Chess and Matinis at Six Below I dug out my martini shaker tonight, in spite of solemn vows made on a number of occasions, to toast my buddy Casey, who lived here at Harmony House for nearly ten years while he was a student and later a computer guy at Hampshire College.

I recall sitting on the front porch sipping martinis with Casey when it was six below. With our lap rugs and longjohns we were proof against the elements. We would play chess and indulge our nicotine addiction and share our observations of the world -- a lot like James Spader and William Shatner on Boston Legal.

We played games from the wonderful chess books by Irving Chernev, as well as games of our own, of course, many of which we attempted to record. When I try to play them out, though, I find there's almost always a move missing which makes them hard to reconstruct -- must have been the martinis.

Casey was new to chess, so I had a few decades of experience in my favor, but it didn't take long for him to hold his own, and eventually he beat me more often than not. We generally played the King's Gambit because the games tend to be brief, one way or the other. If Black jumps on his offensive possibilities right off the bat, he can often gain a quick win, but White has lots of chances, too.

I remember we were both spellbound playing out the games of Petrosian, the master who won by retreating. Of course we could never have reached that level of understanding without Chernev's brilliant commentaries.

Then Casey set up a monitor on the porch and we watched all the Bob Hope Bing Crosby movies and three or four seasons of Sex and the City, and a season of Down Under. It was very interesting to compare perspectives, the twenty-something and the forty-something.

I learned a lot about the unique universe of Hampshire College and shared bits of my world as a stockhandler at Yankee Candle.

In the end a confluence of psychoses among the housemates obliged Casey to decamp, but those psychos are all gone now, and it seems right and fitting to sip a few matinis and recollect a rare friendship.  ¶ 8:41 PM 0 comments

  A Little Taste of Heaven This Xmas season I stopped listening to the radio and plugged in my tape of Carlene Carter and some of her aunts and cousins and sisters, known variously as the Carter Family or the Carter Sisters.

I reckon it's the closest I'm likely to come to listening to the Heavenly Choir. Not only do they have great voices, they each have a lifetime of learning to sing together, and on top of that they sing songs that really capture the spirit of America in times past.

Grandpa A.P. Carter roamed across the country gathering folk songs and his children and their children have grown up singing them. I suppose their children's children will too. It's a wonderful gift that's been passed along over the generations.

Carlene gives us a glimpse of what it was like to grow up in the consummate musical family in her tribute to Mother Maybelle:

"We'd be way down the road by the break of dawn,
Biscuits and gravy and a truckstop song.
In a world of my own, I saw what I saw.
In the rearview mirror
I got a wink from my grandma.

"And if I could change one thing in this world
I'd go back to the days of Grandma and her girls
Singing sweet and low..."

I can't find this record in Carlene's discography, so I don't know who exactly is on it. My friend Dave Pinkerton made it for me.

It has some of Carlene's great songs like Quarter Moon, Ten Cent Town and I Fell in Love, (check it out, complete with chicken guitar) but it has lots of beautiful old tunes, too, like Fifty Miles of Elbow Room and The Little Brown Church in the Dale and The Banks of the Ohio.

I've listened to this tape hundreds and hundreds of times and I still get teary every time. There's one song by Dave Loggins called Natural Life that gives me shivers up and down my spine. The last verse goes like this:

"When I die, I hope my soul will go to heaven
'Cause I know that I'm just passing through this world,
But I believe that God gave everyone an angel
Just to have a little taste of Heaven
While living here on this Earth."

I've sure had my taste, and I reckon she knows who she is. Merry Christmas, cupcake.  ¶ 2:24 PM 0 comments

  Tunisia's Luckiest Puppy One of the funner aspects of working at a travel website is traveling vicariously around the globe with lots of great writers and great people. Like Sony Stark, for instance. I get tired just reading her blog! Here she is in Tunisia with that nation's luckiest puppy.
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  Voting Decency Off the Island I remember when I first heard the word "lifestyle" thirty or forty years ago, and it gave me the creeps. It suggested that you could live in a way that might be different from your immediate neighbors, but would be identical to millions and millions of other people, nothing unique or personal about it, like the houses they build these days.

I have never watched the television program Survivor, either, but I've seen snatches of it and heard about it, and it has always given me the creeps, too. While channel surfing, I saw one part where a woman was talking about a musician and a guy who made people laugh.

She said he was a nice enough guy, but, she said, "You wouldn't want to feed him."

At the time I thought, "This is laying the groundwork for the time when the young people of America, once Social Security becomes an unbearable burden, decide to convert an enormous liability -- Social Security recipients -- into a valuable energy resource." All you would need, after all, is a high-tech after-burner.

Well it turns out reality television gives someone else the creeps, too, Francine Prose, who wrote "Voting Democracy Off the Island: Reality TV and the Republican Ethos" in the March 2004 edition of Harper's, which someone left in the sauna at my health club.

I gather that, on Survivor and other reality shows, they have teams, but ultimately you can't win without betraying or at least outlasting your teammates. And millions and millions of children are watching and learning.

Prose enumerates the values implicit in the universe of reality television: "the vision of a zero-sum society in which no one can win unless someone else loses, the conviction that altruism and compassion are signs of folly and weakness, the exultation of solitary striving above the illusory benefits of cooperative mutual aid, the belief that certain circumstances justify secrecy and deception, the invocation of a reviled public enemy to solidify group loyalty."

And she point out that these are "the exact same themes that underlie the rhetoric we have been hearing [in 2004] and continue to hear from the Republican Congress and our current administration."

It's no coincidence that Dick Cheney is heavily invested in prisons. The Republican vision of the world is like the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" when the angel Clarence takes Jimmy Stewart on a tour of the world as it would have been if he had not spent his life working at the Savings and Loan helping people buy homes and build decent neighborhoods.

They go to a town called Potterville, named for the Scrooge-like, Cheeny-like, banker in the movie, which is all bars and pawn shops and strip joints and liquor stores, and, of course, prisons.

To illustrate what I'm trying to say, let me pose this question: How would Jimmy Stewart, one of the most decent people who ever lived, who served his country as a bomber pilot in World War II, have fared on Survivor?

Nice enough guy, but you wouldn't want to feed him.

We can't let children watch this crap without telling them how sick it is. What kind of world do you want to live in?  ¶ 8:07 PM 0 comments

  The Voices of Children
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  Mortality as Inspiration It's a kind of stiff upper lip holiday season for my family since three of our number are battling cancer. We are very close-knit, so we're all anxiously waiting for news and trying to help out the best we can.

As always with this disease there is so much uncertainty, which might be a blessing because it leaves room for hope that the degree of scariness will be reduced. We lost a beloved cousin to a very fast-moving form of cancer years ago, so we know what the worst outcome is like.

It reminds me of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. It is when her sister dies that Jo March (Louisa) sees that the life she has known will one day pass away and no one will ever know anything about it unless...

That's when she stops writing silly (but fun!) adventures and starts writing the novels that made her famous.

When you think about it, this idea can be generalized for writers everywhere: Your entire world, all of life as you know it, will, much sooner than you think, pass away forever. Is there anything that you love, that brings you joy, that you would like to pass along to the poor souls who come after us?

Millions of people all over the world know all about the March family and draw inspiration from their story because one person took the time to set it all down in a way that people would enjoy reading.

Admittedly, all those millions of people and all their books will be dust, too, one day, but it's a way of passing along something worthwhile to the next few generations and setting them on the right path so they can do the same.

I think there's another lesson for writers here, too: You don't have to be inspired. You just have to put down what you see.  ¶ 9:10 PM 0 comments

  I want to be like Mommy
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  Improve Your Writing Skills I mentioned in my last entry that reading Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail will improve your writing skills. Give it a try! Here's a selection. I don't think anyone, even Lincoln, even Churchill, ever used the English language so well. Maybe because it appeals to me so directly as a father:

"We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

"Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, 'Wait.' But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society;

"When you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people;

"When you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: 'Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?'"

That's just a taste. Read the whole thing and you'll be the next Kurt Vonnegut.  ¶ 8:48 PM 0 comments

  Writing for the Web Our family is praying for my Uncle Nat [Max's father and my godfather] who will be having surgery tomorrow. Not many of us are church-goers or perhaps even religious, but at certain times, religious or not, we pray.

Max has gone down to New Jersey, and I'm holding down the fort. I'm very thankful for the competence of the staff at the GoNOMAD Cafe. They know how to make decisions and that means I can focus on the website, where I have to say, we are publishing some of the best stories I have ever seen. And we have always put up great stuff.

Wednesday I'll fill in for Max in a class on writing for the web, and I've been batting around ideas. I've hosted writing groups for many years, worked with freshmen writing their first college papers, and, in my present post, edited travel stories from writers all over the world.

The advice you give has to be appropriate for the students' level of development, so I think I'll ask for a show of hands to see how many have written something they're proud of, then a show of hands to see how many have written something that really surprised them.

Then I think I'll touch on three points about writing in general. The first is: if you want to be a writer, write. Sounds simple, and it is. My senior year in college, two housemates and I took a course called Daily Themes. You could get a B by writing 300 words a day, and it could even be the same word over and over. We wrote a stupendous amount of crap, but all three of us produced something that really surprised us.

My own offering, Aboard the Mothership, was published in the Yale Literary Magazine, which, I'll have you know, is not for blockheads.

Anyway, the second point is: if you want to be a better writer, read great writers. What you read has a tremendous impact on what you write. My advice to all writers has always been to read Lincoln. The Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural are quintessential Lincoln, but I try to read everything he ever wrote, even his terrible poetry.

And don't forget to read Martin Luther King. Everyone knows the I Have a Dream Speech. Have you read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail? You can't read it without becoming a better writer.

Thirdly, and this is obvious, too: write to the point. Don't take off on tangents, however interesting they might seem. You have to focus. Prune your writing of excess, pretense or falsity. You might not have much left, but that's the real stuff.

I'll try to skip over these points fast if I get the sense that they get it and speak more specifically about writing for the web. Certain bits of information fit in a tweet. Others fit in a Facebook entry. Others fit in a blog entry. Others fit in a GoNOMAD story or an essay in the New York Times.

In all of these media, I believe you will find that it's best to rely on the simple declarative sentence. Sentences are like donkeys -- best not to overload them.

Then there's the line that travel writers walk between telling us only about the destination, so we end up with a Wikipedia entry, or telling us too much about themselves, what we call oversharing. That's usually people who fancy themselves the next Hunter Thompson and want to tell us all about what their Uncle Ernie always said.

Readers want to hear about your journey, but they don't want to wait sixteen paragraphs to find out where you went.

Then we can talk about Search Engine Optimization, key word use in body text, and esoteric stuff like that. Gee, blogs are a great place to bat around ideas.  ¶ 7:10 PM 0 comments

  The Shadows of History I saw a documentary about a guy who carved totem poles somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. He said he loved working with sharp tools. I think that's a lot like editing a really good story. It's more fun than work.

My editorial cup is running over at GoNOMAD with stories from Max Hartshorne and Cindy Bigras, New Zealand, Sarah Banks Hartshorne, Oaxaca, Kent St. John, Papua/New Guinea, Sony Stark, Switzerland, and Kelly Westhoff, How to Travel Together Without Killing Each Other.

On top of that we have a really first-rate new (to us) author, Sophie Ibbotson, who sent us a great story about Dead Goat Polo in Kyrgyzstan.

Still I have to say the greatest pleasure this week was putting up Roman Skaskiw's story about Visiting Free Ukraine. It reminds me of James Michener's Iberia, not a work of fiction like Michener's other works, but a travelogue that combines a personal journey with an exploration of the history and culture of a country.

One part of Roman's story that I find particularly moving is when he talks to his relatives about the Soviet era.

"I heard of people who were taken away for fighting the Soviets, for criticizing the Soviets, for supporting Ukrainian nationalism, for being wealthy, for being university professors, for being writers, for singing Ukrainian folk songs in a pasture, for being related to someone who was deported, for nothing..."

"Peasants are a silent people," Solzhenitsyn wrote, "without a literary voice, nor do they write complaints or memoirs."

I felt I was helping to tell a story that might otherwise remain forever untold, not so much in the interests of justice -- it's a bit late for that -- but in the interests of truth.

I think it's important for us to hear how children betrayed their schoolmates and their families and how people tyrannized one another to serve a totalitarian state. It's a lesson that applies to all humanity. And we all know what happens to people who don't study history.  ¶ 8:43 PM 0 comments

  Things Left Undone .

When I was a choirboy at St. Paul's Church in Dedham, Massachusetts, after we had marched out of the church, we stood there by the door while the Reverend Rudy Rowell pronounced what I guess they call the benediction.

I can still hear his stentorian tones: "For we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us, etc. etc."

Without doubt I have done numerous things which I ought not to have done and I hope I have learned all I could from these mistakes. But after you've learnt what you can, you have to move along.

"Done's done," said my friend Roger Patt one day, and it was as if he had snapped his fingers and cleared up a lot of stuff for me. "Done's done."

Undone -- now that's something else again.

This weekend I had a wonderful dinner with some friends from college, but they were so... successful, and so... happily married. They were retiring from distinguished careers and I am still trying to ascend the first few rungs of Maslow's hierarchy.

It prompted a few reflections about my life, which has been wonderful, but which may not have been all that it could have been in terms of accomplishments.

And for all you young people out there, let me offer this insight: While I regret doing those things which I ought not to have done, that's over and done with.

The greater, open-ended regret is having left undone those things which I ought to have done. Those undone things stick with you. I'm not exactly sure what they are, and it is a bit late, but I think I just might get started on them now.
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