On Perpetrators and Puzzlement

shlomi on January 10, 2018

We’ve all seen a puzzled neighbor or family member interviewed after some horrific killing or act saying “I don’t get it; he was the nicest guy. Never a problem.”

“Yeah,” I’d snort to myself, “I’d have seen something.”

Nah.

I went to a liberal Orthodox Jewish school (an oxymoron today) back in Riverdale. Or, as everyone else called it, The Bronx.

The school was, for me, heaven. Latest (1970s era) gear, brilliant teachers, 3-day camping trips complete with art and science teacher hookups, bus tours of Washington, D.C. Some of the most amazing and brilliant people I now realize I was friends with.

I loved the place so much tht when I had my bar mitzvah I had yarmulkes made with the school’s logo. That place, and some of the amazing people in it (Mrs. Ratner, the secretary, the Doyle family, custodians and cooks extraordinaire, and a few others), kept me tethered to (relative) sanity.

Yes, yes, this story has a point. Where was I? Oh, right: heavenly idyllic place, blah blah blah. I had had a real nemesis there, a fellow student “J” whom I’d been with since kindergarten. We hated each other with the fire of a thousand suns. For good reasons on both sides.

Rabbi (later known as Cantor) Stanley Rosenfeld was the assistant principal, handling the Judaic end of things. He was determined to “make us shake hands.” And, in the end, I think he succeeded. At least, neither of us buried our hatchets in the other’s skull.

He invited “J” and I to spend Shabbat at his house (Friday evening through Saturday night). It was an apartment in South Yonkers, right near the Riverdale border. He was a member of one of the less glitz, more prayer, synagogues.

I only remember two things about that Shabbat: (1) that we hid his clothing and he chased me and “J” around the house in his underwear to get his stuff so we could go to shul for afternoon services. I think it was the first time “J” and I were partners in mischief. And, (2), when he caught me he kept twisting my wrist to get me to tell him where his clothes were. Twisted it until it broke. To my memory he was horrified and apologetic and as solicitous a vice-principal as an 8th grader might expect.

Oh, and he raped boys. The son-of-a-bitch was a serial pedophile, child rapist, assaulting his way through several Jewish schools in the Northeast until he was put away, paroled, and jailed again for breaking parole with yet another assault. And now, according to the JTA, it turns out that someone, someone I probably knew, was raped by him.

 

If someone had interviewed me about him I’d be that gormless, clueless guy, not knowing how close I was to the dragon’s fire.

Alternative Histories

shlomi on December 31, 2017

Authors of Alternative History novels (and TV series) often hinge on specific events: what would happen if Hitler won? After all, the Nazis were close on more than one occasion. Or if the creation story of Jesus never coalesced? Or, in one of my works in progress, Jewish Qabala really worked, starting with descendants of Nachmanides, entirely displacing non-Judaic systems and disrupting the search for the New World.

We’re at that time. The Angry White Men have disrupted what’s been a stable, if fluidly changing, political system. This time is, globally, a schwerpunkt, a turning point, for many futures. Futures that three years ago, in the glow of a liberal view of the world, accepting refugee in numbers unmatched since World War II, accepting people for their love, not their gender or orientation, we could not have imagined.

2016 and 2017 was that slow slide to insanity, led by der Amerikanischenführer. Toward a general-run government, toward a kleptocracy. Let’s see what 2018 brings us…

 

 

On fidelity in world-building

shlomi on December 29, 2017

It’s hard to create a new world, complete with languages, people, and the minutiae that separates the reality that is our planet and its history. In a recent population analysis of GoT, Lyman Stone drills into deathly detail on how impossible George RR Martin’s world is. Marshall Ryan Maresca has written scads of posts on worldbuilding (here’s just one).

As a writer and a reader, there’s a lot to be said for creating the right atmosphere, especially if there’s a book or five needed to write the whole story.

More than the analysis, than the facts, has to be the telling. Readers need to feel a location that’s real. They need to know that a staircase in the house leads to a door, and that the other side of the door aligns with the layout of the house. Knobs need to work as expected. Trolls should meet the expectation of the described milieu. Physics should be consistent throughout.

My last novel finished was “post-apocalyptic.” And walking through the science, as much as it made my storytelling better, makes, I think, for a more believable story than some Luc Besson movie. (Unless you see them as pure comedy and not sci-fi…)

From the bottom of the writing/critiquing well…

shlomi on December 19, 2017

I’m watching other writers and their blog posts. Some are regular as clockwork—it’s part of their marketing campaign, their name branding, and they’ve got more time (and definitely more discipline) to keep on that track. I’ll need to do it as well—just not yet, please.

Speaking of discipline, I’ve talked with a whole bunch of writers, but more importantly people who say they “can’t write” because they don’t have the time, or can’t concentrate… Or “the usual” to writers who talk to folks on the other side.

I can easily push through 4,500 words in a day, in one sitting, when I’ve got a clear vision for what the coming scenes will bring. (And as a pantser those are visions constantly changing as the characters and situations bend the reality I’d “decreed” for the novel.)

I’ve got little sticktoitiveness when I’m not sure where the scene or characters are going. That’s when I do things like dishes, laundry, shopping—and writing posts on my blog.

That little screen grab is how I keep myself at least heading in the right direction. When I’m writing I’ve got non-spoken music (or, at least, not music with English lyrics) playing. If I’m blasting through, it’s a thirty-minute timer, with the option to just hit the reset and do another. But if I’m flagging a bit, I hit the five or ten minute timer to check the news, facebook, or a little game.

When thirty minutes seems an eternity and my characters seem embedded in tree resin, well on their way to amber, I use the ten-minute timer. Hammering hard is easy when I know there’s a break in a reasonably small number of minutes.

I also use the ten minute timer for when I need to do some online research and want to make sure I don’t get sucked down the rabbit hole of “just another link.”

That’s how I’m at 72,295 words on Angels, my current novel, and how I wrote over 173,000 words on Last Run in six months of steady, non-stressed, work. And why my blogging has been sporadic. And I’m sticking to that story.

Why Charlottesville 2017 is not Berlin 1933

shlomi on August 13, 2017

This is my professional blog. I had non-professional blogs once; Facebook takes care of that need now. I do a lot of tongue-biting when something happens in the world and I’ve got this (rather unbully) pulpit from which to vent. However this is a topic that should appear everywhere, in every possible setting, for discussion and calls to action. As the son of Holocaust survivors it would be morally criminal for me not to respond. This is part of my response.

Yesterday one woman was killed and many others injured in Charlottesville. (Two state troopers also died while watching the march, but that appears to have been a tragic helicopter accident.) It’s the events surrounding it that were, with the exception for Heather Heyer’s murder, equally tragic.

The Judicial Response. The First Amendment must be upheld. Except when it generates a danger to the public. US District Judge Conrad was responsible for not only allowing the Nazis to wallow in public, but do so where they did, directly contributed to their feelings of privilege in acting as they did. In this case the Nazis were abetted by an organization that was subverted to this cause: the ACLU. Sometimes one must stand up for the right thing, not the letter of the law. This was one of those times. They’re very proud of their record, however his heinous act appears nowhere in their advertising front page. Anthony Romero, their CEO, and Steven Shapiro, their Legal Director, should pay the consequence for this blind support to the idea, and not the purpose, of the First Amendment. I was a donor. As of today I am no longer contributing to their naive stand.

The Police Response. The police failed in their primary duty. They acted like the fencing in a cage match: protect the bystanders but let whatever happened at the march, stay in the march.

I’m not trying the generalize here: there are photos and stories of law enforcement personnel who did an amazing job in a terrible situation. The African-American officers who stayed on the line, who kept their cool should be models for white officers around the country. They did what many white cops couldn’t do at a simple traffic stop or “quality of life” incident.

My focus is on the city leaders, and Joint Terror Task Force (FBI + state troopers + local law enforcement) that managed the response to the planned event. It was their orders, their strategy, and their actions that allowed this to flare from a meandering of pathetics with flags into a race fiot with all the trimmings. Heads should roll at the top for this.

Religious Leaders. As much as the fascist rabble might want to glom onto it, Christianity is not about fascist, nationalist supremacy. While the idolaters in their megachurches sky grifted, many of the local religious leaders stood as a barrier between the sides. That picture on the right? Those aren’t soldiers, those are Nazis. And the moneyed religious white world was silent. (Yes, a generalization, but an accurate representation, I think.)

Nazi leader response to You-Know-Who inactionThe political response. This is the most obvious, most damning, most egregious part of the riot, more, perhaps even, than the actions of the Nazi thugs and fascists emboldened by their snowflake white privilege. Orin Hatch, someone with whom I have little in common, came through in the style of an old-school politician, as did Senator McCain, who‘s folks wrote a short, sharp condemnation as soon as the events occurred.

Der Amerikanischenführer, the cretin with a finger on the button of nuclear immolation, blamed the “many sides” for this. See note on left from one of the organizers of the riot and murder spree. How the Republican Party, which he leads, cannot bestir itself to distance itself from this blot on American history and culture is beyond me.

My ex had to talk me out of painting “Hail to the Thief” in 2000 after the election fiasco. But for all his flaws, and the many mistakes that cost our country too much “blood and treasure,” W understood what the role of a president was supposed to be. Defend and protect The Constitution. This, this person has not an inkling of his required role.

Yesterday was a sad day for America. Yesterday we learned where our leaders stand when faced with a political base gone gangrenous. Apparently, just standing there is the response.

My heart aches for those injured and the Heyer family. My blood boils at the thought of having to deal with Nazis, a generation after my parents barely survived their encounters.

On Short Stories and Novellas

shlomi on July 7, 2017

One of the agents with whom I spoke at the recent Writers’ League of Texas Agents & Editors Conference expressed interest in a set of short stories if I could also stick a novella in there. At least, that’s what I thought he said, but it was loud… Anyway, I’m already shopping “Upline,” a story set in a universe where life begins at conception and the government’s now having to handle the inevitable consequences, intended and otherwise, of that constitutional amendment. I’m shopping but also having workshopped at the next ArmadilloCon.

I started out with a novel that fell apart, then parts reconstituted into another novel which was (rightly) heavily snorted at by folks at the Slugtribe writing group here in Austin. Then the short story pulled a Hera.

Sunday, fresh off the conference and a great chat with an agent about a couple of other book projects, I finished off another story in that universe: “Transfer Point.”

Tuesday, while topping out Last Run, the novella plot dropped. all at once. It’s an embarrassment of riches, it is. Focus, with agents looking for specific material, is more important than ever, and I won’t deny feeling nervous of not keeping it all together. Creativity wars with editorial control meets marketing and… oh… a day jobbe!

I read several author blogs, and there’s a lot of “pro” discussions (some of it pretty damn awesome, like Marshall Ryan Maresca’s site. But I haven’t seen many “struggling” sites. Hopefully I’m not TMIing out of any future seat at the “real authors” table.

Happy Fourth!

shlomi on July 4, 2017

I grew up suspicious of a country where they lived stealth lives. My dad never wore a kippah (head covering) at work. A fedora on the way in and on the way home worked, but blatant Jewish exhibitionism was something he shied from at Luxor International, which he inherited from his father. A city where “our folks” were kept out of Fieldston area in the Bronx. Where accusations of god-killing were part of hanging in Riverdale, by almost every measure a “safe” place for Jews, if not any tinted minority.
I moved to Israel, to be with “my people,” where I was told I wasn’t, because I wasn’t born there and therefore couldn’t have an opinion. Of being a “Saboni” (soft, like soap). With all that. I never intended to leave Israel.
And then I did, moved to a strange, arid version of America I’d never experienced, but which resembled, in flora and fauna, the Galilee of my past life. I held my mental nose for years.
And then, over the years, I saw the promise of America, buried under layers of vapid manners and marketing. It’s taken close to a quarter century, but I’d begun to embrace the promise of this country, especially as Israel has slid down the slippery slope of ideological and religious fanaticism.
Promises in danger of breaking. A future squandered. A militant, anti-intellectual theocracy is in the offing, a front shill for the cold calculation of Mammon worshipers who cynically used religion and the fear of the Other in a way scarily reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
But it’s not. We still have the rule of law. As a favorite writer of mine said in a book about dangerous foes, “if they could all get pointed in the same direction for more than five minutes, they’d be dangerous.” We have jurisdictions from cities to counties to states to the federal governments.. And courts. And press.
We have attacks on the independence of all of these, along with a worship of the military that’s gone well beyond appreciating their service, while not providing its veterans with anything close to the care accolades might lead one to expect.
We have the power of the ballot box and, frankly, the demographics are on our side. The old white folks, the scared, disempowered-while-simultaneously-privileged young whites. The hate groups. They’ve lost, which accounts for their panic, and this election.
It’s not too late to fight for our country. And I’m sticking it out, because, crappy democracy that it might be, it’s the best one around. Still. Happy Fourth!

 

Words, Books, Memory

shlomi on May 31, 2017

As a Jewish atheist I enjoy the rituals of my people. While I don’t enjoy laying t’fillin (putting on phylacteries)—although I remember how—I’ve always had a visceral sense memory when seeing or touching the prayer book my dad used.
I have the second one he had in my lifetime. The first, a Shiloh edition daily prayer book, was made of relatively normal linen paper, had almost disintegrated by the time I was ten. It wasn’t really unusual: kiddush with my dad entailed dribbling at least a little wine on the pages, and havdalah, when separating from the Sabbath, adds wax to yet more wine.

My current one, with whatever chromo paper was extant in the 1970s or 1980s, doesn’t shy from absorbing the waxy fats of the Havdalah candle, nor the dribbles of wines wending from horrific Manischewitz to actual red, dry wines.

Seeing, feeling… even smelling these remnants of my former life, my belief life, trigger more than just memory. They bring to the fore, for me, the belief that we can strive to be better than the species. That we can transform the anger, hate, trivial, niggling, negative feelings into something… more. Something that elevates us, as humans, as homo sapiens sapiens, from the troglodyte slaves of hateful religious dogma to individuals of thought, laughter, and action bringing up the level of humanity, instead of sinking what we find to some lowest common religious denominator ensuring that all lose to guilt, anger, and anguish.

Instead of experiencing the transubstantiation of plebeian thought to anger and tempora mores, let’s see if we can’t bring to the fore those flutterings of love from that which brought us happiness, and joy.

Because the alternative is the cataloging of sin, transgression, and propinquity instead of the formless, incalculable, effervescent moment of thought, pulled from the past to the present.

Thanks to Choir! Choir! Choir! for the acoustic background to this piece. Ground Control: we’re still here (although they didn’t do that, they did this).

 

Bravery

shlomi on May 28, 2017

I have a character in the short story ShutEye who gives her life for a love she knows she can never have, because it’s the right thing for the greater good. There’s a character in Best Shot (being shopped) who will do anything to get the right photo.

These characters are trivial, flickering shadows in comparison with the real ones. On this Memorial Day weekend there are the obvious ones who fought and died, some knowing their actions would certainly kill them, to save others. The young and the idealistic are great for cannon fodder (said the cynical ex-soldier) because we believed in the true rightness of our cause. The brave are a category apart from that: they are willing to sacrifice themselves to save or help others. For examples, look no further than the American Congressional Medal of Honor stories. Every war has their heroes, from Afghanistan & Iraq to the Vietnam War, back through the Korean conflict and of course World Wars One and Two. And every country has its fallen who died bravely for their military cause.

Yes, one can argue whether the war was justified, or served its purpose in the most horrible of methods. But this is about personal bravery, not the religion- and drug-fuels acts of cowards and terror-mongers. The same Medal of Honor rolls tell the stories of bravery during what they call the “Indian Wars,” which today the world (excepting the current US administration) would call “genocide.” These men were, however, brave in their actions, if not the moral righteousness that history best describes.

Bravery is without border, without nationhood. It’s a person deciding to do the right thing as they see it.

This weekend we have two more recently fallen, and another seriously wounded, protecting their country from enemies domestic. Without uniforms, without preparation, without patriotic pep talks or camaraderie. Bravery comes from within, and the ‘spur of the moment’ comes in part from purity of thought. Neither were there under orders, of with a unit. Their bravery was as true and real as any from the Congressional rolls of recent decades.

Friday night a domestic terrorist apparently tried to attack two women in hijabs on a commuter train in Portland.

If Congress can honor a Arnold Palmer, a golfer, with the Congressional Gold Medal, it certainly, at a very minimum, honor these three men for their service to this country, fighting against terror.

 

Nazi Anything

shlomi on April 24, 2017

Sometimes writing takes a back seat, as it should, to reality.

We spend a lot of time, in this Trumpian, Facebookish era, endlessly macerating previous texts, quotes, and media. It’s easier, it’s true, to quote others than to write one’s own clever words. Of course, some folks’ clever words will stand for ages:

People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people. (Alan Moore, from “V for Vendetta”

Writing is hard. Quoting is easier.

Memes are easier remembered than created. And easier appropriated than created. And memes, by the nature of their being, are slippery viruses that get to all kinds of places you might not consider.

This is difficult. It’s difficult because I’m a child of Holocaust survivors. My mom from Auschwitz, my dad from a nameless slate of forced labor camps. My aunt, one of Mengele’s survivors, was the only close relative to make it through those years. My grandfather, who survived by the grace of a Polish, Catholic farm family by being hid in their attic (his Polish neighbors burnt down his farm after my grandfather testified at their denazification trials).

I’ve faced Nazis (and forebore from killing them, what with this being a democracy and all.) America, after keeping Jews in the line of fire and bringing Nazis back to America after the war to aid in their rocket research, has been fairly good to my people. It gave my parents a home, and a home and opportunity to many of my kind, including the mafioso, the Nobel Prize winners, and the awesome, awesome, everyday people.

Mr. Seinfeld brought humor to American television, in a vapid, aimless way. While I ever found his show funny, he is a pretty good standup comic, and I wish him no ill.

The “Soup Nazi,” however, was definitely not a bright spot in his writing resume for that show. His parents were foreign-American: his dad fought in World War II, and his mom was Syrian-Jewish-American. And he spent time in the early 90s in Israel on a kibbutz. He had to know about the sensitive, “it’s still too soon” aspect of calling people Nazis under any reasonable circumstances.

But his dad was a US soldier. And US soldiers had no problem talking about krauts, spicks, japs, chinks, and gooks. It’s the nature of soldiers and their governments to demote their enemy to non-humans. I know: I’ve been a soldier.

So, the “Soup Nazi” was written, first to paper, then to episodic television, and eventually, became a meme. It was funny, ugly, and therefore quickly absorbed into what passes for the American etymological memory.

We were having a good meeting, this manager and I. He is a sweet, kind, honest, funny, straightforward married dad of a young child. He chuckles, a grownup version of a giggle, and he reminds me of myself, in the 1990s, at an IBM subsidiary, trying to empower and feel for my employees. My contractors. My peers. The world around me.

“I want you to be the documentation Nazi, if you—” he said, as we discussed process in his nascent group.

“Don’t ever say that again,” I said. “My parents were in the Holocaust. My father was in labor camps. Today is Holocaust Memorial Day.”

I’m very bad at reading faces, and expressions. I think he was shocked and taken aback (who wouldn’t) at my statement. I _do_ know that, from the tone of his voice, he was surprised at my reaction. And genuinely, honestly, deeply, sorry.

So was I. In some way, I was surprised I didn’t lose it. He said this on the Holocaust Memorial Day. He said this hours after I’d listed, carefully, clinically, the names and dates of all my my immediate family who died in the Holocaust. And how they were people, not numbers. Not even the number carved into my mother’s skin, until, after the war, she seared it from her flesh. 72197.

I can’t help me; I’m the creation distillation, and essence of what my parents, their actions, their family, my actions, and my family, have created. And I can’t help him, not that he needs it, a happy, funny, forward-looking person who wants the best for those around him.

But I can cry, without stop, at the surprising pain of this jab, silly, memetic and trivial though it may be.

And, after breathing, a viewing of “V for Vendetta,” and a possibly unhealthy dollop of wine, I realize that the Nazis really are dead. They’re not making soup, or making fun of it. They’re not standing in front of gun show, advertising their fear. They’re not doing anything. Their power is a function of their reach. And their reach, delusions of the fascist right aside, is the length of their small arms and even tinier hands.