http://historicalnovelsociety.org/hns-award/

What ho, ye valiant lads and lassies of the quill – go for it!

From the many discussions we had, I remember most clearly his phrase, “the seemingly bad.”  He meant that we cannot really evaluate events as they unfold, and we waste a lot of energy trying.

Years later I came upon a Chinese folktale that serves as a parable of the point.  It goes by various names, such as “An Old Man Finds a Horse.”  An illustrated children’s version of the tale was published by Ed Young and Tracey Adams in 1998 as, The Lost Horse.

Here is the gist of the story.

Once a wise old man lived on the steppes.  One day his prize mare ran away.  The neighbors said, “How terrible.  What a loss!”  The old man said, “Perhaps.”

A few weeks later, the mare returned, along with a fine stallion.  The neighbors said, “What great good fortune for you!”  The old man said, “Perhaps.”

When the man’s son tried to ride the stallion, the horse threw him and he suffered a badly broken leg.  The neighbors said, “You’re only son is crippled.  What a terrible blow!”  The old man said, “Perhaps.”

A short time later a regiment marched through the valley, pressing all the young men into military service – except the old man’s son, who was unable to serve in the infantry because of his leg.  The other young men who marched to war never came home.

I had my own experience of “the seemingly bad” in the early ’80′s.  I worked as a part-time community college art instructor and wanted  a full time position.  Shasta College, in Weed, CA, right at the foot of Mt. Shasta, had an opening, and based on an application and phone interview, I was invited to visit the school as one of five candidates for a second interview.

Everything looked good.  My portfolio was strong, and I got a glowing recommendation from the chairman of the art department where I had studied, who had also taught the hiring professor at Shasta.  Mary and I drove up on the kind of fall weekend that makes you glad to be alive.  The interview went well, and that night we celebrated with dinner at a restaurant that featured a balcony overlooking a creek.  While watching a golden sunset, we talked about where to live and what to do in our new home.

Guess what?

They promoted one of their own part-timers.  I’m sure they intended this all along, and the interviews were just a formality to satisfy labor regulations.  I was crushed.  I forgot my old friend’s lesson, that this might just be seemingly bad.

A year later, in the face of recession and severe budget cuts, the position I had applied for was cut, along with a number of other teaching jobs.  If I had been hired, we would have been stuck in a small town with severe unemployment.

This story and the concept of “seemingly bad” came to mind recently when I thought of people I’ve met who are desperate to get published – not just working hard to achieve the goal, but desperate, piling all their hopes and sense of worth on that increasingly shaky endeavor.  What happens to the many who will never achieve that goal?

Hopefully, something along the lines of what happened after Shasta College turned me down.  Feeling at first like a sell-out, I went to work in computer graphics.  In retrospect, it was a great move.  What seemed bad turned me down a different road that allowed me to make a good living while exploring a different kind of creativity.

I’m not suggesting that bad things don’t happen, or every cloud has a silver lining.  The seemingly bad can be awfully hard to weather.  I am suggesting that it’s hard to anticipate outcomes from the middle of the trenches.  The more I thought about it, the better it seemed to pass on my old friend’s advice.  The seemingly good and seemingly bad are often not what they seem.

Richard Leakey beside a scaled computer generated figure of Turkana Boy who lived 1.6 million years ago. Photo courtesy J.J. Kelly/National Geographic Television.

This documentary, largely narrated by Leakey, gives a real feel for the region and the painstaking work of uncovering our past, but the most interesting questions concern what it means to be human.  Computer simulations picture early hominids who lived hundreds of thousand years apart.  At what stage, at what point in time, did our ancestors become human?  What core attributes distinguish us from other mammals?  In the 1980′s, Leakey founded the Turkana Basin Institute to explore this and related questions.

Filmmaker, John Hemingway (left) and his crew filming, “The Bones of Turkana.” Photo by Katie Carpenter.

Language is one key attribute Leakey says, along with walking upright and using tools.  Communication, walking on two legs, and tool use are not  exclusively human traits, so Leakey expands on his nuanced criteria:

“We know birds use tools and chimps and insects and lots of mammals. But to take a block of very hard stone and to take another stone and fashion an object from it, that’s something different. You have to “see within” the stone to know what you’re fashioning before you fashion it. You have to project an idea.  That’s a step that no other tool maker uses.” http://boingboing.net/2012/05/15/bones-of-turkana-meave-and-ri.html

Leakey bases his final core criterion on the 1.6 million year old skeleton he calls, Turkana Boy.  This young person apparently suffered from spinal deformities.  He was not a robust adolescent and could not have warded off predators or hunted on his own.  Leakey identifies the final key human trait as compassion.  This is something he knows about first hand.  Since losing his legs in a plane accident in 1993, Leakey has had to rely on the kindness of others to help him survive and thrive.

PBS has made the entire program available to watch at this link:  http://video.pbs.org/video/2235479708/.  It’s a fascinating account.

The Journal calls Houghton a major textbook publisher, and the company says it’s been hurt by state and local budget cuts to K-12 education programs.

Fans of Tolkien know Houghton as the American publisher of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  Several books I treasure are Tolkien  editions illustrated by Alan Lee, artistic director for Peter Jackson’s movies, whose drawing and paintings shaped the films, and in some cases, served as the the actual backgrounds for outdoor scenes.

These are kind of books I treasure as print editions.  At the same time, it’s easy to imagine a transition to ebooks could be a business saving move for the textbook division.  Industry watchers knew Houghton was in trouble as early as 2008, when it temporarily suspended new book acquisitions.  It’s hard to believe they are the only traditional publisher that is struggling for survival.

I expected to like this movie. I wanted to like this movie.  At the theater, I tried to like this movie, but I couldn’t pull it off.

Dark Shadows was a gothic soap opera that ran from 1966 – 1971.  As a child, Johnny Depp wanted to be Barnabas Collins, a 200 year old vampire.  He got his wish, but sadly, not even a cast with Depp, Michelle Pfieffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Christopher Lee, and Alice Cooper can save a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to be.

Comedy blends well with horror – think of Young Frankenstein or Ghostbusters – but Dark Shadows blows it at several crucial points.  In one scene, the vampire seeks out a group of wide-eyed hippies.  He asks them about love and romance and then slaughters them – after we get to like them.  That’s a bush-league scripting error!  A screenplay can kill people we care for, but it cannot do so and hope to remain funny.  The rest of the comic riffs fall flat after this.

I bonded more with the hippies than with the characters I was supposed to care about.  The brave orphan, the confused adolescent girl, and the etherial love interest remain distant and two dimensional.  Barnabas never charms in the manner of Captain Jack Sparrow.

The love scene between Barnabas and the witch attempts to be wild and kinky but doesn’t get beyond the special effects.  The final battle is won by a ghostly deus-ex-machina.  The vampire wiggles his fingers, signifying hypnosis, and a mob of cops and townspeople do his bidding.  The plot is full of holes and unanswered questions.

We were in the mood for a gothic movie, and now I wish we had chosen The Raven.  Dark Shadows ends with a lead-in to a sequel which I do not intend to see.  Save your money on this one.

I happened upon this theme while geeking around with an iPhone app.  While looking for a way to create custom ringtones, I found, “Ringtone Converter” on iTunes.  This is a free app, designed to make 30 second ringtones from any song in your iTunes library.  Some of the songs don’t load, though most of them do, and I roamed through my library, auditioning songs as potential ring tones until I came to a clear winner – Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

As I listened to IZ’s voice, I looked up the song on Google.  It was written by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg in 1939, for The Wizard of Oz, and almost cut from the movie by MGM CEO Louis Mayer who said it slowed down the action.  ”Somewhere Over the Rainbow” went on to win the Academy Award and become one of the most covered songs of all time.  It’s number one on a list of “Songs of the Century “compiled by the National Endowment for the Arts.  In a letter to Howard Arlen, Judy Garland said,

“‘Over the Rainbow’ has become part of my life. It’s so symbolic of everybody’s dreams and wishes that I’m sure that’s why some people get tears in their eyes when they hear it. I’ve sung it thousands of times and it’s still the song that’s closest to my heart.”

The voice of Israel Kamakawiwo’ole speaks for itself.  It’s a good time of year to listen to this man who brought so much beauty into the world – his birthday was May 20.  When he died in 1997, Hawaii state flags were flown at half-mast, and his body lay in state in the capitol rotunda.  He was only the third person given this honor.  This video commemorates Israel’s voice and legacy, and records the thousands who came out to celebrate his life on July 12, 1997, as his ashes were given to the ocean and his spirit journeyed over the rainbow.

Courtesty, National Geographic.

“Why would they go into those numbers if the world is going to come to an end this year?” asked Anthony Aveni of Colgate University, an expert on Mayan astronomy.  Aveni and others published their findings Friday, in the journal, Science.

Rain forest location of the find – Courtesy National Geographic.

At the end of the year, when we no longer have the the elections to worry about, and all your friends are starting to think of apocalypse, you can tell them about the Mayan geeks, and suggest they chill.

You can read more about the find here: http://tinyurl.com/cw4aqzx

This book is a celebration of stories by a consummate storyteller.  It is structured as a frame tale, three levels deep – a story within a story within a story, something you find in some our oldest epics and story collections like The Odyssey and The Arabian Nights.

In case we we miss that connection, King says it another way through his main character, Roland Deschain, who tells his traveling companions, “There’s nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.”  Later, during a story concerning his younger self, Roland says, “A person’s never too old for stories…Man and boy, girl and woman, never too old.  We live for them.”

This is the eighth of King’s Dark Tower Novels, and the first I have read, but the introduction caught me up well enough to proceed.  Roland Deschain is a gunslinger in Mid-World.  A gunslinger is a cross between a knight errant and an old west marshall.  Many gunslingers are descendants of “the old White King, Arthur Eld.”

Mid World borders our own and is “filled with monsters and decaying magic.”  In places, there are gates between the worlds, or places where “the veils are thin.”  Three of Roland’s companions come from New York.  The fourth is a billy bumbler, a talking, dog-like creature.

Roland and his companions – his ka-tet – barely have time to find shelter from a starkblast, a devastating storm, with winds like a hurricane, the sudden onset of a tsunami, and temperatures so cold that trees snap and explode.  While the friends shelter by the fire in the only stone building in a deserted town, Roland tells of one of his first assignments as a gunslinger.

In the first story, “The Skin-Man,” Roland rides with his partner, Jamie Red-Hand, to the desolate mining town of Debaria, where a shapeshifter has slaughtered dozens of people.  This a gritty western world, like the bleakest of early Clint Eastwood’s westerns, and the monster is more deadly than the bad and the ugly Clint faced down.

While talking to an 11 year old survivor of an attack, a boy whose father and a dozen others were slaughtered, young Roland tells the second tale, “The Wind Through the Keyhole,” about another 11 year old, Tim Ross, who goes on a dangerous quest to save his mother who has been injured by a treacherous step-father.  Tim sets off to find Maerlyn, aka Merlin, at the heart of The Endless Forest.

Picture an 11 year old on an Arthurian quest, who stumbles into a swamp filled with gators and is saved by a group of plant people who communicate telepathically and give him a strange disk with buttons and lights that speaks and answers his questions in a female voice.  Her name is Daria.  Once she tells him she’ll be “offline” for half an hour, “searching for a satellite link.”

Just when he’d begun to believe she really had died, the green light came back on, the little stick reappeared, and Daria announced, “I have reestablished satellite link.”

“Wish you joy of it,” Tim replied.

Well, why not?  Is a magical iPhone so different from an enchanted sword or magical ring?  A master storyteller like Stephen King can pull of escapades like this because he always has me asking the one question that really matters in storytelling.  To quote Neil Gaiman, that question is, “What happened next?”

There’s adventure, courage, cruelty, humor, horror and much more as Roland Deschain takes us in and leads us back out of three levels of story.  One constant throughout all the tales is the wind, and I think Roland speaks for King when he says:

In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn’t it?  And why not?  Why other?  If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

The Wind Through the Keyhole is a very satisfying summer read – and quite a bit more.

If you haven’t heard, Maurice died today of a stroke, at age 83.  Here is a nice five minute interview he gave in 2002 that ran on the PBS Newshour tonight.  It’s illuminating to hear him say, “I don’t know how to write for children.  I don’t think anyone knows how to write for children, and those that say they do are frauds.”

He goes on to say, “I write for me,” and adds that it isn’t always easy to be driven by something internally that is “riotous and strange.” What a great gift he gave to riotous strangers!

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june12/wildthings_05-08.html

Lego Indiana Jones

I called it an expedition to motivate myself.  ”Bookstore” these days means Barnes & Noble, and I don’t like to go there very much.  I think you’ll see why in the course of this post.

I went to look at their middle-grade fantasy books.  It’s time for summer reading, and some of the classics in this genre weave just the right spell of imaginative escapism:  books like Inkspell, Spiderwick, and  The Emerald Atlas.  Imagine my dismay when I got there and found the middle-grade section gone!  For years these books lived in the right-rear corner of the children’s section, but now all the signs said, “Young readers, grades 3-6.”  I looked through the children’s section and found a few familiar titles, but the group as a whole was no longer on display.

“Explorer” by Stephen Noble, www.stephennoble.com

The rationale became clear when I left the children’s section. Right at the entrance were two large racks of “Teen Paranormal Romance,” sporting the best display of any genre in the store – trade paperbacks with covers, not spines, showing. Marketing must have decided that closing the middle-grade commons would motivate younger girls to move up to a more lucrative market. Apparently books like Garth Nix’s Arthurian stories for boys, or Newberry winners like Lois Lowry and Madeline L’Engle, no longer warrant shelf space. A book or two might have been stuck in between the 3d grade readers, but if so, I missed them.

I don’t begrudge Barnes & Noble its marketing efforts, but it’s been many years since I discovered anything new in their stores.  Discovery used to be part of going to bookstores.  ”Browsing” once was the order of the day, and some of those discoveries changed my life.  Like the time when I was 18, and on pure impulse, bought a copy of Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads.  The spark that title ignited still burns.

Now I make most of my book discoveries online.  This morning, Amazon sent me an email, based on my search and reading preferences:  ”Best Middle-grade books in May.”  Where am I likely to go to read sample pages and shop?

I went on my expedition a week ago, two days before Barnes & Noble and Microsoft announced their partnership to champion the Nook.  As I sat down to write this post, their merger seemed huge.  It’s not about the big six publishers anymore, is it?  The future belongs to the big three – Amazon, Apple, and B&N / Microsoft.

The big six had their chance to open ebook divisions, or even join ranks in a partnership, but sticking to rear-view vision, that boat has sailed.  Now its hard to imagine any business model that can save them.  Their mantra has been, “People will always want paper,” but will they?  I don’t know.  What follows is speculation as I look at the books on our shelves.

Books that are read only once – meaning the vast majority of paperbacks, will do fine as ebooks.  Most textbooks for most grades of school should do well as ebooks too, and lighten the load of student backpacks.

Coffee table books might warrant larger readers, which will probably soon be embedded in coffee tables.  You see desk mounted touch-screen computers on shows like Hawaii Five-O.  I bet it won’t be long until they appear in furniture stores.  Same with fine art prints for the walls – think of a blend of existing digital picture frames with wall mounted HDTV’s.

So what books do I really value in paper?  Books like Lord of the Rings and Wind in the Willows, books I treasure and read again and again, yet those are pretty rare purchases and won’t keep printers in business.

Spiritual books of all sorts, for I underline those and fill them with post-it notes.  How-to books, on subjects from  gardening to computer programming texts.  I used the latter until they fell apart at work.  Any book where I write notes in the margin.  Right now, ereader bookmarks and margin notes are inadequate, but this should be an easy fix in the future.  Software that lets me use my laptop keyboard when I plug in on USB will fix much of the problem.

I don’t want print to go away.  I don’t want to see used bookstores close or raise their prices to “antique” levels.  There’s magic in turning pages, in the smell of ink and paper.  I’ve read so many stories that begin when someone finds a mysterious, yellowing book of lore, that I can’t go into an old bookstore without wondering if “today will be the day.”  It’s hard to imagine those stories with mysterious, yellowing, kindles!

No, I don’t want print to go away, but it’s hard to imagine any other future for the printed word.  Can you?

(l-r), Andy Grove, Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore in 1978, on the 10th anniversary of Intel. Photo courtesy of Intel

The bad news is that Grove’s formula depends on intelligent and focused government action. In 2010, that didn’t seem as hopeless as it does now.  Yet perhaps ideas are like seeds; the good ones grow, even though they may take a while to germinate.

One key problem, according to Grove, is our loss of hi-tech manufacturing jobs, not only because of the human cost, but because of our loss of the expertise that production brings.  He says the US has already fallen too far behind to ever catch up in technologies like solar panels and batteries for fuel efficient cars.  “Not only [do] we lose an untold number of jobs, we [break] the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today’s “commodity” manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry.”

Grove suggests we need an employment-centered economy and political leadership.  He cites the performance of several Asian economies, including China, the source of so much hand-wringing in the face of perceived U.S. decline.

Andy Grove, 2010

Grove recommends government incentives to aid the growth of key industries and keep the manufacturing base at home. He ends the article with a chilling bit of history:

Most Americans probably aren’t aware that there was a time in this country when tanks and cavalry were massed on Pennsylvania Avenue to chase away the unemployed. It was 1932; thousands of jobless veterans were demonstrating outside the White House. Soldiers with fixed bayonets and live ammunition moved in on them, and herded them away from the White House. In America! Unemployment is corrosive. If what I’m suggesting sounds protectionist, so be it.

I suggest everyone concerned with employment and US technical expertise take a moment to read what Grove has to say:  http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b4186048358596.htm

We’d been looking for a second dog for over a year and had even spent six weeks with a foster animal with the option to keep, but it didn’t work out.  We’d put the word out, and one afternoon it paid off.  The owners of a mom and pop kennel called concerning a year old animal that needed a home.

Kit had been rescued by a roommate from a couple who mistreated her and were planning to dump her by the side of a highway.  She was frightened of men, and at first ran away when I tried to pick her up, yet by the end of the day, she was at home in our home, and after a walk in the park the next morning, she was my new best buddy.

First walk in the park

She was just over eight pounds when we got her, and her ribs showed. Now she has the opposite problem – she’s on low fat kibble. Officially, she’s a Chipom, a Chihuahua / Pomeranian mix, although we suspect there’s something else in there, because she’s bigger than either of those breeds. We’ve wondered how much the dog DNA tests cost, sometimes wondering if she really might have a fox in the family tree.

Kit is foxlike in more ways than appearance, not all of them good.   Rescue dogs often carry baggage and hers manifests as aggression, which can be very sudden.  Work with a trainer has helped moderate it, but we’re still not done.  Kit is smart like a fox too, not always in healthy way.  Everyone thinks their dog is brilliant; let’s just say that this one, among other tricks, has learned how to paw the button to lower the backseat windows while driving.  We have to put on the lock as if she was a kid.  And an instant after such indiscretions, she’ll turn on the charm that makes strangers ask, “What kind of dog is that?”

Like any complex creature, she’s full of contradictions. She’s as brave as a dog twice her size, and the unquestioned alpha to the others, and yet she’s a wimp when it comes to rain. With tail between legs she’ll duck for cover if the drops start to fall on her arctic quality fur.

In the end, it’s like William Stafford said in his poem, “Choosing a Dog:”

“It’s love,” they say. You touch
the right one and a whole half of the universe
wakes up, a new half.