, all ye faithful TST readers!

This week I wanted to post a poem that had a Lenten theme, seeing as today happens to be the day after Ash Wednesday, the second day of Lent 2006... as we enter into this traditional period of penitence, sacrifice, fasting and almsgiving in preparation for the holiest season of the Church year, I thought it might be useful/inspirational to offer some words of wisdom from an experienced poet that could help to focus our minds and hearts on what Jesus endured on our behalf...

...unfortunately, no such poets were available, so I had to call on an amateur for help... had to call upon the scrub team... the understudy of the understudy of the understudy...

Seriously, I feel pretty sheepish doing this, but seeing as I did want my theme to be Lent, and not finding a poem that was a perfect fit in my own collection/searching around... and realizing that I had written a poem myself with Lent as its theme/subject... well, what the heck. Why try to explain or justify myself any longer? Here is my own brief meditation on Lent for this week's poem. I don't promise brilliance here, only sincerity, and a mind/heart that yearns (in my better moments) for a deeper understanding of the Church's great mysteries. In this particular poem, I was going for a chant-type rhythm (obviously, although I'm not sure I achieved that), and also was expressing my fascination over the fact that we get our modern word "quarantine" from the Latin for "forty"... I thought it was interesting how when we quarantine someone, we separate them from all others... as Jesus once "separated" Himself from everyone to do spiritual battle with Satan... I thought there were some interesting connections to explore there, and this was my attempt to do so. The poem was scribbled back in 2001.

I hope readers will forgive the outrageous presumption of including a poem of mine within this series of masters... obviously my intention is not to identify myself with such illustrious company!?! My only goal here is to post something that brings to mind the holy season we are entering into, and helps us think about what we might want to sacrifice for ourselves to "prepare the way of the Lord" in our own hearts.

*******

Quarantine: A Lenten Chant

quar an tine (n.): from the Latin "quaranta" = forty; 1. A period of forty days... 4. A state of enforced isolation.


Forty days of desert wind
and biting sand to scrape your skin.

Forty days to rub you raw
with loneliness and hunger’s gnaw.

Forty days devoid of rain
to quench your thirst and ease your pain.

Forty days of searing sun –
a test for greater trials to come.


Forty days for you to doubt
that Spirit which had led you out.

Forty days of suffering’s scourge
and hesitations, harshly purged.

Forty days to try your soul
while Satan vied for your control.

Forty days so long endured
to make good on your father’s Word.

America: Toys 'R' Us

One thing's for sure about we Americans: we love our toys. From iPods to TiVo to NetFlix to Bose Wave Music Systems (it's passe to call them "radios" now, didn't you know?) to 50" flat panel plasma TVs to camera phones to Viking ranges and beyond, we cannot seem to resist the ever-present lure of technology, the Turkish Delight of the "next new thing." No doubt this is one of the side effects of living in the most affluent, consumer-driven society ever known to man. And no one is immune from these obsessions, trust me... I am not saying in any way that I am. But the fact that we are obsessed with our toys, as a culture, is absolutely indisputable. In America, to a large degree, our toys are us.

Nope, I'm certainly no stranger to that desire for the "next new thing." And obviously these new technologies provide unprecedented conveniences and opportunities for entertainment for us. But, there is a flip side to all of this innovation and consequent consumption. And that's the side no one really likes to talk about. Most people don't want to take the time to ask what long-term affects some of these new toys might be having on us, on our children, on our society at large. We don't wonder, for example, what it means that we can now customize almost all of the news and entertainment content that comes our way, meaning we only need to hear and see that which we want to hear and see. We don't think about the ways in which our obssesive purchasing of expensive, restaurant-quality kitchen appliances doesn't make for more domestic happiness in the home, and why that might be so. We don't pause to consider what effects the constant bombardment of images might be having on our children's ability to analyze what they might read, to think through and deconstruct an argument.

In short, no one out there seems to asking the tough questions about Americans' love affair with their toys.

But there is at least one lone voice out there asking these exact kinds of questions, and she's coming up with fascinating answers, and doling out massive portions of healthy food for thought along the way.

I'm talking about Christine Rosen, who is a senior editor of The New Atlantis journal, and a fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC. The New Atlantis, which calls itself a "journal of technology & society," is a relatively new publication (began publishing in 2004), but to my mind it has rapidly become one of the most interesting and provocative journals out there. It looks critically at the development of technologies across all fields and disciplines, and asks the tough moral questions about their applications and possible misapplications. As you might expect (especially in this day and age), much of their content is dedicated to bioethical issues, and a quick perusal of any major newspaper on any given day will provide more than ample reason why this is so. Such issues are being pushed to the fore as new and society-altering technologies emerge at a dizzying pace, challenging even our basic assumptions about life, the universe and especially, ourselves.

But bioethics, as important an area of inquiry as that is, is not the only topic of discussion in the pages of this bold new journal. Rosen has written a series of fascinating and insightful articles about some of our most "revered" (for lack of a better word) technologies, our toys, and the effects they have on the ways we live, the ways we learn and the ways we communicate (or don't) with each other. I've read several of them and I plan on reading many more, simply because she continues to ask great questions about these technologies that I don't hear anyone else asking, and the more I read them, the more I believe they need to be asked.

Here is a list of some of my favorites of these articles, and the subjects they take on:

"The Age of Egocasting" (Fall 2004/Winter 2005) -- Takes a good hard look at iPods, TiVo, and our obsession with "content on demand." Asks the provocative question, If we can customize all content that comes our way, when do we ever engage in ideas that might differ from our own?

"Are We Worthy of Our Kitchens?" (Winter 2006) -- from the journal's web site: "We seek household bliss in our sophisticated appliances, but we devalue home life in the name of career. Christine Rosen takes a hard look at the connection between our domestic technologies and domestic tranquility."

"Our Cell Phones, Ourselves" (Summer 2004) -- examines the ways in which cell phone usage has become a high priority in our common cultural life, and dares to ask whether it's appropriate or not for us to be listening in to the high drama of each other's lives in our public trains, shopping lines, and restroom stalls.

"The Image Culture" (Fall 2005) -- Traces the triumph of the image over the word in contemporary life, and wonders why we as a society lament about illiteracy while we do everything we can in our power to rob our children the chance to read -- and to reason.

These are just some of the truly fantastic articles that Rosen has written over the course of the past 2 years for The New Atlantis, and it seems that she will continue to ask such important questions within the publication. And the greatest part is, all of these articles, as well as every article in the journal, is available for FREE on their web site. I heartily encourage you to take a look, and maybe evern download one or two of them. I would bet my bottom dollar that TST readers would find them to be interesting reads.

If I met Ms. Rosen on the street, I would thank her profusely not just for sharing her wisdom and insights, but also for holding our society to a higher (and an older) standard of what good education and good living means. She has planted so many worthwhile questions in my mind that have a direct and powerful bearing on how I raise my own children, and how I live myself. For that alone, it has been worth the little time I spent (*gasp!*) actually reading them. Technology can be a great gift, but we need to think critically about it, as we do any tool that we might develop -- with all good intentions, perhaps -- to help us live better lives. We ought not just go with the flow, and allow ourselves to be seduced by the newer, better, faster, simply because everyone else is. Toys 'R' Us indeed... but at some point you have to ask: do we own the toys, or do they own us?

Here is a link to Ms. Rosen's latest article, from which you can navigate to the rest of the articles in this outstanding series (right column of the page):

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/11/rosen.htm

Journal of a “Novel”-Entry 9

Kickin’ Up Hell

As the research for my Great Depression/Indiana/oil man novel continues, moving into its second month here shortly, I looked back on two relatively dry works about the Depression itself from the point of view of a wide variety of voices. Both of these works were anthologies, with selections from people of all walks of life, be they Congressmen and Senators, journalists, novelists, working class farmers, women, men, immigrants, etc. Some of them told fascinating stories while others simply laid out logical, well-planned arguments as to why the Depression hit in the first place and what was to be done about it.

But being a fiction man at heart, and wanting to write a novel myself after all – the whole purpose to this enterprise – I didn’t want to stray too far away from the terrain of fiction, and I didn’t want to make my research exclusive to what fiction can accomplish. Some would say that it is even a better indicator of what a time was really like to read a good novel from, or about, that time, rather than reading history, and I think I might subscribe to this idea. I just read something recently – and I do not remember who said this, otherwise I would quote the person impressively like my brother Duke always seems to be able to do – where another writer commented something to the effect of, ‘If you want to know something about czarist Russia during the Napoleonic Wars, you should read some history. If you want to know what it felt like to live at that time and in that place, you should read War and Peace.’ And that is basically the heart of the argument. Novels, not history, tell us what people looked like, acted like, and talked like.

Therefore, I knew I had to fit a novel in here somewhere, and it might be just justification for the fact that I prefer them over nonfiction, but if so, so be it. The first place I turned, as you can see on the right, was my old mainstay, John Steinbeck. Of course, The Grapes of Wrath is the ultimate Depression novel for America, and it would be the most logical choice, but I have read it twice, the second time probably about four years ago, and I’d probably prefer to wait longer before reading it again (I probably will though). Also, I got to thinking that although Grapes is Steinbeck’s masterwork, it is probably not as immediate to the Depression itself as its immediate predecessor was, and that novel was 1936’s In Dubious Battle. Grapes was written during the Depression too, of course; in fact, my research tells me that thanks to the recession and kind of resurgence of the Depression that took place between 1937 and 1938, it was written during one of the most difficult stretches, and Steinbeck was by no means financially secure when he wrote it.

But In Dubious Battle was written around 1934-1935, when the first terrible throes of the economic plight was still fresh, and the wounds of the Depression were new and raw. In addition, Battle explores the questions that people had at the time surrounding capitalism and its opposite, socialism, more directly than Grapes does, and it frequently employs terms like ‘communist’ and ‘red’ and ‘radicals’, which seem like bad words in retrospect, but had very different meanings at the time. People had serious, burning questions about the viability of the American system. Many of those questions are given expression in this novel, which centers on striking apple pickers in the valleys of northern California. First I read a lot about the fact that those ideas were circulating around; now, Steinbeck’s novel is putting those ideas into some kind of fictional context for me, which makes it seem all the more real.

But the primary reason I wanted to read a novel from the time is even more basic, even more fundamental than this. I can put it into one word: dialogue. I wanted to find out how people talked. Or I should say how men talked, because Steinbeck, for all of his strengths, didn’t focus a lot on women overall, although you can make the case for Ma Joad in Grapes as one of his most memorable characters. But when it comes to hard working men of the times, no one had their finger on them better than Steinbeck. Consequently, I am picking up all kinds of idiosyncrasies from reading this novel, little snippets and phrases men would say to one another. There certainly is no shortage of the word ‘hell’ in their dialogue: ‘raise hell’, ‘beat hell’ out of someone or something, ‘kickin’ up hell’, ‘sore as hell’, ‘mad as hell’, ‘rustle up enough hell’, etc. One little thing I noticed is that people at the time would say that they would ‘beat hell’ out of someone, whereas I always hear now that people would say they ‘beat THE hell’ out of someone. That’s the kind of little thing that could make a difference.

It seems that men frequently referred to one another using terms we don’t use now, such as ‘fella’, ‘mister’, ‘guy’, ‘boys’, etc. Today a man might say, “That really pisses me off”, whereas in the 30s the same guy might say “That makes a fella sore as hell.” That kind of thing. No one really says ‘sore’ when they mean ‘angry’ now, but they did then. These differences are interesting. Obviously I can’t just supplant Steinbeck dialogue and make it my own, just putting his phrases in different characters’ mouths, but I am hoping to absorb the tone and spirit of the words, to get a sense of how people behaved and thought of one another through language that was written when it was contemporary. In Dubious Battle seems dated (as hell) now, but one has to remember that when it was published it was cutting edge stuff. It contained the flavor of the times.

Finally, reading this novel is also helping me pick up other terms I simply wouldn’t have known about from my own experience. Terms such as ‘crank’ from old-style Model T Ford cars, which refers to a handle you had to turn to get the thing primed to start; or ‘vagged’, which meant getting picked up on vagrancy charges; ‘scabs’, which refers to thugs that were hired to quell uprisings from striking agricultural workers, ‘bindle-stiffs’, which seems to mean ‘guys’ or working-class types. This sort of thing.

Digging for (Facts on) Oil

Also reading selections from Daniel Yergin’s 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction powerhouse about the oil industry called The Prize. I don’t know squat about this industry or about books related to it, but it’s hard to imagine another history as exhaustive as this one being around anywhere. This 900+ page book goes into the complete history of the modern oil business from all corners of the globe. I think it would be fascinating stuff to read the whole thing, but I don’t really have the time for it, so I am going to just read a 70-page chunk which relates to what was happening, internationally, from about 1900 through the beginning of World War II. In the early part of the 20th century, the leading source of oil for the industry was the United States, apparently, but I can’t see this being the case today. It seems that many of the deposits that all the ruckus is about in the Middle East may not have been discovered yet. That is interesting in itself. So far I have read about oil ‘crazes’ taking place in Mexico, Venezuela, and Russia, all between 1900 and 1930.

How much all of this can be related to one working man’s experience as an oil distributor in the Midwestern United States in the 30s and 40s is not very clear to me. But it is interesting to get some general sense of what was going on in the industry as a whole. For all I know Floyd may have kept up on such things. A man like him might have read about the Mexican Revolution in 1911, which upturned the government in that region and which destabilized the whole oil industry, which until then had been focused on oil deposits in Mexico. He might have learned that a major strike was made in Venezuela in 1922 and that most companies flocked into the region for a piece of the action. In fact, Standard Oil of Indiana, which was a competitor of Sinclair Oil (my grandfather’s employer), once was a major player in the 20s because they hit some major deposits in Venezuela, but they eventually sold their part of the Venezuelan business to another Standard Oil spin-off: Standard Oil of New Jersey.

Indiana to New Jersey. It all comes back around…….

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #25

The toys may have changed over the years, but the spirit is exactly the same... for the 25th poem of the series, I present a personal tribute to my sons. Robert Louis Stevenson's classic poem reminds me so much of what I am blessed to see every day on the floors and tabletops of our family home... may the raging fires of your imaginations never be extinguished, boys! Daddy loves all three of you more than he can say...

*******

Block City

What are you able to build with your blocks?
Castles and palaces, temples and docks.
Rain may keep raining, and others go roam,
But I can be happy and building at home.

Let the sofa be mountains, the carpet be sea,
There I'll establish a city for me:
A kirk and a mill and a palace beside,
And a harbour as well where my vessels may ride.

Great is the palace with pillar and wall,
A sort of a tower on the top of it all,
And steps coming down in an orderly way
To where my toy vessels lie safe in the bay.

This one is sailing and that one is moored:
Hark to the song of the sailors aboard!
And see, on the steps of my palace, the kings
Coming and going with presents and things!

Now I have done with it, down let it go!
All in a moment the town is laid low.
Block upon block lying scattered and free,
What is there left of my town by the sea?

Yet as I saw it, I see it again,
The kirk and the palace, the ships and the men,
And as long as I live and where'er I may be,
I'll always remember my town by the sea.

Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 8

New Titles Added to Mutt's Research Docket

I am finishing up my reading of the book 'The Great Depression: Opposing Viewpoints', published in 1994 and edited by William Dudley. This book has been much more of an academic background exercise as it presents what the subtitle suggests, but from figures that were hashing through the problems of the Depression as they arose on a national, policy, intellectual level. That's why there are pieces from the two presidents involved (Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt), members of their cabinet, members of Congress, and journalists, all of whom make various arguments and prescriptions for what will heal the ailments of the nation during those lean and terrible years in America. It is great background for this project, but it is low on "human stories"; it doesn't get into how the people who lived through it, lived through it. But the first anthology I read did get into more of that, and some of the titles I have coming up are sure to touch more on the personal stories of the people that survived. Nonetheless, this reading has been more than worthwhile in that it brought to light to me what proposals our leaders were making, what MIGHT have come to pass if other people were in charge, where things may have gone. There were great arguments being made for and against the redistribution of wealth; for example, many leaders argued for lowering people's work hours from 40 to 30 hours a week so that it would take more workers to do large jobs because men couldn't get done in 30 hours what they might have gotten done in 40 hours. Thus, more people would be hired. Arguments like this were flying back and forth. As many policy makers and Congressional leaders as were behind the New Deal policies were against them. There was certainly no shortage of partisan politics as the Depression wore on.

Perhaps so that I can slide back down off the ivory towers in my reading into the lives of "real" people and their real thoughts, concerns and voices, my next read will be John Steinbeck's 1936 novel 'In Dubious Battle'. Obviously since this is fiction, the people involved are not literally real, but we all know that sometimes it takes novels to illuminate what people's lives were, or are, or will be, "really" like. If that's not the case, let me cut off this entire pretense and drift off into utter obscurity (oh wait, I'm already there!). I already read this novel once, back in 1999, but it seems like a long time ago, and it will be interesting to revisit. For those who do not know, 'In Dubious Battle' was the immediate predessor to 'The Grapes of Wrath', a novel which clearly set the stage for Steinbeck to write his masterpiece. But it's riveting, powerful novel in its own right, and is a good representation of that time in Steinbeck's career when he was clearly coming into his own as a storyteller and to some degree as the voice of his generation of novelists. Sandwiched between his classics 'Of Mice and Men' and 'Grapes', this novel is tense, brisk and full of emotional potency. It also contains a good measure of talk about what most people would now call 'socialism', as many of the migrant apple pickers depicted in the novel openly wonder whether or not the Russian system might not be more fair than the American system of democracy. The novel reflects some of the debating that I've read about to this point about that people were engaged in about whether or not the entire American system of governing itself had run its course. To readers now this seems like jarring, even anit-American stuff. But in its time, this novel only refected what many people were seriously contemplating, and Steinbeck, like most good novelists, is careful in his portrayal of this tragic story to keep 'himself' out of it. He's not advocating communism; he's reflecting the voices and spirit of the people of his time and place. 'In Dubious Battle' is up next.

After that I will most likely break into a superb discovery I made recently, one that I hope will really blow the doors off of my creativity for this SPECIFIC fiction project. I bought this book used for a total of $5, including shipping (you know right there that this should be one of the gems, for it does not violate my $5 book expenditure rule). I learned about it in an interesting way, by sending an email to the Indiana Historical Society (which I found online) and asking them for recommendations. Playing it up, I just said I was a 'writer' (true technically, I guess) researching a 'book' on Indiana during the Great Depression, and that I needed some Indiana-specific recommendations. They came back with only a few, but this one may be most of what I need. The book was actually published by the Society, so they oughta know, and it is called 'Indiana Through Tradition and Change: 1920-1945'. Sounds boring as hell I am sure, but when I went online to see if it was available used, I found it on Amazon.com for $3.00, and thanks to their online feature that lets you see some books' tables of contents, I realized I had found something close to the mother lode! Turns out that this book is Volume III of a five-volume history of the State of Indiana, but it covers exactly the time period that I need. Walter Brogan, as I see it, would have been born sometime around the start of the 20th century (Floyd, as previously noted, came around in 1903). I see Walter, for the purposes of my novel, as being a millennial child, so let's just say he was born in 1900. In that case, the period of 1920-1945 not only lines up very well with my own grandfather's middle life, from young man to middle age, and so reading this would be interesting on that level alone, but it also obviously lines up with Walter Brogan's. This book focuses only on the State of Indiana and what was going on in it during that time, and believe me, it covers EVERYTHING: politics & government (state and municipality levels), industry, agriculture, culture, relgion, sports, the arts, and everything in between. There is even one chapter that talks about the petroleum industry, the oil deposits in Indiana (there were some), etc. It's an absolute home run for my purposes and I cannot wait to get into it. It will be dry, but it is what I need. I am hoping, as I said at the outset, that it really drives some ideas and gives me foundational facts about the setting for my story. Thanks to the Indiana Historical Society! Look for a mention in the acknowledgments!

A Title and a Basic Storyline Begins to Emerge....

But you won't get much of it here. I won't reveal my tentative title just yet (Duke Altum knows, grease him if you really want it!), but I like the T.C. Boyle idea that having a rough title before you helps you gain some drive and focus. Sounds good anyway. I haven't even starting writing yet and don't plan to for a few months. But I am starting to get a concept going of what I want this story to be about. Let's just say it is going to be mostly about Walter Brogan, but also about his son, Father Luke Brogan, S.J. In a way, it is a kind of 'alternate history' of what MIGHT have happened if my own Dad had become a priest. Well, on second thought, it is not really that, because I don't know what would have happened. But this is a concept that is founded somewhat in the fact that my father studied for years to become a priest, and may have been one if things had gone differently. But, you ask, what does Father Luke Brogan have to do with anything? I thought you were writing about this guy struggling through the Depression? I am, but some of the themes that are emerging have a way of running down through more than one lifetime. I will leave it at that for now. You will have to buy the novel when it hits bookstores everywhere in, say, 2009.

On that optimistic note.....

Wright's 'Amalgamation Polka'

Stephen Wright's new novel The Amalgamation Polka was published yesterday by Alfred A. Knopf, which for me made it a great day for American fiction. As I have blogged before on this novel (see my review in the November archives), I found it to be a fascinating take on the Civil War period piece, an interesting hodge-podge of different stories, an eclectic mix of humor, violence, social commentary and lyricism. For over a year now since I first heard from a friend that Wright had finally delivered a new manuscript for publication (both she and I had studied under Wright at The New School in New York), I have been very, very excited about it and have hoped fervently that this book would bring Wright widespread acclaim and, more importantly, new readers.

That is why I was very disappointed to see that the novel was immediately pummeled in a review by the icily cantankerous critic from the New York Times' Book Review, Michiko Kakutani, who has been lambasting books for the Times for years and who seems very difficult to please. Reading her review, which concluded by asserting that Wright had penned a 'mannered and maladroit book', which I am sure would not sit well for a writer who clearly marches to the beat of his own literary drum and whom one look at the photo in the review will tell you would not be described as 'mannered', I am forced to consider a few things about the book world, critics, and indeed, my own response to the novel.

I write that I must re-think my own initial response to the novel because I do not think that Kakutani's review was without its fair points, and I certainly don't think it was poorly argued or particularly nasty. She cites as the major flaw of the novel that it frequently does not seem sure of the kind of story it wants to be. It moves from comic to horrific to episodic. Sometimes it has a Twain-ish feel and sometimes it has a more linear, cinematic feel that less resembles 19th century writing and more resembles modern war stories. I found this quality to be intriguing and one of the things that made the novel seem different from most other books I had read about the period, but I can see how people would read this and think it was jumpy and had tonal shifts. In my reading, the whole novel had a curious feel that made it difficult to nail down, but I didn't necessarily see this as a bad thing. But then again, I didn't really read the whole book as a comic take on the war or the American society of the time, and other reviews I have seen did. Inevitably, you begin to wonder if your own reactions were just off the mark because 'real' reviewers didn't see it the way you did. But I think to some extent one must have some faith in their own gut responses to books. It felt how it felt to you when you read it.

Kakutani writes that these shifts and different tones 'collide' with one another in the novel and make it, more or less, a big undeveloped mess. She accuses Wright of not being sure of 'exactly what story he wants to tell'. Knowing something about Steve Wright, I really doubt that this was the case. Whether he wrote a story that gives that impression is one thing, but it is hard for me to believe that he just wrote along, not knowing what he wanted to do. Wright wrote this book over twelve years. When I worked with him in 2000, he told me he had 150 pages of what became this novel 'done', and that was six years ago. This is a man who must have worked and re-worked every aspect of this novel 'til his fingers bled, and I am convinced that he knew what he was trying to accomplish with this book, which to me seems to be to tell a Civil War story in a style reminiscent of a 'dead' form of American literature (that of the 19th century masters like Melville, Twain, Poe, etc.) in order to illuminate the ridiculousness of war and racism. I think that to imtimate that Wright is groping around for some idea of what he wants to do in this book is not only a disservice to what he accomplished in this novel, but it is also ignoring his previous accomplishments which demonstrate beyond a doubt that he knows what he is doing when he writes a book.

Kakutani writes that Stephen Wright has a 'heat-seeking eye for the weirdness of contemporary life', and she is certainly correct with this well-phrased statement. One might argue that because his three previous novels were so accurate in their portrayal and skewering of our modern times (the last century), his foray into historical ground seems strange and ill-suited to his gifts. You can make a valid case for this, and it obviously feels that way to Kakutani. She has the right to express that opinion. I only wish that her reviews, and perhaps book reviews in general, sometimes paid more attention to the technical points of writing a novel. By that I mean language, sentence structure, prose, vocabulary, etc. I supposed that most people who read book reviews are not very interested in opinions about this aspect of contemporary novels, and I guess I can understand that. I do think, however, that in Wright's case, more should be made out of his prose and his language because it exceeds the great majority of any contemporary fiction that is out there today and it deserves special mention. You can take ANY of Wright's four novels and find extraordinary sentences, poetic flourishes and stunning paragraphs at random throughout each. There are some paragraphs I've read by him that I wanted to read again and again. And given how much time it took him to produce each new book, unless he is just a really lazy guy and of independent means who can just take his time when he writes, this indicates to me that Wright has imposed extremely high standards on his own craftsmanship, and in the end he has always risen to exceed these standards, in my opinion. I know this is a subjective thing, but most critics have always recognized how well he writes sentences, and Kakutani pays little attention to this except to mention his 'gifts' in the outset of the review and his 'electric prose', whatever that means. She should state that this a guy who writes at a very high level and should give him more credit for doing so. It's very, very difficult to write even a few pages of prose that sparkles and cracks like Wright's does.

Other writers, or I should say other novelists, have a greater appreciation than some critics do for what he has accomplished. Russell Banks wrote of his second novel, "M31: A Family Romance" that 'his sentences buzz like high tension wires'. Toni Morrison called "Going Native" 'an astonishing novel. Even Thomas Pynchon, the recluse, wrote of this new novel that Wright 'writes in the tradition of heartbreaking humor which America's lapses of faith in its own promise has always evoked in the finest of our storytellers, among whom Stephen Wright here honorably takes his place'. I know that in the book world some of this is just back-scratching, but when was the last time you saw a blurb from Thomas Pynchon on anything? And Morrison and Russell Banks are hardly lightweights.

It is interesting to consider the power that a reviewer like Michiko Kakutani holds. If she reviews a book well it almost always shows up as a blurb on a book; if she pans something, it's like it missed the mark somehow. She frequently lambastes books written by white men. Makes me wonder how much pandering has to be done to her by publishers or even authors, but I wouldn't want to know. I think they could use some new blood at the Times, but that's neither here nor there.

Finally, some personal thoughts about Wright and this book. There's no doubt that I want this book to do well because I studied with him and know that he's had a long and hard road. So I have some emotional involvement I guess you could say, and that certainly effects my disappointment at this negative review. But obviously she felt that it didn't deserve high marks, and there's nothing I can do about that. Steve Wright was the whole reason I WENT to the New School; I read one of his novels when I was in my decision process for graduate school, and I knew that he was a great writer and I wanted to try to study under him. Not that this made me a great writer myself, it didn't, but I relished the experience, and I am still trying. His books have had a profound effect on my thoughts about the American novel and writing in general, and I think they have been a great influence. I hope that Stephen Wright will gain some exposure and success with this new novel, despite the negative review from the biggest paper in America. But if he doesn't, he will still be a great writer as far as I am concerned, and I hope this is not the last we have heard from him.

Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #24

Last week got away from me, sorry faithful readers! I kept meaning and meaning to get a POTW up here and it never happened. To make up for it this week, I'm offering something slightly unusual -- not a poem per se, but a fragment of a poem. A poem that is one of the greatest works of literature ever penned, one of my favorite works of fiction of any genre -- the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.

Recently I took the final (and least famous, for some strange reason) volume of the Comedy, Paradiso, off of my shelf, and was thumbing through it, trying to recall the experience of reading it. I came across a short passage that I had marked off, and as I re-read it, I realized that it makes for a perfect example of why I think this work is so worth reading: it is chock full of interesting interludes and passages in which Dante (through the mouths of his characters, who are very often historical figures) muses about human nature and man's relationship to either himself, the world, or God Himself. Very often, they make for valuable spiritual reading, in that they remind us of truths greater than ourselves, and orient us within the great schema of Providence.

In this passage, Dante is being instructed by Saint Thomas Aquinas within the Fourth Sphere of Heaven, who has just finished explaining "why none ever rose to equal Solomon's wisdom." At the conclusion of this instruction, he issues a warning against hasty judgment (it's probably worth noting that in this discussion he has just mentioned some of the Church's most infamous heretics). It makes for powerful and even timely reading, "for those with ears to hear."

*******

Paradiso, Canto XIII, lines 117-123; 130-143
(John Ciardi translation)

For he is a fool, and low among his kind,
who answers yea or nay without reflection,
nor does it matter on which road he runs blind.

Opinions too soon formed often deflect
man's thinking from the truth into gross error,
in which his pride then binds his intellect.

It is worse than vain for men to leave the shore
and fish for truth unless they know the art:
for they return worse off than they were before.

Men should not be too smug in their own reason;
only a foolish man will walk his field
and count his ears too early in the season.

for I have seen a briar through winter's snows
rattle its tough and menacing bare stems,
and then, in season, open its pale rose;

and I have seen a ship cross all the main,
true to its course and swift, and then go down
just as it entered its home port again.

Let Tom and Jane* not think, because they see
one man is picking pockets and another
is offering all his goods to charity,

that they can judge their neighbors with God's eyes:
for the pious man may fall, and the thief may rise.


*from the translator's notes: "Tom and Jane" -- anyone in general. (Dante says: "donna Berta or ser Martino.")