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Absolut God: A review of Capek’s timeless satire

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

The Absolute at Large (Frontiers of Imagination)The Absolute at Large by Karel Čapek

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Absolute at Large is a deft, straightforward, drily laugh-out-loud satire on spiritualism. When a frazzled inventor accidentally invents a nuclear power engine that offgasses God, a.k.a., the Absolute, he begs his old friend and industry baron to buy the machine and get it off his hands. As its curious byproduct converts factory workers, board members, bankers, and innocent bystanders to rapturous spirituality, neither capitalism or Marxism can withstand its effects on society–and the Catholic Church is the first to admit that God has no place in human religion.

The book is full of wry one-liners and absurd humor, such as the Church’s belabored decision to baptize God into its ranks, and a dean’s indignant belief that a scholar of religion has no place believing in God. Sarcasm is surprisingly ageless; written in the twenties, the novel and its humor keep quite well, and remind me sometimes of P. G. Wodehouse’s prolific Jeeves series.

But it’s not a novel to read either for its subtlety, for its beauty, or its generosity toward humanity. Enjoy Capek for his wit and spare writing style, and his ability to lay out a concise satire despite an enormous number of characters. If you read it, read it quickly, don’t expect to get attached to the characters, and do expect its value as a novel to lie almost completely in its humor. As such, it’s a great example of social science fiction–it asks a straightforward, “What if?” and follows it through to its logical consequences.

I would have given it three stars had I not finished it in two short days. And because I’m now reading Diana Abu-Jaber’s Birds of Paradise, I can’t resist a food comparison: as fiction, it’s a savory snack, but nowhere near a full meal.

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Defining marriage, one friend at a time.

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Last week began with a phone call in the dark hours of Monday morning and ended 1,233 miles away in Miamiville, Ohio. In other words, it began with a death and ended in a wedding; and along this  arc between one human experience and another, I felt a Merlin-esque sense of aging backwards, of seeing still-young friends gathered in hope and celebration while at precisely the same time, my wife attended her 48-year-old aunt’s funeral.

A friend says that the more you cry, the more room you make in your head for information. He was trying to put a silver lining on being a frazzled medical student–but there is some general wisdom here, too. As two people who do not often cry, my wife and I felt sort of blown open by loss and love. And this is good. Because life is short, and it’s hard to remember exactly what love is, and all the forms it takes; but when I found myself crying at Mari’s bedside and several days later at Faith’s wedding, moved by emotions I couldn’t articulate, my mind kept traveling back to a wordless sense of how much I loved my wife and how much we depend on each other’s love. And from that, I felt more empathy than I thought possible for Mari’s bereaved family, and for Faith and Travis’s joyful new marriage.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about the human experience. And I probably spend more time than is good thinking about politics and arguments and fairness and what “ought to be done.” But weddings, funerals, reunions, babies, journeys, dreams at night; we can’t control those, but they remind us of ourselves in relation to other people. Faith and Travis’s minister knows this, too, because after the “I do’s,” he asked for a series of “We will’s” from the audience; e.g., “We will recognize their union,” “We will listen without judgment when they need us.” Modern marriage creates vows between all people in a community, not just the bride and groom, because those ties will be important as life gives us more and more events beyond our control.

My wife and I, we had no wedding. DADT existed at the time, and DOMA still exists. Sometimes I hedge on talking about my personal life, out of fear that when I say “wife” the person I’m talking to will startle a little behind their eyes and I’ll see it; and then have to embark on a lot of aimless chattering while they figure out whether their opinion of me is different because I’m not as heterosexual as they had assumed. (It happens about 30 percent of the time. And it’s always uncomfortable.) But this weekend at the wedding I couldn’t help talking about my wife because I missed her so much, and in return, I was met with the most commonplace and kind responses. People asked me about her. We talked about our spouses, our jobs, our homes.

And likewise, 1,233 miles away at the funeral, my wife’s family asked her where I was and said to say hi.

We are married, one friend and family member at a time, every day. And this is what I want to say: There is nothing more political than living in your own skin honestly.

 

 

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Breast cancer is not a pink ribbon.

Monday, October 10th, 2011

I spent the weekend watching my partner’s aunt in her last days of life. Maricela Ochoa passed on this morning around 5 a.m. after a five-year fight with breast cancer. She was 48. I knew her as cool Tia Mari, the actress, the activist, the 5’3″ spitfire with a voice the size of her native Texas, the woman who outlived her doctor’s dead-end timeline by over two years.

Sometime around midnight on Saturday, it began to piss me off that NFL players wear pink gloves and shoes, that the cable music channel displays a pink ribbon, that you can buy all kinds of things in powder pink to make a statement. I was standing in the living room at the head of Mari’s hospital bed, looking at the fissure lines on her skull that showed beneath her dark fuzz of hair. For hours she made choked, drowning sounds; the sound of barely not suffocating, of having a 5’3″ body full of malfunctioning organs. Her skin was faintly greenish-purple, as if the light around her bed were distorted. She had not eaten or had water in four days; and her mouth–with its trim, exact lips and perfect teeth–hung open. I wondered about the lines she had spoken onstage and before cameras, the slogans she chanted in antiwar protests, the countless times her mouth opened and closed in her life to give shape to the billowing ribbons of opinion, feeling, and confession that run through us all.

Whereas pink ribbons have absolutely nothing to do with cancer. Just like yellow ribbons haven’t got a damn thing to do with our kids who die in the desert; nor does the flag pin, that glorified tie tack, do enough to stop our elected leaders from sending them there. Not all symbols are created equal. I believe Tia Mari would agree with me that there is neither a factory nor a product designer in the world that can manufacture a symbol that makes us feel, in our very bones and tissues, how fragile we are. How fragile all of us are, and that our body’s inevitable termination demands the most constant and careful self-questioning about what it means to be brave, to have compassion, and exist as much as possible in a state worthwhile to other people.

I learned to write in a school that advises writers to tell every story as if to a dying person. More than ever, today I try to imagine dying: Like everybody else, I can’t take my body. I can’t take symbols. I have to go without language, my life’s biggest asset and biggest crutch. What matters then? If I am to be a victim of cancer, or some other awful and average killer, what matters is that the people whom I loved know precisely how much I loved them. That my wife is OK. That I spent enough of my time doing things that made me feel excited or passionate or humbled; that a few of those things give my family a feeling of vicarious pride. All good storytelling requires empathy of both the teller and the listener, so in my last days of life I hope I can still listen to a story. I want that story to be so colorful, so specific, so powerful, and so meaningful that I can’t tell the difference between its life and mine.

Cancer is a way that living things die–people, dogs, mice. It is a natural killer. Cancer dollars will never buy a satisfactory cure, because who is ever ready to leave? It is hard enough to smile for the dying. It is like trying to lift a house. I imagine Mari must have understood better than anyone that life is no rehearsal, and we need the most colorful, specific, powerful, and yes, meaningful, memories to relive when we are too weak and too medicated to open our eyes again.

Congrats, Mari. Your life is big. I wish I could have seen you act in your favorite play, but I’m a better person for at least having heard your voice, some of the strong things you said with it, and seen you just last week singing and dancing to spite your cancer. I think it’s awesome that less than a month ago you were in a Huffington Post article, and you yourself said, “We’re living. We’re human beings. We’re not just a little pink ribbon.”

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A Heretical Complaint: Reading a Loveless Gabriel Garcia Marquez Novel

Friday, October 7th, 2011

Love in the Time of CholeraLove in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I spent two weeks of my reading life. That’s how long it took to get through Love in the Time of Cholera. I read first with a kind of tingly enthusiasm, reunited with the work of one of my favorite authors. Then with a growing sense of duty. Then with fear that the novel’s sprawling backstory was really going to account for all six hundred and twenty-two (give or take) of Florentino Ariza’s lovers as he grew to old age, waiting for Fermina Daza to become a widow.

Perhaps it is unfair of me to expect brilliance from all of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels, but 270 pages in to this one, I finally succumbed to the temptation to scan. I slowed for the final fifteen pages, which reinforced my view of Florentino Ariza as a tepid protagonist. He made me think of leeches, parasites, little rodents living in the wall.

For a novel ostensibly about love, the only reciprocal love I believe is that of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour and his Haitian lover. All else feels stained by conditions, regret, empty lust, and equally empty longing. These are the faces of other loves, yes, but they lose even this credibility by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s final failure to make us feel that the love that settles between Florentino and Fermina is truly “the heart of love.” This comes after 350 pages of uninterrupted narration and our loss of respect for Florentino–given his pedophilic dalliance and his hand in the deaths of both his child-lover and the river over which he had responsibility. Maybe it’s fitting is that the book’s final image is of a plague boat doomed to sail up and down a dead river, carrying its dying lovers between pestilential cities.

One Hundred Years of Solitude left me longing to become a better writer, and Memories of My Melancholy Whores impressed me with its uncharacteristic brevity and tricky, magical ordinariness. Although Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s wisdom and insight make so much of Love in the Time of Cholera awe-inspiring to a fellow writer, after I set it down with a final thump on my coffee table, I couldn’t help thinking of Twitter’s irreverent #lessambitiousbooks game: Old Pervert’s Crush in the Time of Cholera.

Or maybe you can think of a better re-title?

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Social Media for Authors: Week 4 of 4

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

This is the final of a four-part series of class notes from the Social Media Bootcamp course, whose lessons I’ve adapted for authors. Whether self-published or traditionally so, you will be responsible for your own promotion, and this course has been an invaluable resource on how to use the Internet’s no-cost social media networks wisely–in other words, (1) without mindless cruising, (2) without resenting the Internet for eating your writing time, and (3) without the frustration of posting stuff that people ignore.

Week 4 was all about tying together the first three weeks’ lessons on how to find your audience, discover what they care about, enter the conversation, gauge your success, and correct course. The big takeaway should be a Plan-with-a-capital-P, in other words, a simple but specific schedule of what you’ll post, when, and where. So, you can put a checkmark by (1)–no mindless cruising. At the end of this post, I include Exhibit A, the schedule that I developed for myself so that you can work on one of your own.

In adapting the course for authors, as an author, I will be the first to confess my initial view of social media marketing as a hybrid monster-cross of bleak duty and embarrassing self-exhibition. Therefore, I am now a vehement advocate for Goodreads as the most under-appreciated social network for writers. Facebook and Twitter have their place, but as a network that actually gives me energy, Goodreads is my home base. My self-promotion there is limited to occasional book giveaways and a portal to some of my free resources (like YouTube tutorials and this blog). I spend the rest of my time enjoying its smart and active forums (such as the one on Middle Eastern and North African literature), and taking book recommendations.

That’s to say, Goodreads makes me strike a balance between social media participation and quiet hours offline. So, you can put a checkmark by (2)–no resenting the Internet for eating your writing time.

Finally, one of the most annoying and dispiriting aspects of social media marketing are the crickets. You know, the ones that you hear chirping after you update your status, post to Twitter, or write something on your blog. By building an intelligent plan for social media engagement, you can eliminate some of this silence. Not everything I’m trying right now is working, but my consistent attempts to improve has almost inadvertently increased my Twitter followers and blog traffic. The byproduct of an imperfect plan is information, and ultimately, more success.

Here are the three lessons I will live by for the rest of my social media life:

1. ALWAYS LISTEN FIRST!

2. The operational definition of social media is “a conversation about what my audience wants, on networks they go to anyway.”

3. Be creative!

For my detailed breakdown of what I learned and how I made my plan, see below. Note, too, that I scheduled time to take a three-day break from the Internet every month. I’ll leave you with this parting thought from the course planner, Penelope Trunk, whose advice I paraphrase here with apologies:
Blog on the border between your expertise and your curiosity. Don’t write about what you already know. You’ll come across as condescending rather than vulnerable.

+++++++++++

EXHIBIT A: SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY AND SCHEDULE

October 1, 2011

Networks, purpose, metrics

  • Blog (SC.com), to create a thoughtful and entertaining corner of the public forum that welcomes fellow web-savvy readers and writers. Measure success by hit count, comments, and invites to guest blog.
  • Blog (3PE), to provide a warm and understanding resource for unpublished writers, and promote EdLex. Measure success by hit count, Editor’s Lexicon sales, RFIs, client successes, and new clients with really great manuscripts.
  • Blogs (others’) via Google Reader, to connect with like-minded readers, writers, athletes, MENA thought-leaders, and queer women. Measure success by response to my comments, hit count on SC.com, subscriptions to my blog, and number of real connections through blog visits.
  • Goodreads, to share the passion of reading, to offer giveaways, interviews, and exclusive content. Measure success by growth of friend numbers, SC.com traffic, comments on my reviews and forum thoughts, and my own continuing desire to participate.
  • YouTube, to share knowledge in short tutorials, promote Editor’s Lexicon and 3PE. Measure success by number of views and shares.
  • Google+, to post the most interesting material from my other networks. Measure success by circle adds, engagement.
  • Twitter via Hootsuite, to stay part of the book industry conversation, share resources, find new blogs, and promote material in other networks. Measure success by followers, Klout score, engagement, share of blog and YouTube hit count.

 

Goals

  • Sell Editor’s Lexicon copies: (5-7 per week)
  • Improve engagement across the board
  • Get great clients: (1-2 RFIs per week, projects I love, client successes)
  • Establish a consistent, smart presence: (3-4 guest blog invites per year, steady increase in engagement everywhere)
  • Enjoy my reading and writing life: (Manage my time well, 1-2 hours of reading per day after writing and work)

 

The Schedule (8 hours 40 min per week)

MONDAY (1h 50)

  • Blog (mine): Resource or relevant thoughts, 1.5 hours
  • Twitter: 20 minute cruise and sharing, scheduled blog mention if applicable

TUESDAY (1h 40)

  • YouTube: Record 1-2 lessons, 1 hour
  • Blog (3PE): Share video and/or Monday’s resource, 20 min.
  • Twitter: 20 minute cruise and sharing, scheduled random weekend finds if applicable

WEDNESDAY (1h 00)

  • Blog (mine): Book review from Goodreads, 10 minutes
  • Goodreads: Write book review, post YouTube video, cruise forums, 30 min
  • Google+: Share cross-posts, 10 min
  • Twitter: 10 minute cruise and sharing

THURSDAY (0h 40)

  • Blogs via Google Reader: 40 minutes

FRIDAY (1h 40)

  • Blog (mine): Literary or thoughts, 1.5 hours
  • Twitter: 10 minute cruise and sharing

WEEKEND (1h 50)

  • Goodreads: Fun participation, 1 hour
  • Blogs via GoogleReader: Find, read, comment, 30 minutes
  • Twitter: Find and schedule for Mon. and Tues., 20 minutes

MONTHLY

  • Guest blog post or interview on SC.com
  • Three-day social media blackout, stay offline for sanity’s sake (Wed. through Fri.)

 

Random Observations:

- Twitter: posting interviews with popular novelists is almost always successful.

- Goodreads giveaways give a book a HUGE exposure advantage over any other tactic.

- SC.com blog visits on Saturdays lowest of week; don’t waste my time blogging. Go outside and have fun.

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