Sense of Deception

January 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

 

I write about deception not to train the reader in its arcane arts, but to research my novels. There is deception in nearly any situation you can think of––nature, business, politics, or personal relationships––anywhere it might provide someone, or something, an edge.

The general and his wife, honored guests at the baptism, congratulate the captain on the birth of his first child, a son.  The captain beams over the guests, so proud, just so proud.  His wife frets over the loaded table.  The general’s teen-age son lolls against the door.

A young woman, her complexion clear and eyes blue, is seated on the divan holding the child, cooing. A blue pendant hangs where neckline of her white blouse and the lift of white skin meet. “Isn’t he beautiful,” she says, holding the child swathed in a knitted white baptismal blanket.

The son gazes at the pendant. The general’s wife, greying, wearing striped suit jacket with skirt, looks on.  ‘If that boy thinks he’s coming within twenty miles of this house, I’ll break his leg. Trouble. She’s trouble.’ She sips her tea.

CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN!!!!

or

The craggy-faced, white-haired gentleman extends his hands self-deprecatingly. “I’m just a simple country lawyer…” he says. You cover your wallet with your hand.

[Read more...]

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Translation to Russian

January 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Sergei has sent me the first chapters of his Russian translation of Spirit Falls (Дух в Водопаде?  Те, кторые говорят по русски, предлогайте еще название книги), which I have postedhere.

He is concerned whether his translation captures the novel’s spirit. For those who have yet to read Spirit Falls, it is set in a multi-lingual milieu in which 2nd generation immigrant children in the process of becoming young people puzzle out meaning without a polyglot dictionary but with stories they hear or themselves create.

For solace, I point Sergei to  Vladimir Nabokov who skewered Constance Garnett[1] for her translation of Tolstoi’s War and Peace[2]. David Remnick writing in The New Yorker quotes Vladimir Nabokov referring to her writing as “dry shit,” and repeats accusations that she skipped words she didn’t know. I can only say, “Vladimir, you’re such a hot s##t translator, translate it yourself.  And furthermore, your translation of Eugene Onegin is wet s##t. There. Take that!”

Sergei’s translation is magical.  It is as if I am seeing myself askew, permitted to see my world through Russian eyes, rendering worthwhile the suffering it took to learn Russian in Madison, Wisconsin 1965-1969. [Read more...]

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On the Eve of 2012, Peer Literary Criticism

December 31, 2011 By

It is New Year’s Eve 2012 in Madison, Wisconsin.  Yesterday there was an alternating snow-sleet-rain storm in our Lake Wingra microclimate. Today this small world is grey and ice-covered.  Tomorrow morning there is a winter weather advisory—high winds and sleet.

I had published Spirit Falls in September 2009.  I write more slowly than I would wish. Come hell, high water or freezing rain, by 15 January 2012,  I will send out ten review copies of ‘Wounded.’   I had wanted ‘Wounded’ published this year.

This is what has slowed me.  I have been writing a novel series in which counterpoised Russian and American couples leading their different lives intersect at points in the Cold War.  That’s the plan. So far the arcs of their stories intersect but do not intertwine. It was too long and complex; Thus I have divided the novel in half, i.e., that set in Russia and that set in the United States.   The good news is perhaps that it is easier to read story of seventy thousand words rather than one of 150K. I am not yet as skilled as Lev Tolstoy. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Publishing

Misdirection

October 27, 2011 By

You don’t have to fool all of the people all of the time; you just have to fool the right people some of the time. (folk wisdom)

On June 18 (1941) Timoshenko and Zhukov tried once again to persuade Stalin and the Politburo to put the Army on full alert. The more Zhukov spoke, the more irritated Stalin became. “But you have to understand that Germany on her own will never fight Russia.”  He stormed out, then suddenly put his head around the door and shouted, “If you’re going to provoke the Germans on the frontier by moving troops there without my permission, then heads will roll, mark my words.” In Stalin’s mouth, this was not a figure of speech. (Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion, p. 299. The account is indirectly derived from Timoshenko himself.)

The novelist strives to enter us into an alternative world by means of suggestive description, ‘realistic’ scenery, convincing dialogue, and character motivation. “Yep, that make’s sense,” we say.

The director manipulates props, light, sound and movement to guide the audience eye from here to there.

Misdirection is beyond a doubt the most fundamental principal of magic. In magic, misdirection directs the audience’s attention towards the effect and away from the method that produces it.  The key word in this definition is attention. (Bennett and Waltzer, 63)

Female wild turkey

On a mid-October day, overcast and threatening, on my farm, I am walking through the pine plantation to a a quiet spot where I often smoked my cigar, a place where swamp grasses had suffocated the seedlings to create a small clearing. I step into the clearing. An apparition, immense and brown and white and flashing bright red like a police cruiser, rises from the grass three feet before me to eye level (I seem to remember) flapping and squawking.  My unlit cigar strikes my epiglottis.  The apparition swears, falls to the ground and struggles off to the left, dragging a wing and a leg.  To the right from the corner of my eye, I see a dozen or so fluffy yellow and brown turkey poults scurry into tall grass. [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Deception, Soviet Union, Wisconsin

Denial – hide the truth

October 4, 2011 By

I add two caveats before I go on.

Though I address the principals of denial and deception––deception, denial, deceit and misdirection­­––successively, linearity in deception, deception analysis and counter-deception should be, but most often are not, thought of as occurring simultaneously.  S/he who is skilled in detecting ruse can also pat her head as s/he rubs her stomach––simultaneously. I will later examine the application of Aristotelian logic (limited) and Bayesian analysis (useful and so very difficult) as tools for incorporating the reality of deception into a a working conclusion, but we understand from the beginning that certainty is elusive.

Though I have been a student of deception for a lifetime and a practitioner of counter-deception analysis with more or less intensity for some forty years, I am no tenured professor of Denial and Deception. I have found that truth is plural and contingent.

I do not teach.   I learn. [Read more...]

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All deception is based on truth

September 18, 2011 By

           A first rule of deception is truth. All deception works within the context of what is true. All deception works within the context of honesty.

Deception is the deliberate attempt to manipulate the perceptions of the target[1]. This first principle, truth, recognizes that, if deception is to work at all, there must be a foundation of accurate perceptions that can be manipulated.  In almost all cases, things are what they appear to be.

Bernard Madoff resembled Warren Buffet in all ways discernible to the naked eye. Each was an investment ‘magician.’

To counter deception is not easy stuff.  Counter-deception strategies (discover, assess, counter) are labor intensive. Many lie cheat and steal and we have neither time, money nor energy to uncover them all. We trust.  We trust the Firestone Radial tire is safe at any speed. In 1991 we trust US intelligence when it affirmed that Saddam Hussein was not far along in nuclear weapon development; in 2002 we trusted US intelligence which assessed he was far along in reconstituting his nuclear weapons capabilities.  Sometimes our trust is well-placed; then again… [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Deception, Soviet Union, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Pricipals of deception, or “Rules in a knife fight”

September 8, 2011 By

You are traversing a large and dark room.  Dim bulbs glow and extinguish, here and there, without illumination.  There is sound; now loud, now low, its source and direction uncertain, then silence. Smells; oil or burning rubber. Touch; your shin strikes an iron bar, a white light of pain. Memory; you had been in the room, possibly, once before, long ago. Your enemy is in the room. Perhaps.

To the lieutenant as to the diplomat, denial and deception is a weapon that fires both ways; to coin a phrase, it is a double-edged sword.  There it is. You advance. Five minutes into the future is utter darkness. Deception, like the bullet and the bow, has already been invented. The best we can do is to learn its use, and choose, when we can, not to use it.

Denial and Deception is of the primordial ooze.

[Read more...]

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This Web Log is about…

June 25, 2011 By

The purpose of this web site is to make sense of liars whom I’ve lived and worked among, against, and for in my life. There are moments when I shake with rage at the memory of trust broken; as well I quiver with shame at the memory of breaking trust.  We deceive and are deceived, by others and ourselves. It is this topic of deception––state-to-state and person-to-person–– about which this web site dances.

This web log addresses denial and deception, its dozens of synonyms in English (and Russian), how deception (and its synonyms) is defined, was applied and sometimes countered in the twentieth century.

How best to address deception––in fiction or non-fiction, in novel or memoir? [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Deception, Publishing, Russia, Soviet Union Tagged With: , ,

Towards the next novel

March 12, 2011 By


On reading War and Peace (Tolstoi), On War (Clausewitz) and War (Sun Tsu)

March 15, 2011
In writing my next novel “Wounded,” I have been thinking how to create the eminence grise, Alexander Soroka, is a disillusioned Bolshevik Russian Jew who had had a hand in the Lenin and Stalin genocides[1]. Alexander Soroka is a propagandist, a Soviet deception planner, a master of narrative and message, who spins the narrative of the Soviet seven-year plan (1958-1964), its stated goal being the victory of Communism, the creation of heaven on earth.
The United States has been designated the Main Enemy (Главный противник), against which Soroka formulates Soviet strategy. Once a believer, he now reads the Communist Party archives.
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev––the two are old WWII frontoviki–– now Soviet premier, tells him to review the deception annex to a Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces movement order, which will become the 1962 deployment of medium range nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles to Cuba, a most innocent correction to the balance of forces, [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Deception, Russia Tagged With: , , ,

Memories from the time of Stalin

December 2, 2010 By

I am reading interviews about Soviet Repression Orlando Figes [ http://www.orlandofiges.com/familyHistory.php ] with the assistance of Russian Memorial had gathered. It is about as sad as it gets. Memorial, controversial in Russia,  is both an organization and an effort by Russians to tell the stories of those Communism murdered (repressed in Russian) through interviews with the survivors. Most interviews are yet to be translated, but those available in English still bring one to ones knees.

I am at the age and circumstance where I can review the era in which I lived and my role in it. I live now in Madison, Wisconsin, one of those peculiar American enclaves that has attracted unadventurous intellectuals seeking secure enclaves in which to live while applauding murderous monsters wreaking havoc in lands and among peoples far, far away. Madison (and Ann Arbor and Berkeley and lower west side Manhattan) was a world incomprehensible to me in 1965; that time remains incomprehensible today. Perhaps after I finish these four novels, I will understand.

I started to read these remembrances (Всмоминания) in order create the emotional landscape of Ekaterina Soroka and Danton Larionov, two of the four main figures in “The Wounded,” for when they encounter Michael Richard Belisle and Marie Jeanne Charbonneau. At this moment, I do not know how to convey the utter sadness of a sad time. There are still people on the face of the earth who name themselves “Marxist.” I do not understand them. We each have our moments of utter idiocy. I forgive them and I forgive myself.

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Filed Under: Book Reviews, Russia, Soviet Union
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