Что Делать? What is to be done?

May 9, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Nickolai Chernyshevski and Vladimir Lenin wrote essays fretting over What is to be done?  As do I; fret, that is. Their ambition was to remake Russia; mine is somewhat less, merely to inform what I intend to do, or more specifically, publish over the next two years.  There is a danger in publicly sharing ones goals.  Excuse me, wasn’t Broken Codes to be published in October?  You are beholden to your projections.

Nevertheless,  I intend to write and publish…

Novels

Soldiers in the Long War

Soldiers in the Long War is five novels which tell four stories over forty years (1950-1990).  We encounter an American, Michael Richard Belisle, his (French) Canadian childhood friend (and so much more), Marie Jeanne Charbonneau; and two Russians: Danton Larionov, a GRU agent and son of an NKVD executioner,  and Ekaterina Soroka, a story teller.   M.J. Charbonneau and Ekaterina Soroka become fast friends.  Michael Richard Belisle and Danton Larionov do not. The phrase,  ’soldiers in a long war,’ informs each novel and each character of the course of the ‘long war’.

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Filed Under: Deception, Publishing, Russia, Soviet Union

Куда? Whither?

May 9, 2013 By 2 Comments

Оn 31 May Patrice and I are leaving our Madison apartment and on 31 July we are leave Madison. Patrice will teach Rolfing (August-September-October 2013) in Boulder, Colorado. While Patrice teaches, I will write  a great deal, in Colorado as well as Croatia.

Croatia?

In November 2013 we will travel to Rovinj, Croatia for six months (November 2013 thru May 2014).

From the harbor

From the harbor

Rovinj is a gorgeous medieval Venetian city and, though we encourage visitors, but our apartment is small (further details to follow). Friends own a twelfth century house in the city center (It had been Venetian quarantine house where visitors to the city during times of plague had to stay one month; if they didn’t die, they were allowed in town.)  We will rent their apartment in the off-season. It is smaller than our Moscow apartment, perhaps 1/4 the sq. ft. of our Madison apartment. We are downsizing.

The local languages are Italian and Serbo-Croatian; Patrice has been assigned to learn the former; I the latter.  I cheat somewhat; Serbo-Croatian is 60% common to Russian, which I speak.  On the other hand, Patrice understands French, but is shy.  I’ll tell you an anecdote:  When Patrice and I visited Paris, I spoke French so well that the French replied to me as if I were fluent,befuddling me, whereupon Patrice, too timid to respond in French to the French,  translated into English, whereupon I replied in French to the French.

Our goal is to write stories (further details to follow)

 

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California Zephyr to San Francisco,

November 3, 2012 By

James R.C. Cook, Khorat RTAFB, Thailand, 1970

Robert Townsend, Grand Junction, Co, 19 October 2012

Patrice and I traveled the California Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco this last half of October (2012).  I made the trip for myriad reasons––visit Dara and Jim in California, see the Grand Junction, Colorado, train station where Richard Belisle (Read scene from Wounded) is diverted into the second half of the upcoming novel, Wounded, take a break from writing, which I pick up again on Monday.

Robert Townsend, 2nd Lt, USAF, Khorat RTAFB, Thailand, 1970

San Francisco:1970 and  2012. Much water has passed beneath the bridge since I was there last. I trained Mondays and Tuesdays at McClelland AFB (Sacramento), then hitchhiking to Berkeley  to spend my second lieutenant’s $600.00 monthly pay.  It was a place and time freighted with scorching emotion.  We were in love, a patriot Midwest farm boy; a Princeton, N.J. girl, child of European first generation emigrants fled from Hitler’s Germany (Her parents would have been then at least twenty years younger than I am now).  Love–a word freighted with varied, vague, but scorching emotions itself, right?  ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’

           Why do we write these novels but to discern the meaning of words?

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Publisher and Writer – Landowner and Serf

June 12, 2012 By

Curt Flood and Reserve Clause

I’ve spent a great deal of time composing this blog because I am writing a scene, time frame 1961, in which two young men, Rick Belisle and Andrei Byelenko, minor league baseball hopefuls and sons of Slavic immigrants, are discussing in context of their careers the baseball reserve clause, the US Selective Service[1] system, Russian serfdom and the Alabama penal system. I am also reading a selection of current book publishing contracts and note the commonality between serfdom and a routine publishing contract.

I write fiction and I publish the fiction I write–Two tasks requiring two states of mind that share commonality only in their complexity. Why bother both writing your fiction and marketing it, you ask?  Find an agent, who finds a publisher, who markets your fiction. Each does what s/he does best.

Nope.  If it ever worked that way, it don’t no more.

When in 2005 or thereabouts I had finished two of five planned interlinked novels, I sought representation to a traditional publisher.  It was as if I had returned to the 1970-75 American Army.  Decisions were made distantly, somewhere along a convoluted and sclerotic chain of command.

I write literary fiction about violent men of action who seek truth with human connection. I compose narrative in the morning, marketing plans in the afternoon (day job) and my fiction marketing plans in the evening. I have been trained.  For one-third of my military career I broke Soviet war plans, the next third wrote US war plans, and the remaining third puzzled over Soviet deception (Маскировка и дезинформация).

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

Codes, Ciphers and Cryptanalysis

April 1, 2012 By

The Centerville Code

Justin A. Day (pseudonym) with  Jan Weeks published The Centerville Code forty-two years too late for me.   It is a 10-13 year-old boy adventure book where the heroes require facility in cryptanalysis––the reading of codes­­.  It is the type of story I read as a pre-teen and had I read it forty-two years ago, I would have understood cryptanalysis and would have been transferred to 6950th Security Squadron, Chicksands, England rather than the 553rd Reconnaissance Wing,  Khorat, Thailand.

In July 1969 I arrived at the Signals Intelligence officer training school at Goodfellow AFB, San Angelo, Texas to begin a life of adventure.  A callow farm boy grown even more so at the UW Madison,, I had rarely left Wisconsin in my first twenty-one years.

USAF Security Service

I began the course in August. The first weeks were a continuation of college from which I graduated with a 2.89 GPA; college was memorization and tests. The military training was memorization,  excruciatingly boring, which military training tends to be, and until the shit hits the fan when you deeply regret not spending twelve additional weeks dry firing on the range or blind-loading grenade launchers.  In late August 1969 we began the six-week codes, ciphers and cryptanalytics block.  It could just as well have been an intensive six-week Kalahari !Kung course of tongue clicks with glottal stops for all the sense it made.  One’s assignment choice was based on class rank––first in class got first choice.  Cryptanalysis is not a discipline which, if you stare hard and long enough, it sticks at least through the examination.  I flunked every test and as a reward was assigned to South East Asia.  I came later to understand that I was dyslexic; I transpose letters and numbers.  It is a genetic defect which is mostly a defect when breaking codes (in the old days, before Cray computers), a task composed of a long series of handwritten computations where a mistake at step 4 cascades into an utter and complete chaos by step 57. [Read more...]

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

Reformation and Counter-reformation–Traditional Publishing and Indie Publishing

March 16, 2012 By

Peasant Wedding; Pieter Brueghel

I am a Germanophile. My Wisconsin farmer-neighbors were first and second generation German immigrants.  I went to high school with the Greutsmacher, Schenk, Meyer, Schmidt, Langenkampf and Gatterman… families.   I served in Germany about ten of my twenty soldier years. Two of my five children were born and baptized at 2nd General Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.  I speak German.  I know the Protestant Reformation and how it changed the face of Germany.  I know the Catholic counter-reformation, and how it changed the face of Germany.

On 1 March 2012 I received my first Amazon payment upon breaking the $25.00 barrier, a direct deposit of $132.18.

I have a spiritual side; I go to church. I am Catholic. I am grateful. I give thanks. Whom do I thank?  I am making money with my writing. I am accustomed to the collection plate.  Here is the question­­––To whom do I tithe?   [Read more...]

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Filed Under: Publishing

Robert Olen Butler and A Small Hotel

February 25, 2012 By

Robert Olen Butler (A Small Hotel)

I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.   Al Alvarez

Robert Olen Butler, A Small Hotel

Robert Olen Butler’s novel A Small Hotel is a gem.  It is a diamond.  It is an intense moment-by-moment psychological study of a married couple, Michael and Kelly Hays.

First, full disclosure.  In 1993 Robert Olen Butler taught a two-week fiction class at the Iowa Summer Writer’s Workshop during heavy and continuous summer rains which made Iowa appear from space as the sixth Great Lake. I attended it. Robert is among a hand-full of great teachers I’ve encountered in my six decades of on-and-off formal studies. Many consider him America’s greatest living writer of literary fiction.  Perhaps. I haven’t read all of America’s living writers of literary fiction. That I admire his writing I affirm.

Second, book reviews often tell us more about the reviewer than the reviewed. We’ll see about that shortly.

In A Small Hotel Michael Hayes, a lawyer,  cannot articulate the word; Kelly, a society matron,  can not comprehend its meaning.

So what is all this trouble with the meaning of words?  What is ROB driving at?

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Sense of Deception

January 27, 2012 By

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 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.

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 female, I swear I’ll break his leg. Trouble. She’s trouble.’  “Yes, dearie,” she says to the child’s mother, touching her wrist, “You do set a beautiful table.”

CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN!!!!

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Translation to Russian

January 26, 2012 By

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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