Author Archives: michaelulinedwards

EXPLORATION

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Primarily a writer of fiction, I read a lot of history. One group (area) (field) of books always interests me: Exploration of the earth beginning with the Portuguese and Spanish and finishing in the Twentieth Century. A lot of usual stuff happens: In a sixteenth a guy got parted from a Spanish expedition in Florida, and he walked west to Spanish settlements in Mexico.

Exploration and writing a story are similar. There’s a starting point. The vessel sail in one medium on blue or if it is snow, white. Paper is usually write for the author. Like the author an explorer sort of knows where he’s headed. Neither writer nor explorer know exactly how to get there. A lot of skill is required. Once the writer and explorer believe the destination is reached, they like to call it quits. Success is not always evident. Remember Columbus sailed for India and ended up in North America. Look at the first draft of any story. How close to finishing is the writer? Getting home, completing the story – that’s the rub.

Recently read is L.H. Neatby, The Quest of the Northwest Passage, chock full of facts, names and places with many maps that don’t give all the names of the places mentioned in the text. When reading a book of exploration or discovery, it is good to know where the expedition is: Glendale, Arizona or Glendale, California. Can anyone tell me where the Great Fish River is? Having read the book, I may know. But I may not.

Next, it is not enough to say that Eskimos in the early days (1600 to 1700s) were murderers and thieves without giving a brief background of their society and culture: Life is hard near the Arctic. Did the explorers act this way, or that? I was unaware until late in the book, that a translator who learned to speak the natives’ language in Labrador was understood by Eskimos near the mouth of the Mackenzie River, at least 2000 miles away.

Neatby’s book is otherwise well-presented. It benefits from shortness, 200 pages, no Index. But brevity diminishes the tales. Trapped in ice like Shakleton at the South Pole 60 years later, Captain Collinson secured his ship in the Arctic flow. Morale of the crew was excellent especially after the men built, next to the ship, a billiards table from ice and available materials and played until the ice broke. The reader needs more than 250 words about Captain Collinson.

The text requires an interest in exploration and Canadian history; it is not geared toward the general reader. But the subject matter is compelling with one caveat: Every explorer is cold, frozen, gets frost bitten or ends up frozen to death. This is a welcome book to read during the hot summer months.

The following are exceptionally readable and authoritative books about exploration, the persons involved and the peoples they met:

Carl Sauer: a) Sixteenth Century North America, b) Seventeenth Century North America, c) The Early Spanish Main

JH Parry: a) Discovery of the Sea, b) The Age of Reconnoissance, c) other books

CR Boxer: Histories of the Dutch and Portuguese Empires.

William Goetzmann: a) Exploration and Empire, b) Army Exploration in the American West

Alan Villiers: a) Captain Cook. There are many biographies of Captain Cook. This one is well written. The author is a sailor and has sailed in a ship like the ones Cook piloted, as well as many smaller ships and boats that Cook sailed. There is some technical sailing lingo in it which is not obnoxious. I’m not a sailor and never will be. I will not master the terms or fully understand, always what was happening or why. Although incomprehensible, these sentences and clauses did not get into my general understanding. Despite that, I can only conclude that I like this book because I like to be teased. 

BAD WRITING

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After writing my manuscript in November 2013 [earlier blog], I looked at books on writing by authors. I pulled them from the public library. None of the books are gospel. Many mention issues to keep in mind to weigh and balance, but are not important while writing the first draft. The issues become important while fooling with drafts 2, 3 and 4.

There are five books:

James Thurber, Collecting Himself, Harper & Row, NY, 1989 Michael Rosen, Ed., The text mostly gives impressions of working, sometimes as a writer. The best article in the book goes back to Thurber’s days in Paris during the Twenties: “How To Tell a Fine Old Wine.” To get good from this book the reader must believe The New Yorker magazine is sophisticated, or at least clever. It may also be helpful to consider David Letterman is funny without the drum punctuating the end of “the funny line” and the once present Paul Schaffer cackle.

John O’Hara, An Artist Is His Own Fault, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbonville, 1977, Ed. Matthews Bruccolli. More than half this book is derived from lectures and speeches, none of which have been adapted to the written word. Having just read the second volume of Mark Twain’s Autobiography, vol 2, UC Press, 2013, these are by comparison poor speeches and mediocre lectures.

In his writing O’Hara displays prominent, fatal faults: “His first draft is usually is last.” He also reads little or not at all. He says the first duty of a novelist is “creation of character.” He complains that women authors are treated more gently by critics than male authors.(101) [Sour grapes.]

Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones, Shombhala, Boston, 1986, Somewhat of a how-to-book which eventually turns to Zen (author is an adherent).

Page 8 is excellent advice for new writers. Generally it should not be ignored:

1.”Keep your hand moving. (Don’t pause to reread the line you have just written)….2. Don’t cross out. (That is editing while you write…)[Perhaps] 3. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Don’t…worry about staying within the lines and margins.) 4. Lose control.[This probably means get lost in the story so the words are coming from your imagination.] 5. Don’t think. Don’t get logical. 6. Go for the jugular. (If something comes [into] the writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.)”

Page 35: There is bad advice about metaphors and similes, even if the author can only close the page or turn the book. Page 36-37 more advice “Writing is not a McDonald’s hamburger” That may be true, but I know the following is also true: A writer wants his writing read by everyone who eats McDonald’s hamburgers.

There are good and valuable considerations: Writers should keep physically active; they should be able to hear and listen while writing. Of interest are chapters on writing sex, being a writer, syntax and detail in stories.

Sol Stein, Stein on Writing, St. Martins, NY, 1995, tries to relabel and redefine terms of writing, and suggests the primary way to advance the story is a strong character. Character is a laborious means to write and to tell a story.

From his own books Stein presents an incomplete example: 

In my novel The Resort, the leading characters are an “ordinary middle-aged couple. Henry and Margaret Brown, who                                                             find themselves in horrific circumstances at the end of chapter one…I made the Browns just different enough to interest                         the reader, but it was important that they not seem “special.” Therefore, when calamity hits the Browns, readers from any                      walk of life can identify with their plight, which is crucial for the story. Stephen King usually has quite ordinary-seeming                      characters get involved in extraordinary circumstances.”

What Stein does not want to tell the readers, in order to give his flawed analysis, is his characters [The Browns] at the end of Chapter One are in a new setting – dangerous, uncertain, terrifying.

Character, story, setting, which is most important. It is easy to judge. A writer can easily correct flaws in character and story with details. Flaws are impossible to correct in setting without rewriting extensively or writing anew. AN EXAMPLE.

A. Buy an engagement ring from a jeweler in the suburbs. OR

B. Buy an engagement ring from a store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

Man may not want fiancee with him when he buys in the suburbs, a transaction which might include barter, bargaining or under the counter payments.  Man who buys on Rodeo Drive likely will have fiancee with him.

Add another fact: Man is rich enough to buy on Rodeo Drive but buys in the burbs. Fiancee’s reaction justly asks, “What the hell is this?” “What’s going on?”

It is setting not character nor story that determines what will happen and why. Indeed, part of the story or the whole part may rely on  where the ring was bought.

There are questionable references to excellent books of history: Bertram D. Wolfe did not write “the best book in its field in any language.” Stein’s references and suggestions in non-fiction are not helpful and should be ignored, except those to Garrett Mattingly.  

Stein makes the following audacious assessment: “George Orwell’s non-fiction is far superior to his fiction.” It is likely Stein has not read all of Orwell, who is careful to communicate exactly what he thinks throughout his entire opera. Perhaps Stein considers 1984 and Animal Farm as non-fiction, but he certainly overlooks Orwell’s pre-World War II novels like Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a story with subtle environmental strains: “I don’t mind development so long as it doesn’t look like gravy on a table cloth.”

There are good passages in Stein on Writing. Unlike John O’Hara, above, Stein quotes Ernest Hemingway, “First drafts are shit.” About Thesaurus Stein accurately observes the effect on a writer using one “…surprises me with a word that I would not have thought of on my own and that gets me thinking in a different direction.” From John Gardener: “Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.” Stein gives a reference for love scenes, Helen Fisher’s Anatomy of Love. On page 118 is excellent advice about dialects.

Stephen King, On Writing, Schribner, NY, 2000, is better than I remembered it being. The library is ordering new copies, although it appears to have a sufficient supply. So is there a new edition with improvements?

Without mentioning Stein On Writing, King responds, 

I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch                      them try to work themselves free…The situation comes first. The characters – always flat and unfettered, to begin with –                     come next. Once these things are fixed in my mind, I begin to narrate. I often have an idea of what the outcome may be,                       but I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things                        their way.(164)

When King says, “The situation comes first,” he refers to the setting, jewelry store or hazardous waste pit. King raises an excellent point. Fixate on character, and the author may insist the character do things his way, not the character’s way. King explains later,

…what happens to characters as a story progresses depends solely on what I discover about them as I go along –                                how they grow…Sometimes they grow a little. If they grow a lot, they begin to influence the course of the story.(190) 

There are many excellent chapters and passages in King’s book: He is wholly correct and should be followed about knowing the fundamentals of writing this language: Use Elements of Style for knowledge and information. He’s entirely correct about symbolism. He mentions Edgar Wallace Plot Wheel with the hope everyone will stay far from it. He recommends potential and all writers read, unlike John O’Hara.

There are clunky things: Unlike King I would not recommend reading Harry Potter. And James Michener did not write many of his later books; he edited them. Hemingway’s defense of alcohol would never reach 70 words; he would not use more words than Faulkner did. King cites an unHemingway defense of alcohol.

 

 

 

 

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN, Vol. 2

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Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. 2, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2013.

Passages in this volume of the Autobiography will be found in no other book. Twain himself doubts whether any human being can be original, but this volume belies his claim. Twain is. Incidents of first impression and first expression exist therein.

While in Europe in 1896, Twain’s first daughter died in Connecticut. By the summer of 1902 his wife was in bad health. Later that year his youngest daughter had a life threatening illness (104 degree temperature; doctor sleeping in next room). The fear in Twain’s household wa wife would learn of daughter’s illness, and she would be carried off. 

Twain had a third daughter, Clara, who primarily took care of the wife. Twain himself riles wife too much; his daily time with her is limited. Clara makes up a wonderful, social, engaging social life for the daughter near death. Wife’s spirits rise. These fabrications are carried on for three months. Twain writes two letters which are included in the text. [There must be more letters.]

Twain details the life of lies to stating the sick daughter’s happy life, and that they are relayed to everyone in the household – anyone who might come within earshot of wife – must know and speak the lies. Presumably wife remembers all the lies, and so must everyone else. There are near misses. There are mistakes, quickly retorted and corrected or excused, including the schedule of a local train.

Twain observed the whole scenario could be viewed as absurd and humorous except it is real, and it involves his family. The reader can infer what Mark Twain, writer, is doing: To protect himself, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, writes a full, complete and honest account of the activities in the house and about the sick daughter’s social life. Once on paper the events are removed, in a medium where Twain is a master. It is his only defense against two more deaths in his immediate family.

More astounding was the visit of William Dean Howells during the summer 1902 prior to the grave illnesses. Howells adumbrates a story about an ill mother and then her daughter gets sick. Both were cared for by two aunts. The aunts don’t want to lie; it is a sin. But they sin every day to keep the mother’s spirits up, even after the daughter has died: The mother believes the daughter is having a wonderful social life for the first time in her life. The mother also dies. Although the aunts regret sinning, they realize it was necessary.

Mark Twain wrote that story, Was it Heaven? Or Hell? It was published by Harper’s Monthly, when Twain’s wife and daughter were gravely ill. Both of them recovered.

The Autobiography has gems about writing. Spelling: “Majestically lawless.” Twain writes about “style,” “a mysterious thing,” including involuntary “indiscretions,” ofttimes an unwanted, “trademark.” And proofreading – the message is sometimes the editor must do everything himself: Twain tells an anecdote of Bret Harte’s trying to correct “chastity” for “charity.”

An observation about human beings came out which pertains to writing. The sort of human being one is will result in the type of writer one becomes. Bret Harte is used as the example, and Twain does not like him. Harte is capable, but is also acerbic, witless, disloyal, unemotional and selfish. Flickers of brilliance come from Harte’s writings, but mostly Harte is pushing the pen. 

The Autobiography does not analyze the heart of writers generally. It raises the issue by example, the personality and the abilities and capabilities of a writer [or any artist]. Those traits and in life, circumstances, realizations, choices and adjustments, bring very individual reflections and come after one consciously mulls, considers, weighs and judges. When those forces and the results arrive unannounced, the writer is in trouble.

“Circumstance” raises another short significant issue. Twain notes, like a diary entry, attending a banquet where Elihu Root, Secretary of State, addressed circumstances as changing the way Americans viewed government and their own freedoms. [This is my summary, not part of the Autobiography.] In many ways the more Americans are brought together as one people in one nation and are supposed to think the same way – whether by innovation, culture, society or law – the more Americans will lose the distinction of being a nation of individuals. 

Twain alights on celebrity, by commenting on an article about Olive Logan. She was a female lecturer in the lyceum days. Olive had nothing to say and couldn’t have said it if she did. She was on the platform “to show off her clothes,” a “living fashion plate.” She manufactured a reputation, writing “innate, affected valueless stuff,” and marrying “a penny-liner,” a man who was paid a penny a line to get small items, true or untrue, in newspapers.

The newspapers would appear, and next came the revelation: Readers who “had not been quite aware of [the celebrity] before,” now knew. There were no explanations, just recounting daily or weekly activities, like a Facebook page or a Twitter feed: “Her name was familiar to everybody…and there wasn’t a human being in the entire United States who could answer if you asked him, ‘What is her fame based on?’ ‘What has she done?’ You would paralyze a person by asking that question.”

[The primary difference between Olive Logan then and “celebrities” today is, today Americans can now say the woman took off her clothes, or did explicit acts, and published them.]

Sadly, the life of Olive Logan wound down like the lives today. She is near deaf. Her current husband, a generation younger than she,  always drank and neglected her. She “could no longer write.” The couple was impoverished.

Twain mentions other fallibilities of the American system. He complains that the United States of America is an Unpolite Nation without remembering or mentioning that he lives in and about New York City. He notes the pace of America, “come step lively,” differs from the pace elsewhere. He mentions American diplomats and counsels, “chuckleheads,” sent “to some part of this planet because [they were] not needed in this country.”

Many passages are devoted to copyright issues and some (purported) Congressional testimony. In Twain’s day the copyright laws were antiquated and woefully inadequate. Readers other than historians, legal historians, Twain devotees and intellectual property fiends will find these parts laborious. But Twain was prominent in the push to change the laws. 

Speaking from the grave, Twain likewise discourses on religion. His views are well presented. His is not an attack on faith itself, but largely on the practice of religion and man’s distortion of faith. That is always the grind. There are distilled, more perceptive presentations of these arguments in Twain’s literature: Huckleberry Finn, The War Prayer, The Mysterious Stranger, and elsewhere.

During the last decade of life Twain did not write much – short stories, essays and articles. He explained that he no longer wanted to pick up a pen and write a novel. The Autobiography was dictated. These is a difference in quality and complete excellence between Twain’s best books and this Autobiography. Many entries are literary, but Twain’s purpose was not literature: He wanted a conversation from himself, a one-way conversation to readers. Readers gets that. The difference between his literary efforts and the Autobiography remain, and have a lesson for today’s writers: Typing at 100 plus words per minute, printing out pages of beautiful words, trying to proofread and write something literary. Unlike Twain, most of today’s word processing entrants have never lectured to audiences, have never delivered humor, do not understand the basic simplicity of a joke, yet they are trying to work at the speed of the spoken word, like they are running their mouths to monopolize conversations with friends. 

One gift this volume of the Autobiography gives to writers is Twain’s impressions and methods of lecturing and speaking, a task he could do on an impromptu basis. This volume has also left me in an uncomfortable state of humiliation: Mark Twain could lecture better than I can write.  

STUPID: Novel Writing

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I am not unhappy. I’m complacent. 

Under the mistaken impression that everyone was writing a novel in November, NANOWRIMO, I said, “I’ll try.” I’ve already written a novel this year: JUNKETS, iBookstore, michaelulinedwards, 99 cents, an espionage story without the flair of Ian Fleming or James Bond but funny and humorous.

Having advanced notice, I began novel writing in October with no theme and no concept, just write and continue writing. The protagonist ran through Chapters One and Two.

I can correct this in rewriting and revisions, but with the next text I began writing my thoughts about writing. Writing is what I believed my protagonist was doing. I stayed with the third person using my character’s name, rather than personalize the story to “I.”

I have 40,000 words with no iota of an idea, a particle of a plot, a fragment of fancy left in me.It’s not too bad considering I gave up on character development 30,000 words ago.

While writing it took a while to realize this is no novel [last weekend]. It’s an essay or worse. Reminiscences, a memoir or autobiography. I wrote a long book about university days [Bitch., a verb not a noun, a period not a dot, iBookstore, michaelulinedwards, Berkeley 1968-1973]. Afterward I vowed never again to write anything in that genre – autobiography, memoirs or reminiscences – true life or fibs.

Yet that is what I have in the 40,000 words, draft one. Thoughts and impressions of writing and my writing career. There’s no organization to it at all. I tossed in everything. I’ll learn whether there is an unconscious organization in my brain. A week ago upon finishing a topic, I believe I had a theme in it. Don’t ask which one or what it is about.

This week I asked myself, what to write next. I had a bunch of unrelated subjects – writing in coffee shops, intellectualism in the creative process, bookstores, and this morning, copyediting. I wrote sentences, one paragraph or multiple paragraphs, and I dumped all those unrelated subjects at the end.

Before Thanksgiving I thought, time to research. Learn what other writers have published: Library time. Books are essay-like with autobiographical overtones. Likely I’m stuck in this genre. Upon rereading something will likely make sense, and I can put all the pieces together in a massive cut and paste. It will be a masterpiece to add to two novels, already written about writing but not edited. 

That all may be a madness. I’ve gotten a lot of errant thoughts out of my brain and away from my being. That is helpful. I know, however, I won’t rewrite right away.

TRUE BELIEVER: ATROCITY

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TRUE BELIEVER by Kurt Andersen

Do not buy this book. Waste no time reading it.

Andersen has presented America with a gross self-promotion, and he flat out misrepresents that this book is about the 1960s. Author Andersen is a National Public Radio host, a New York personality and a contributor to The Daily Beast. When asked by that Internet website to compile a list of his favorite books about the Sixties, Andersen put his book as Number One.

True Believer story: Woman in her sixties is writing her memoirs. The first chapter tells of her current life (divorce, professional status, etc.) She says she saved every document about her life from birth certificate to date, but the text belies she did that or she knows what she is writing about. Because of a poorly contrived literary contrivance of this book, I’ll call this woman First Person Girl.

In Chapter One Andersen introduces First Person Girl who is writing her memoirs. The first chapter is first person. Almost every chapter for 250 pages is First Person Girl in her sixties, as a child or as a teenager, and she is always “I.” Flitting between the present day and the Sixties (and sometimes events in between the Sixties and present day) requires a reader with a very complete memory of those 60 years just to know the references. Andersen does not tell what any character is actually thinking and why she is next doing something or changing her mind. He presents no life, no character changes and no character development. The book is a recitation of unconnected events with First Person Girl among them or mentioning them, along with more current and past events. Andersen tries to connect the reader to references by making First Person Girl a James Bond fan. What Andersen accomplishes is making First Person Girl silly, supercilious and superficial.

After introducing First Person Girl in Chapter One, most novelists would drop into the life of the subject. NOPE. There are improbable conversations. A grandchild asks First Person Girl, tell about the hippies. Did you smoke marijuana?!

Of 428 pages of text about half is present day stuff, and the remainder about the Sixties and references to facts in between (Princess Diane’s death). When writing, Andersen opened a reference book of events by year and asked himself: What am I going to put on the page from which year? The Mall March, August 1963, Harry Belafonte wasn’t identified as being there, but the lesser known in 1963 Sidney Poitier was. Next in that chapter was the “first real conversation about the Negro question with a Negro,” the family’s cleaning woman.(page 102) Violet complains, gives impressions and tells aspirations of the Civil Rights Movement, but it conveys nothing. Violet is not a real person; she’s a token stuck in so five pages can be devoted to Civil Rights exposition. First Person Girl next summarizes Violet’s conversations over “hundreds of hours…over the previous decade.”(105) [Which decade and when did First Person Girl have the conversations? Violet dies at age 51 within a decade.] Nothing is learned from the bald recitation of facts and impressions in the contrived, counterfeit drivel. Readers have no insight into Violet’s life, the life and times of the Sixties in general or of the Civil Rights Movement broadly.

It finally became apparent that First Person Girl grew up, in the Midwest, likely Northern Illinois. There are a few lines about listening to the Cubs game but no mention of Ernie Banks. There is a reference of going to Milwaukee, but not to Milwaukee Braves games or seeing Hank Aaron. On page 111 I thought these people were Canadians – a reference is made to “Canadian sophistication.” I was mistaken.

The idle and frequent references to events in the Sixties have no order, no significance and no relevance. They don’t put the reader in the human lives of those times, and they don’t tell what Americans were thinking. While flitting between 2012 and the Sixties, Andersen mentions Le Bron James (305) but fails to mention New York kid, Lew Alcindor [Kareem Abdul-Jabbar], UCLA basketball [nine championships in eleven years] or Cassius Clay [Mohammad Ali]. If Andersen were interested in young forwards playing basketball in the Sixties, he might have mentioned Rick Berry or Julius Erving. NOPE. In an appeal to the modern crowd but conveying nothing, Anderson mentions Mark Zuckerberg (308). The name dropping adds nothing; it tells nothing. It is a waste of ink, paper and distracts from any story of the Sixties. Indeed, while relying heavily on cliches and name dropping, it is important to get everything right and imprudent, lazy and i!rresponsible to use slogans twice: “Hey, hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?” (187, 328)

What wasn’t mentioned about the Sixties? A good economy but not much about the World or even Vietnam. Sports wise omitted were the Boston Celtics, Wilt Chamberlain, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, the New York Mets and the Packers. Movies were mentioned but not Doctor Zhivago, The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Joe or The Last Summer (excellent, brutal, cruel story about social pressure among teenagers). “The Smothers Brothers” TV show is mentioned but not Pat Paulson for President. There are no other presidential candidates in 1968 other than Nixon and Humphrey. There were no gays and lesbians in the Sixties. Andersen apparently was not part of any rioting; he mentions riots but not what it is like to be inside a riot. The April 1968 C!hicago riot is not mentioned.

The research for True Believer is poor. It reveals Andersen had his ears closed; his eyes shut; his mouth covered, his hands in mittens. He was a sheltered teenager who went to Harvard University in 1970 after that school had its campus student uprisings. A book was written and published within a year of those events; it tells of the low-key protests. The other excellent book from 1972 gives a decade’s events at Harvard: The Fall of the American University, Adam Ulam.

Approximately page 250 to page 370 First Person Girl, who has juvenile diabetes, fades. Andersen more or less slips into a third person story. First Person Girl goes to Radcliffe, so is an adjunct of Harvard. A Harvard-Radcliffe “cult” (Andersen’s word) forms, is secret, purportedly disciplined, supposedly motivated, presumably knowledgable, financially capable and with the means to change the world. They use artistic license from The Theater: Since everyone in the cult is highly educated, there are show-off references by cult members about other cult members – characters from Shakespeare’s plays like Mr. Indecisive of the cult, Hamlet. That is an idea for use in a movie, but it does not reflect any reality of cults or from any group of the Sixties. The Shakespeare references indicate Andersen’s abysmal failure to research any revolutionary or radical movement or group which was successful. He could have started by reading the writings of Harvard professor, Adam Ulam.

Cults exist through psychological and physical coercion and force, and emotional dependency. Add ideology and there is an political dimension. In the 1960s drugs were used to create submissive, compliant beings, following a Leader to Earth’s end. But drugs and diabetes? First Person Girl does drugs and gets by. Another cult tool was sex, especially with the Leader. Sex sealed relationships and secured devotion. First Person Girl had a boyfriend. I infer he was a Leader of some sort, so he had her exclusively. Anderson doesn’t tell his cult-sex-life, but no doubt Boyfriend was actively porking everything he could. Was there an emotional toll on First Person Girl?

It is difficult to determine which true beliefs anyone in the cult had because there seems no Leader, no herald, no Joshua. The cult decides to assassinate LBJ, President of USA. Because of this limited goal Andersen’s cult is mislabeled. It is closer to a cell. The cult plans, gets prepared, gets into place: LBJ gives his quitter speech on March 31, 1968, and everyone in the cult realizes the assassination should no longer be carried out. Members listen to a Bob Dylan song, and one or two cult members sing along.(336-337) That’s not much of a cult, a cell or any other type of group, except a bunch of spoiled, rich Ivy League Ivory Tower morons occupying this asshole story.

Andersen, though, does not give up. The story is wanting, but he wants a longer book. He drops in more events, and more names. Page 393 students of Harvard (I believe) chant: “Dare to struggle, dare to win, Charles Manson, live like him.” It is extremely doubtful this was chanted in the fall of 1968 or any other time in public. Charles Manson was completely unknown in 1968. The Tate-Labianca murders happened in August 1969. Manson and those murders were anathema to the New Left. When Bernadine Dohrn [name dropped along with Bill Aryes in True Believer, 110] praised the death of Sharon Tate, Leftists said about Dohrn, Aryes and their followers, “The Weather Vain:” “You don’t need to be a Weatherman to know who the assholes are.”

The next page, 394, Andersen bounces to March 1970 – townhouse in New York City explodes; it is a bomb making factory. He regresses to November 1969 with revelation of the massacre on My Lai, Vietnam. He rushes into the future to the killings at Kent State, May 4, 1970. This whipsawing is nonsensical, word wasting, page filing and reveals Andersen is not writing a novel but is listing events and is making up crap about each happening.

I looked for evidence of research. None. In ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Andersen writes condescendingly, “…there were things I needed to learn about…young women in the 1960s.” [Men have penises; women have vaginas.] “I am grateful to all the women I’ve known – in particular to those I know and love the best [names omitted to protect the unwary] for their specific suggestions and corrections, and for splendidly teaching me day in and day out how the other half lives.”

None of Andersen’s female sources appeared to be around during the Sixties, and Andersen read nothing: Not Betty Friedan, not Robin Morgan, not Valerie Solanas, nothing about SDS and the New Left and not Alice Echol’s excellent book, Dare to Be Bad. A defining moment of the women’s movements occurred at a New Left meeting during the summer of 1967. New Leftists were droning on about issues, agenda and dogma. Shulamith Firestone, a tiny, determined woman, got to the microphone with points she wanted raised and discussed. A guy dismissed her (paraphrased): Don’t bother us little girl. We’re talking about real issues.

From that time on, the New Left, radicals, revolutionaries and other groups had difficulty obtaining women. It was fatal to those causes because women were the oil that allowed the machines to function and keep relations civil. Women, who were conscious [not First Person Girl], were unwilling to be mothers to men their own age. They wanted to be women and adopt other roles as opportunities arose. There were arguments over this stance, and especially about no kitchen duty, no cooking duty, no housework, no typing. None of these female concerns were mentioned in Andersen’s cult or in True Believer. It is too bad because if the women he loved had informed Andersen, True Believer may not have been published.

What sort of research should Andersen have done? I cannot tell which sources are available today. When I wrote Bitch., a period not a dot, a verb not a noun (iBookstore, Michael Ulin Edwards), the Berkeley campus housed the one library with the collection of liberationist and feminist texts which had existed in Berkeley since 1970. I wrote the first draft of Bitch., and I returned to that library for research. It was gone. The books (about 10,000) had been moved.

Whereto? Berkeley was going through a spring cleaning trying to free space for new groups with new interests. Women’s issues were passé, especially the thoughts and imperfect expressions from the late Sixties and early Seventies. The books (and I suppose magazines, articles and pamphlets) went to the main library where they were culled. Not many went into the library collections; some went to other UC libraries. Many of the women’s books were mass market paperbacks, and those were put up for sale, a nickel a piece. If there were no buyers, the books were recycled. I paid five cents, found books in libraries, in used bookstores, in library bookstores and at garage and yard sales. I likely read 500 books and looked at another 500.

Reading True Believer, I have no inkling, no sense, no impression that Kurt Andersen researched any issue on any point he mentions: Hippies, Street People, the New Left, Harvard student protests, women, Vietnam, anti-war movement and marches, and liberation issues. He didn’t live among any of those people, so he lacks experience on that level. He may have vast experience with one issue: drugs. 

In True Believer an issue of writing arises. Any author, especially someone writing a memoir as a novel, has a voice separate and apart from the character in the novel. Mark Twain did it as well as can be done in Huckleberry Finn. In True Believer there is no indication that Andersen keeps himself separate from First Person Girl’s voice. Andersen never abandons the author’s voice. Indeed none of the characters have his or her own voice. An example:  

                     “As the Movement grew, and antiwar protests became regular bi-annual festivals of rage,

                   and we learned from the Seed, Chicago’s new underground paper, that Negro riots were

                   actually black rebellions, the adults grew less indulgent. I saw a poll showing that in the

                   last two years, Americans’ support for civil rights demonstrations – civil rights – had dropped

                   from 42 percent to 17 percent. Which meant push was coming to shove. Alex had mentioned 

                   McGeorge Bundy, President Johnson’s national security adviser, because I’d just written an

                   editorial for the school paper arguing that New Trier’s speaking invitations to him and the White

                   House press secretary should be withdrawn. ‘These two men,’ I wrote, ‘share responsibility

                   for the death’s of eight thousand American soldiers and the murder of untold thousands of

                   Vietnamese women and children. While freedom of speech is important, refusing to condone

                   needless death can be more important. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

                   once said, if words ‘create a clear and present danger [such] that they will bring around…

                   substantive evils,’ they should be prohibited.’ My mother called my article ‘extremely well

                   written.’ That was also what she’d said about my editorial in the fall approving the assassination

                   of South Africa’s apartheidist prime minister. But this time she said that my argument struck

                   her as ‘nutty as a fruitcake…’”

                   True Believer, p. 211-212.

Mamas are prone to undue, unwarranted praise. It’s good that this family cliche is in the text for a personal touch. This paragraph begins with the Movement (Leftist, anti-war, civil rights, Black – which one?). It races onto Negro city riots and Underground Newspapers. It mentions Americans ebbing support for civil rights. There’s push “coming to shove,” a cliche with references to nothing in the book and nothing during the Sixties or in the present day. There are invitations to Presidential aides, and how wrong those invitations are. Next is First Person Girl’s editorial, mentioning freedom of speech and Oliver Wendell Holmes. There is apartheid in South Africa and the assassination of a prime minister, the family reaction and the potential Generation Gap.

There is a lot going on in this paragraph, too much for a 16 year old girl(210). It’s 1965: First Person Girl graduates in 1967; she goes to college. If she is referring to anti-war protests, the first large scale “festivals of rage” happened nationally after she graduated from high school. The American death toll in Vietnam reached 8,000 in the Spring of 1966. Chicago had its first large scale race riots after she was at Radcliffe. And it is inconsistent for a James Bond fan in 1966 to be editorializing about the Vietnam when alternative lifestyles may not have been part of her life. Indeed, First Person Girl seems uncomfortable describing any alternative lifestyles as well as living within them. Her life at Radcliffe in the cult seems sterile. Take something as simple as hair. Did First Person Girl have long hair? Did she thread-braid it? Moreover, would First Person Girl think this paragraph should be in her memoirs, thus representing any part of her life? Certainly her mother wouldn’t say it was well-written. 

Instead it is the author’s voice the reader is hearing.  

WOMEN: PERFECT HALLOWEEN CHARACTERS

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On Halloween, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Section, page 1, had the following sentences, “A spate of supernatural series that has the TV industry spellbound simply fulfills need for strong female characters.” That caption to the picture read, “Julia Ormond’s character projects authority and power while protecting her daughters in Lifetimes ‘Witches of Eastwick.'” The article is further aglow about powerful women characters: “Witches, Crones, Harpies, Furies and Amazons.”

Really?

Since Harry Potter began, the Milleniums and the IC [Internet-Cloud] generations have gone gaga over supernatural figures, and heroes and cartoon characters found in comic books. That’s real life. It’s the reason why many twenty-somethings are living at home after college. They’re deep in student debt, have financial obligations and no income. They have the next sequel of Batman, Ironman, Superman and Spider Man to save them from evil forces, and everyone will live happily ever after in a world of soft goodness and complete understanding. Miracles happen. The Second Coming of who or what is upon us.

Nowadays there are women wanting to get ahead, whether they are at the hairdresser, watching DVDs in their parents’ TV room, following football and basketball games, at work in a job for which they were overqualified, or she is studying mathematics to understand economic theories.  According to current culture and society, her heroes are witches, crones, harpies, furies, Amazons, as well as the usual vamps, vampires and vixens.  It’s a great time to be a man because every man knows that’s what women are. Women must use supernatural, extraterritorial, overarching, spiritual communion, and so on to make her way in the world: Be a she-women to overcome the he-men. Be a wedge to our maneuver a hunk. Be a ball buster in a testical world. Huba-huba, buba-baby.

Monica Lewinsky tried that with Bill Clinton, and I’m not sure where it left her as a human being. We are centered on human beings, not supernatural beasts with male or female genitalia, both or none. What do the grunting-grubbing producers in Hollywood say? Getting and maintaining status for women is not in the paycheck. It is in the message. When a female superhero acts, she is open and obvious. Women do not have to coo, coax, wile or suggest. That’s passé, from the Fifties. Human beings have evolved beyond implications and inferences. Be upfront. Appear naked on the Internet! Show the world the woman you are!

When a woman has quiet time with husband or boyfriend, and things need saying but you don’t want an argument: You want his thoughts and hopes about you and the relationship, devotion and warmth – signs from him that he spends as much time as you have given to him and the relationship. It has always been a problem of communication – suggestion, implication, cajoling, teasing – but NOT today. No one expects subtlety. Be Xena instead, exerting authority, exercising power, exorcising demons and emasculating…

Are the Mistress of the Universe movies today better than films about human relations from the Fifties? Consider Crime of Passion, Barbara Stanwyck, Sterling Hayden, Raymond Burr. Stanwyck is a successful journalist in San Francisco with an Ask Abby column. She meets Hayden, Lieutenant LAPD on a murder case in Frisco. She beats him to the suspect. He proposes, and she leaves her career to become wife in LA. 

Although well-thought of and promising, Hayden is willing to wait for promotion. Being a housewife Stanwyck is bored. At a party she wants to join the conversation of the men where the conversation is about the police department. But she is relegated to the officers’ wives talking about casseroles. Stanwyck uses her abilities to move him high in the department. She sleeps with his superior, Burr, and because Burr refuses the promotion to an open position, she kills Burr. Hayden learns is wife killed Burr and walks her to booking in a poignant final scene.

Crime of Passion is a movie showing human issues, women living demeaning lives and never using their abilities. Today Stanwyck’s part would be held by a supernatural woman or a psychologically damaged woman to show her fallibilities and provide reasons for her actions. Stanwyck would never take the modern part especially if she had to cast a spell. That act and that bit of acting would diminish Stanwyck as a human being and as a woman. Stanwyck would take roles like Crime of Passion because she had to meet life as it came to her character and work through the problems.

For today’s films – fantasy, wonderment, fairy tales, comic book flicks – I suspect actresses capable to playing human beings like Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis need not apply.

ME, A HERO

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Another website said Casey Affleck claimed to rescue a repairman. He made this rescue self-award announcement on late night TV, all to enhance his image and to gas his career.

The world should know of my rescue efforts, successful and unsuccessful, so the human race will flock to the iBookstore and buy my novels and one history, Michael Ulin Edwards, Author.

I’ve rescued a fireman, a police officer and a civil servant. I don’t know the details about the fireman, but I saved an officer from complete embarrassment by writing a court brief after he gave me a ticket for jaywalking. The charge was dismissed. I raised the self-esteem of a civil servant by asking a question “no one has ever asked before.” For the remainder of the day that government employee felt useful and fulfilled.

Last week I helped an old lady, a vegan, cross the street, and two weeks ago I held a door for a woman pushing a stroller. I didn’t see the kid. I held a ladder for a repairman so he wouldn’t fall on me.

I tried to save last summer’s goldfish before they sailed down the drain into the LA sewer system.

I’m a good person. Buy my books on the iBookstore. Michael Ulin Edwards, Author.

EDIE – Jean Stein, George Plimpton

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Edie (1982) tells its biography by interviews with friends, acquaintances and business associates of Edie Sedgwick. She is from a wealthy family with roots long into New England, although her parents – heretics, black sheep, apostates – moved to California where Edie was raised and where easy money was made in real estate. The East Coast contacts remained. George Plimpton’s parents were friends of the Sedgwicks.

As a biography Edie doesn’t tell much about the girl, young woman, woman. She has no voice except bits of dialogue from an Andy Warhol movie staring Edie, Ciao! Manhattan. Edie had no education, no writings, no letters, nothing other than being an earlier version of Paris Hilton, letting others document, dissect and distort her life. With friends and acquaintances like the ones interviewed, she was a throw away person. The book slaps together small talk from persons with no interest or with vague recollections of Edie: I was at this party or this place. Edie was standing in a corner with Andy Warhol. What do you remember Andy? I was there and Edie stood next to me because she was afraid and didn’t have anyone else to stand next to. It is no wonder that Edie died of a drug overdose at 28 years, the end chapters of the book. Next comes the philosophical imponderables: Did anyone see it coming? What happened? Was it suicide or accidental?

Edie is 428 pages long, and obviously published because big name people were involved. No one wanted to memorialize or tell about Edie except for a buck: Do a little genealogy about the family and make money from Edie’s existence. Nobody else will. What better tribute could be made to a girl who never made womanhood in her mind, who hung around and was tolerated because her family knew big people and they had contacts. Toss in a couple of topless photos and one fully nude (can’t see pores), and it’s a best seller. She won’t care. She wasn’t modest in life. She’s dead. Rest in peace. 

Edie is empty, crass and cheap. It has been identified as a book about the Sixties; it is not. Edie didn’t go up the river from where she was living in New York City to Woodstock! Edie is emblematic of the long time state of American publishing houses – slap together something to sensationalize to sell shi-. Promote names of undeserving, poor writers – they’re the bunch, our bunch that we can sell like laundry detergent.

HIPPIE – Barry Miles

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A picture book (nine by twelve inches) of the Sixties’ music and hippie scenes.

Author Barry Miles is on the inside back cover. A photograph has a biographical caption of one sentence which reads in part, “Barry Miles was a central figure in the development of the hippie movement…”

Everyone can stop laughing now. Although there are photographs, hippies were no longer hippies by 1968. They were street people, dealers, run-of-the-mill petty thieves, drug addicts, counterculture-artists as well as students, radicals, revolutionaries, communist anarchists, women belonging to various women’s groups, gays, lesbians, ecology-earth freaks, commune people and minorities.

I appreciate the pictures, graphics and artwork in Hippie, but showing them only does not distinguish among the lifestyles and goals among the various peoples. That sort of story, fiction or non-fiction, would take a long time and a long book put together with great care. By showing pictures only there are mistakes. Women’s movements (1968 to the present) ended much public nudity for the mass of politically in-tune women. Indeed, by the Spring of 1973 the underground newspaper, The Berkeley Barb, which had made a living on naked women stopped printing those photographs. Yet in Hippie Miles has photos of naked women at music festivals to support the idea that there were hippies later.

The mix of Hollywood and youth music is not well told in pictures or in the slight editorial comments. Much too many pages are devoted to Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and people prominent in the mid-Sixties when their influence justly faded after a year. One page mentions The Beach Boys – surfing, girls, ocean, beach: California Culture. The Beach Boys were in California before The Beatles, the Stones and everyone else. And California, its beaches and the Pacific had a lot to do with hippies, pot and youth music. No pictures and no words explain, tell or reveal any of this.

Hippie makes a passing glance at Charles Manson, musician hippie. His murders are mentioned, but it is Manson personally who is responsible, not hippie culture of peace and love which Manson embraced and lived, had disappointments and professional set  backs. Something should have been written. Anyone familiar with hippie culture knows how mean, degrading and violent it was. Explanations are difficult but not an impossible analyses for “a central figure in the development of the hippie movement” to narrate about hippies, Manson and murder.

Finally, while there are many photographs, graphics and artwork, collected in one volume, not much was presented that I had not seen before. The book yielded insignificant facts – Bill Graham’s beginnings. But there is no explanation in Miles’ broad brush of hippies and the culture. Did hippies disappear (1) because they no longer had anything to oppose; (2) because life was becoming more difficult to support that lifestyle; (3) because the youth of America [not English youth] were less naive; (4) because hippies could not solve anything in society with their lifestyles; (5) because hippies were predatory leeches on society; (6) because women stopped being hippies because it was primarily chauvinistically oriented and women were interested in liberation or feminism?

None of these questions or considerations are solved by showing pictures, artwork and graphics. Hippie is disappointing.