HISTORY IS A WRITER’S RAW MATERIAL

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A press release from Amazon came in today announcing that the company had acquired 47 books written by mega Best Selling Author Ed McBain, best known for his 87th Precinct series. His real name was Evan Hunter, and he was a successful author under that name too. He died in 2005. This picture of him was taken in 2001. He looks agreeably lived-in, and his books reflect that fact.

I was delighted to be reminded of the man. I hate forgetting an author whose work I admire, but though I’m fairly certain I have read the vast majority of his books, somehow his name slipped my mind. Shame on me!

A recent report excoriated the ignorance of American school children – and much of the population - when it comes to history. I find that extremely worrying because I don’t see how you can make a rational decision in a democracy if you don’t have context; and history is context. I love it because not only is is innately interesting (it’s stories after all) but it also helps explain why people are the way they are, and why they do what they do. If you want to know why the Greek economy is in such terrible trouble right now, just look at their history, and all becomes clear. And the same applies to this Great Country.

There is a clear line linking our current economic woes to our behavior in the past. Beneath the bombast and the propaganda, American economic history is not the story of near consistent economic progress we are led to believe in. True, there have been magnificent achievements, but our corporate state has also done some terrible things – and is still doing them. And whether we are progressing, or not, is a decidedly debatable point.

When I say the corporate state, I don’t mean the U.S. Government. I mean the coalition of corporate interests which currently dominates our daily lives both directly, and through its influence on the U.S. Government. The image of puppetry comes to mind; or do I mean substance? We are certainly close to that point.

The American Business Model isn’t the role model it has long been touted to be (though it could be) – which may help to explain why few other countries are following it. It’s a tragedy that we don’t know our own history, and an attendant catastrophe that we are so ignorant of the histories of other countries. Instead, we have seemed to settle for ideology – a remarkably poor basis for informed decision making – combined with argument by assertion. The convenient thing about the latter is that veracity is not required.

Studying history tends to change one’s notions of time, particularly in a culture which seems to suffer from collective amnesia unless the issue concerns a sports statistic. Personally, I don’t consider the Vietnam War to have taken place a long time ago, whereas of my friends, who are preoccupied primarily with the events of the day, and the immediate future, regard such an attitude as eccentric, at best, and probably nuts. As to when it comes to discussing past relationships, indiscretions and adventures, the ability of women to forget – or to appear to forget – is truly impressive. All the world is indeed a stage, and the fair sex are accomplished actors.

We writers tend not to forget such things because history is our raw material, and our own histories – however they reflect our philandering, imperfections and mistakes – are our point of departure. Even fiction emanates from somewhere.

Bear that in mind when you next have an author over for dinner.

 

Victor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THINGS THAT GO THUMP

Cover of Rollerball

Short stories are notoriously difficult to write; which may well be why I have never attempted to write them. They need to grab you, suck you in, close with a twist – and be memorable; and that is no easy task to accomplish in a few pages.

How few? There are no precise rules except those laid down by the relevant publication. Keep going and you’ll end up with a novella. 

I grew up with short stories. My grandmother liked to read to me before I could read, and for a little time afterwards; and then I discovered Saki (H.R. Monroe), G.K. Chesterton, Somerset Maughn, and other practitioners of the art such as Arthur Conan Doyle. Then in my teens I gravitated to magazines like Argosy which published some excellent works in their day. And I read endless Science Fiction short stories – a marvelous vein of provocative literature.

The two stories that have stayed with me through the decades are: Leiningen Versus The Ants by Carl Stephenson, and Rollerball by William Harrison. Both were made into movies. 

I’m prompted to muse about this particular genre because I have just read a stunningly good prize-winning short story by Audrey Carlsen entitled Falling. It presses all the right buttons and ends with a twist – and I doubt I’ll ever be able to cross a  bridge in Seattle again without thinking of it. You can Google it, but to save you the trouble, here is the link  I gather Audrey plans a medical future. I wish her well in that, but the world of literature will be the poorer if she doesn’t keep writing. This is one exceptionally talented young woman.

Speaking of falling, reminds me of a rather bizarre incident which happened just outside my office window while I was out to lunch. My first floor office overlooked the stunning vista of the ramp that led to the underground garage. I was very junior management in those days. When I returned, I found a man hosing down the ramp and noticed that the edges of the wet patch were a reddish pink (a sight I was to become familiar with over the years).

Someone higher up in the building – both in rank and geography – had evidently decided corporate life was not for him. I was quite intrigued by this and went to try and find out the circumstances. In Ireland, such an incident would have proved to be a serious topic of conversation, probably good for days. But this was England, and London at that – and a very stiff upper lip environment.

No one would talk! No one would say a word. I was flabbergasted. It was then I knew that despite the peculiarities of my background, I was indeed an Irishman; and, as such, a stranger in that strange land called England.

I did eventually find out one interesting detail. When Mr. Mills, our buyer, had seen the victim in question plummet past his office window, he had immediately dialed 999, and only afterwards had opened his window and leant out to gaze upon the inevitable result.

British sang froid at its finest.

 

Victor. 

 

THE WRITERS OF WINDOWS LIVE WRITER NOT QUITE GUILLOTINED AND DEAD – BUT, IT’S A TEMPTING THOUGHT

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Where software is concerned, I have long entertained the notion that those who write the stuff need an incentive to do better. The over-arching problem is that the programmers don’t use the programs they write, so that they are rather like house-builders who haven’t yet even gravitated to caves. They eat their pizzas in the rain.

Decimation, the quaint Roman habit of killing every tenth man to encourage the others, is the kind of incentive that comes to mind, and it should be carried out on an annual basis. Those who don’t write code that translates into a totally transparent user experience should die first. I don’t think programmers respond to subtlety. They are fixated on the large sums of money they get paid, and they absolutely do not understand what the users of the software they write have to go through. Meanwhile, we – poor users – blame ourselves for our lack of skill, and grovel over the phone to Indians with false names located in Bangalore in the hope of being dragged out of the mire. If we are lucky.

Where Windows Live Writer is concerned, I have now been using it for a week and certainly find it vastly better than Blogger (faint praise). On the other hand, it lacks a HELP MENU, and is positively permeated with eccentricities. Fundamentally, it’s a Darwinian creative environment.

Software companies do have people who are qualified in UX (the ‘user experience’) but I have long been of the view that they might be better off listening to real live users. Simply put, the corporate culture of all too many software houses overwhelms the non-programmer.

Spleen having been vented, I shall persevere.

 

Victor.

 

 

 

OF LORDS, AIR-COOLED UNDERWEAR & MURDER

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I suspect I really shouldn’t have hinted that my great – great grandfather might have been Jack The Ripper -except that the idea just floated into my mind (an occupational hazard for us authors); and the co-location in London, and the conjunction of dates of both the murders and great grandfather’s invention was just (I’m searching for an excuse) too convenient.

But, I was just being mischievous; and by all accounts, Lewis Haslam was an admirable man.  Judging by his portraits, and the iron will of his daughter, Vida, he was certainly a forceful one.

No, the photo isn’t of him. It’s of Lloyd George. Think of LG as WW I’s Winston Churchill.

He. Lewis Haslam, went on to become an MP – a British Member of Parliament – and in 1911, Lloyd George offered to make him a peer (a lord). He turned that down on the grounds that Prime Minister Lloyd George was merely trying to pack the house of Lords in his favor (quite true), and that a peerage should really only be awarded for some service of note for one’s country (a debatable argument). King Charles had a habit of making his mistresses Duchesses, and being a cuckold  had promotion potential as well. The aristocracy have been as much bribed, as have served.

And thus we induct those who rule us. It all sounds remarkably like Congress to me. I was going to add “without the sex” but then sanity prevailed.

Personally, I should have thought that inventing the product, Aertex, that helped to keep the most intimate parts of the British cool justified such a title, but evidently great-grandfather thought otherwise. I gather he was also influenced by the fact that he had no son to inherit the peerage; merely two daughters: my grandmother, Vida, and her sister Lally; and he was proud of his own name, and certainly rich enough. In short he didn’t need a title, and didn’t want to be beholden to Lloyd George even though they were friends (they had adjoining constituencies in Wales and often travelled up to London by train together). Lloyd George was charming (and a notorious ladies’ man) but he could be tricky.

The British textile industry in the Nineteenth Century – the period of the Industrial Revolution – is normally associate with ‘Dark Satanic Mills,’ from a poem by William Blake, and deplorable working conditions. Whether that was the case where Lewis Haslam was concerned is doubtful for several reasons. His father had been the entrepreneur during the grizzlier days of industrialization; Lewis Haslam was a Liberal MP and stood for reform of working conditions across the board; and his daughter, my grandmother, was an idealist in the very best sense, and spent her life being socially concerned. She wasn’t a communist or even a socialist. Instead she thought society as a whole would be better off if people were treated decently and that workers would be more productive if adequately rewarded. Such was her father’s experience as an industrialist, and there was no doubt at all that that had worked out well.

All of this is my lead-in to my wondering why, roughly a century later, social concern in the U.S. seems to be so lacking, and unemployment so intractable. Surely, the U.S. Business Model is supposed to seek efficiency; and a demotivated workforce may be cowed, even obedient; but it certainly isn’t efficient  

To be continued… but now you have a hint as to why I collect economists (they keep well in formaldehyde). I am cursed with a curious disposition.

 

Victor.

P.S. I have to wonder: Could this Jack The Ripper stuff be hereditary?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

KEEPING YOUR COOL THANKS TO AERTEX UNDERPANTS

Cover of Zulu

My much loved grandmother, Helen Evelyn Vida Lentaigne (nee Haslam) – came from a very wealthy background. Her father, Lewis Haslam, was a textile magnate and politician, and, just to gild the gingerbread, had invented a revolutionary fabric called Aertex in 1888, which was the material of choice for shirts and underwear throughout the British empire. 

Essentially, it was a loose but robust cellular cotton weave with numerous tiny holes in it so it breathed – and cooled. Whether its use originated the expression “Keeping your cool” is a moot point, but it certainly contributed to that physical state. This was just as well because the British ran their empire with remarkably few people, and looking imperturbable in the face of any and all difficulties, played no small role in ensuring this practice’s success. For a supreme example of such behavior, I cite the movie Zulu – based upon the actual Battle of Rorke’s Drift – where 104 British soldiers fought off a Zulu impi of roughly 4,500. I would claim that Aertex was the British secret except that the battle in question took place in 1879 before Aertex was invented.  

You can look it up on Wikipedia or Google it, and there is even a web site http://www.aertex.com dedicated the brand. Unfortunately, we don’t own it any more, but it made no small contribution to the family fortunes. Apparently, great-grandfather Lewis, got the idea for his invention when he observed women wearing lace gloves at a reception. What his motives were for observing the fair sex so closely is a family secret. We deny absolutely that he was Jack The Ripper though it is quite true that he maintained a large house in London and was around at the time. It is a complete coincidence that both the invention of Aertex and the Jack The Ripper killings happened in 1888.

To be continued…

 

Victor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

AFTER MUCH AGONIZING, I CONFESS TO THE FOLLOWING SECRET VICE…

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Gulp! I collect economists. When I say that, I don’t mean that I have them hanging in neat rows – as in suspended by the neck from the ceiling, or perhaps from a line of hat-racks  (though some undoubtedly deserve such a fate) but more that I’m constantly on the lookout for economists that make sense of our current chaotic economic environment; and, better yet, who have ideas of how we can get out of the mess we’re in; and make some progress in the future.

Where are those guys?

The reason why this is seen as a vice – at least by the publishing business – is that authors are supposed to stay within genre; and stepping outside your label is frowned upon severely. Since I am best known as a thriller writer, I should stick to writing thrillers; or, at worst, write an economic thriller. Similarly, romance writers should stick to romance and so on.

I find this kind of mindset – this tendency to typecast people, and then to box them in - utterly frustrating, but it is all too common in this Great Nation. Perhaps we can only cope with such a large population if we label people; and we are certainly conditioned to respond to the concept of branding from an early age; and socially conditioned not to think out of the box.

My favorite story about such groupthink concerns a photographer in New York who had built up a very successful business photographing food, but now wanted to try photographing something else (intimate photographs of breakfast cereal can get monotonous). Though it was widely accepted that he was both creatively and technically brilliant, his efforts to diversify were entirely unsuccessful. Art directors had him classified as a ‘food man’ – and that was it. Eventually, he decided there was only one solution. He would, so to speak, clone himself, and set up another studio under another name. That rather drastic and expensive strategy succeeded – and he ended up being as successful in fashion as he continued to be in food. The irony here is that world of photography is small, so most of the art directors who commissioned work from him knew of his modest deception; but he still needed his two identities, and two studios, to achieve his breakout.

One of the truly alarming things about being limited to a genre relates to non-fiction. Non-fiction is typically sold to a publisher by way of a proposal a proposal, possibly accompanied by a sample chapter or two, but unless you are a celebrity or a have background specific to the field you are writing about, you haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell of selling your work. The quality of your ideas and the elegance of your prose appear to have no value in themselves. I find that deeply troubling because often it is the very perspective that the non-specialist brings that finds the answer. A fresh mind is a wonderful thing.

In my own case, initially I started to collect data on this country shortly after I arrived in 2001 primarily just to learn about my new home – and I’m innately intellectually curious. Soon, I came to the view that the U.S. economy suffered from deep structural flaws. In 2004, I became convinced that we were heading towards a major recession. All of this research eventually lead to TITANIC NATION: How To Avoid Icebergs. The Case For Fundamental change In The American ay Of Life

I’m now convinced that unless we change our ways fairly drastically – which will require vastly more fresh thinking than we seem culturally able to either originate or absorb right now, our economic future will not be pretty.

But you’re not an economist I hear you say; so how would you know? Hmm! Well, of course I don’t know. I’m merely making an educated guess (otherwise known as an ‘expert opinion’). But, just to muddy the waters; as it happens, economists have a track record of being particularly bad at forecasting; and I confess I am one (courtesy of Trinity College, Dublin – plus some decades of subsequent study).

But, I write thrillers too.

 

Victor.

 

 

LET ME CONFESS TO A SECRET VICE. I COLLECT ….

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You may well be expecting me to confess to something akin to Congressman Wiener’s modus vivendi – but I fear I shall have to disappoint you (this time around). Perhaps in some cultures my minor obsession might be seen in a negative light, but I trust you will regard it with public tolerance – even if privately you think it is a little weird.

But what is “it” I hear you ask? What form of aberrant behavior are you going to confess to?

I’m overcome with a sudden burst of embarrassment. I’m positively choked. How can I reveal something so private?

I need time to think about all this.

 

Victor.