Category Archives: musing

Tempus Vuggin’ Fugit

A guy is playing a distorted electric guitar through a wah-wah pedal– some groovy rock and roll guitar, as the freaks used to say.  I remember doing that, over a simple three chord vamp highly conducive to every possible bluesy invention.   4-14-06 it says next to the title of the song.  Eleven years ago yesterday! Jesus, tempus really do fugit.  

I am walking up a long, steep hill from the Hudson River to a graduation party.   My mother, now dead almost seven years, was alive and I was talking to her on the phone as I walked.  It was June, sunny and humid, and I didn’t notice how hot, until I arrived at the party soaked to the skin.  My host gave me an iced drink, a mojito, maybe.  It was cold and delicious and I was dehydrated, it went down in a couple of draughts.  I had another.  I just about emptied the sun-room, walking in glistening as if just doused with a fire hose pumping sweat.   Two remained, a mother and her son.  The woman asked how I was doing.  As I began the third cold mojito it all flooded out. Talk about fire hoses.  

My mother was toward the end of her long death, my daily calls to her in Florida the highlight of her days, my visits even more so.   I’d just spent a solid month with her, every waking hour, the second two weeks in New York.  Towards the end of that month I had to take care of several court cases and an imperious young judge solemnly read me the redundant letter of the law, although I’d already done everything in anyone’s power to protect an old man from eviction, had, in fact, indefinitely put off the eighty year-old’s inevitable eviction.  

The young judge was performing for two law students he had on the bench with him, to show them what a judge’s day is like, how he conducts business.  As the law students looked on the young judge read our agreement and agreed I’d done everything anyone could have done in this case, that the stipulation was not only reasonable and well-drawn, but the terms where generous, under the circumstances of the $13,000 in rent arrears.   He refused to sign off on it, though, which is what I needed him to do so I could dash off to the NYCHA part and get out of court before it closed for the lunch recess.

“Judge, with all respect, I don’t have any other arrows here in my quiver.   The only thing APS can do for him is get him an Article 81 Guardian.  The guardianship application will stay the Housing Court proceeding until someone can place him in alternative housing.  I wish there was another plan, but he has no income, is not a U.S. citizen, owes over $13,000 in arrears.   We can’t get a grant to pay the arrears, Article 81 is, sadly, the only option.”

 

“Yet,” said the judge seriously, “you didn’t bother to ever meet with the tenant to find out what his preferences might be?”  

“Judge, again, with respect, this tenant is not a U.S. citizen and he has no income.  Technically, APS should not even be taking his case, which I should not mention on the record, except that Josh is a good man and won’t make an issue of it.   I didn’t meet him because his preferences are not at issue here.  If he said, for example, that he wants to move to Hawaii and have APS get him airfare and several months rent in Hawaii, how would I be able to do anything but what I am doing to protect his interests?”

“So, you refuse to meet with the tenant you are representing, or bother to even find out what he might want,” said the judge, for the record.

“Judge, again, how does what he wants enter this discussion?   He hasn’t paid rent in over a year and has no money.  The only way to prevent his immediate homelessness is by having APS apply for an Article 81 guardianship.  I will undoubtedly write an Order to Show Cause, maybe two, before they complete the Article 81, but when the time comes, I will do that.”   Josh nodded, told the judge the same thing.

The judge began digging through a pile of papers on his desk there on the bench.  He dug for a while, as I looked at Josh, and tried to keep my face as composed as possible.  The court room clock now read 12:20, if I didn’t wrap things up here soon I’d have to come back to court at 2 pm to adjourn my last case.

My mother was waiting for me in Queens for lunch.  I had five cases on the calendar and was done with all of them, but this case and one in the NYCHA part that could be quickly adjourned with a stip I’d sign and have the NYCHA attorney submit for us both.  I had one foot out the door as Josh and I wrapped up the stip, it was about 11:20, I was in good shape for getting to my mother in Queens by 1:15 or so to take her for lunch.  Not after an almost hour wait to have this important judge allocute the stipulation between two attorneys.

The stip Josh and I wrote could not have been improved by the most eloquent and exacting jurist.  The judge himself was not disputing that.  The agreement covered everything, the landlord was owed a tremendous and exact sum, and that, in light of the impossibility of the tenant ever paying (the only way to end a nonpayment eviction proceeding staying in the premises) a judgment of possession would issue to the landlord and a warrant of eviction would also issue forthwith, to be stayed thirty days, or maybe it was even 45 days, for APS to complete its application for the Article 81.   Everyone knew this sporting agreement meant my having to make at least one emergency application, two months from now, to stop the scheduled eviction.  

It was around 12:30 when the judge found what he was looking for, a memo from his boss.   The court officer took two copies from the judge and handed one to me and one to Josh.  The copies were so degraded it was hard to make out the words on them.   The judge struggled to read his own greyed out copy and finally found the language he read aloud.  The memo advised judges, in light of the vulnerability of tenants represented by Guardians ad Litem, particularly the crop of new GALs without legal expertise, to make sure their robe was extra long in the back.  

“To cover their asses,” I clarified to the college boy, when he raised his eyebrows quizzically.  His mother nodded, horrified but very interested in the jarring collision that was about to happen in Part A of the New York City Housing Court.

(to be continued, as tempus fucking fugit)

Memory– Vishnevitz

The surprisingly thin canvas of the large painting eventually had a triangular rip where a long nail had pierced it.  It was a framed painting that hung in the basement of our house in Queens, by a wire attached to its back.   The walls of the basement were wood, installed in vertical strips, by a guy named Hymie in the years before I had any memories.  I was told Hymie did the work, though I have no idea who Hymie was.  The painting hung on a large nail driven into the wood.  It was no doubt this nail that gouged the painting toward the end.  I may, as a teenager, have had something to do with that inadvertent rip.   

The painting had belonged to my grandmother, had hung over the couch in her living room in Kew Gardens, Queens.  When she and my grandfather moved to Miami Beach, the large painting was moved to our basement.   I remember my grandmother once smiling at the painting, already in our basement, and looking at me and saying that’s exactly what her home looked like, the painting was exactly Vishnevitz.   I  can picture that smile today.   

The painting was of a wide dirt road, surrounded by huge, lush trees.   There may have been a wagon traveling through it, I think there was.  What I remember are the lush, leafy trees, painted toward the glorious end of an early summer day.  It was an idyllic painting, an idealized homage to nature and the goodness of the universe.  I didn’t particularly care for the sentimental painting, but my grandmother clearly loved it.    Though it was painted, sold and purchased in New York, it was the best, and to my experience, only, souvenir of her home town, Vishnevitz in the Ukraine.    

The letters from Vishnevitz stopped coming some time in 1942, when Einsatzgruppen and local anti-Semites began collecting the local Jews in towns like Vishnevitz.   All I was ever told was that the letters had stopped coming, those unanswered letters stood in for the rest of the untellable story.  It would be fifty years before I stumbled on the Vishnevitz Yizkor book, on-line, page after page of narratives from survivors of the torture and destruction of the writers of those letters that stopped coming.  The details are horrible, every one of them.    

Watching Ken Burns’s documentary on the Civil War, a 1990 masterpiece, I learned of the massacres of surrendering black soldiers.   Ulysses S. Grant demanded this practice stop, that the Confederates treat black prisoners of war as both sides treated white prisoners of war.  Confederate president Jefferson Davis refused.  Grant stopped prisoner exchanges with the South.   As a result, prisons began overflowing with American prisoners on both sides.  One notorious Confederate prison camp, Andersonville, designed to hold 10,000 prisoners, soon had more than 30,000.   The commandant, a German-Swiss fellow, turned the place into an early version of Auschwitz.  More than 10,000 died of starvation and disease in a short time, the rest only wished for death. 

Ken Burns does the Ken Burns pan up a photograph of the skeletal body of a survivor of Andersonville.   Every moment of the pan is horrible.  A narrator reads an account by a southern woman.  She is sure of God’s terrible vengeance against the Confederacy for this crime of reducing humans to living skeletons.   Americans did this to Americans.  

Down that idyllic dirt road, through the lush, beautiful forest, we are just outside Vishenevitz in 1920, when Yetta, my grandmother was an idealistic, ambitious young woman.  In the war after the Russian Revolution Yetta’s family had housed cossacks, Bolshevik cossacks, men who had behaved like perfect gentlemen, according to her.  They hung blankets down the middle of the house to leave the family some privacy.  Perfect gentlemen, of course, do not rape the young women, or the older ones either, as many other cossacks were known to do.  These gentlemen cossacks were idealists, they inspired Yetta and her generation to envision a world of brotherhood among workers who threw off the yoke of oppression that keeps everyone killing each other for the war profits of a few cynical rich people.

“Why are you writing this, man?” asks a disembodied voice, possibly the driver of the wagon in the lost painting.  “Why don’t you call friends, make a plan, enjoy this bracing, sunny Sunday of your life?”    

I have no good answer, except that I saw the painting in my mind, with its triangular rip.   Through that rip the rest followed, as naturally as overturned Jewish gravestones followed the election of a presidential candidate endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.   The founder of the Klan, a self-made millionaire who made his fortune in land speculation and slaves, was also a self-made general of undeniable military genius.   He led small bands of men against large armies and inflicted terrible damage as thirty horses were shot out from under him during the course of countless battles.   He killed 31 men in hand to hand combat and figured he came out ahead in that count of killed horses and killed men.  

“Why are you writing this, man?”  

One day the letters from Vishnevitz just stopped.

Why Do We Pay Tribute to the Baron?

A serf boy asks his father why they pay rent to the Baron.  Not only rent, says the boy, the Baron gets ninety per cent of our crops.  And I notice, says the boy, that mom sometimes goes to the Baron’s, in his carriage, and while she’s gone you’re always in a violent mood. “Why do we have to pay tribute to the Baron, who doesn’t even seem like a nice man?”

“We pay tribute to the Baron so that he will protect us from other barons,” says the father, the boy staring at the man’s clenched fists.

Questions Raised

“While you’re on this legal tangent, why not refine what you’re doing here in the first place, Elie?” suggests the skeleton of my father helpfully, peeking out of the snow that today blankets his grave after yesterday’s heavy snowfall.   “You know, the old ‘questions raised’ from your legal writing days.”  

The question raised section of a legal argument frames the question you want the judge to answer the same way your persuasive argument, with its apt citations to precedent, will guide her to.  Raising the right question, and then providing all the reasons the judge should agree with your answer, is a large part of the litigator’s art.  Separates the winners from the losers, yo.  Worth a shot here, I suppose.

Question raised: what is the best use of your time?  

“Vague, but I like it.  Ideally, if you did not have to work for a living, were content to live as a monk, did not buy into society’s notions of status and achievement, how would you spend your precious, limited time?”

I start to think of that old commie saw ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’  The most satisfying and productive-feeling way to spend my time nowadays, seeing that without a wealthy backer one can’t launch even an ingeniously designed and cost-effective program to help the children of poor people, is writing.  I love to play the guitar, and I love to draw, but writing is something most people can understand and something potentially useful.  Let me put it this way– no matter how well you play music or draw, many people do not get it.  Simply makes no sense to them.  Words– there you go.  We all basically agree on what they mean, everyone can follow them if they are set out in an order that makes sense.

“No offense, Elie, but who gives a shit?” said the skeleton.

Fair enough.  If you have a strong point of view about how viciously the status quo is proceeding, as I certainly do, as you did, and you have the means to express it, to persuade– maybe that is a kind of moral imperative.  

“Means relatively little if you express it to a handful of likeminded people who click on your blahg to read your latest expressions of the moral imperative,” said the skeleton.

No argument here, dad.  I’ve noticed that the more devotedly vicious weasels among us, guys like Grover Norquist and his buddy Jack Abramoff and people of that ilk, are tireless in the mass promotion of their beliefs, or what they say are their beliefs.  

“Well, you have to be careful about beliefs, people actually believe them.  Like the beliefs of the millions who cast their votes for an angry, spoiled brat who can’t get enough attention or power.  You can argue, present the facts, but you won’t get very far with reason.  As you yourself have noted many times, as borne out by the sad story of my life, only direct experience that smashes your belief hard enough in the face can have any impact on what we believe.  We are largely irrational creatures, much as it may pain us to admit this.”  

Yah, mon.  The beauty part is, we are geniuses at setting up rational looking structures to support otherwise idiotic beliefs.  Think of libertarians– they believe in liberty for everybody to decide everything for themselves and that therefore the government should not intervene.  They call the fire department when their house is on fire, call the police when they’re robbed, they drive on roads built by the government, and so forth, but the government has no right to charge them any kind of tax to maintain these things.  The theory sounds reasonable if put abstractly enough: personal liberty is so important that we put it at the top of the list of what a human needs.  

“Anatole France’s great line comes to mind, the one your friend the mad judge was fond of quoting: ‘the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from begging in the streets, sleeping under bridges and stealing bread.'”  

Just so.  Think of the liberty of somebody born in a tenth generation of inherited poverty, at the mercy of everyone else’s more fortunate liberty.   There’s your living refutation of Libertarianism.  

“No Libertarian will ever see one of those living refutations, except maybe on giant screen TV, being led away in handcuffs by a militarized police unit,” said the skeleton.  

Question raised:  how to get these writings presented to a larger audience?

“Next question, please.”    

Question raised: how to present the story of my father’s largely tragic life as an uplifting tale publishers and readers will clamor to pay for?  

“Now you’re starting to make a little sense.  You know, if you type for hours every day, and make a certain amount of sense — even if you pretend you’re talking to a skeleton who can talk back to you —  but you have no plan to market and sell what you write– what do you call that?”  

Libertarianism?  

“I’m glad you find this funny.  Blessed is the man who amuseth himself, Elie.”  

Amen to that, padre.

Standing on a Phantom Leg — and Ag Gag Laws

The law gives and the law takes away.  Thank God for the laws we have that protect the vulnerable.  These laws are not the rule, but they are something to be very thankful for, to fight to protect.  Between the rule of law and the rule of violence, there is nothing to choose.

One of the most difficult things, as an idealistic young lawyer trying to make a living, was hearing a prospective client’s long, painful recitation of a brutal screwing that raised no legal issue a court could address.   One of the most useful, and terrible, parts of law school is the “issue spotting”  exercise.  You listen to a long detailed complaint looking for issues that may be legally remediable among the many equally, sometimes more horrific, parts of the story that is regarded, in its entirety, as a trifle with which the law does not concern itself.  

“You got royally screwed, no question, and I sympathize 100% with your anger at the sickening ordeal you were put through, I would feel exactly as you do,” I would begin, seeking the words to let the poor sodomized fucker down gently on his tender sphincter.  

“What they did to you was unconscionable, sickening and offensively typical.”  The words do not come easily, you have to give your professional opinion of the person’s odds of getting a case into court, having a meaningful hearing, achieving some victory with the law.   Those odds are zero. 

“This is the worst part of my job, explaining to someone who’s been brutally, deliberately screwed, against his will, that the law regards his screwing as a trifle with which the law does not concern itself.  De minimis non curat lex, as the judges say.   It’s Latin for ‘your client is shit out of luck, asshole.  Next!'” 

The issue spotting exercise is the law student’s training for hearing a layman’s complaint and finding a viable legal theory for bringing the complaint to court.  Often there is no remedy at law.   People who are severely screwed often have a hard time understanding this.

 “You agree that they fucked me up the ass sideways,” the prospective client will protest.  

“I do,” the empathetic young lawyer will say.  

“You agree that it was unconscionable, your own word,” says the prospective client.  

“I do, absolutely,” the lawyer will say.  And so on.  The lawyer knows what the prospective client cannot understand in his particular case yet–  the laws are made by powerful forces that like the idea of non-consensual sex, they like it very, very much.   Unless there is a provision in the law to enforce the rights of those who do not give consent to those powerful people, and other non-human entities, who love a little spontaneous dalliance, consensual or not, well, you have a trifle that the law does not need to concern itself with.

It is very troubling to see a rightfully aggrieved person standing on a phantom leg. There ought to be a law…  well, I agree very much.  Unfortunately the billionaire class, in conjunction with those psychopathic legal fictions called ‘persons’, with their army of well-paid  lobbyists representing the tiny, powerful group whose interests they tirelessly protect, have the most persuasive voice for lawmakers.  

Still, there is the human reflex, felt by many, to stand on a right they strongly believe they SHOULD have.  Brings us, in an odd way, to the narrow electoral college election of this unreasonable fellow we have in office now.  Millions voted for his unconvincing promise to help the little man and cut through law and everything else to get him what he SHOULD have.   A promise ridiculous on its face, as we used to say at law,  but there you have it.  His type essentially says, pretty much irrefutably:

You have no legal right unless you can enforce it in court, asshole.   Even if you have a legal right that a court will enforce, find a lawyer who will work for free or we will bankrupt you.  We will bury you in legal bills!  You really want to fight the power, motherfucker?  We will destroy you!

In this context there is a controversy, sadly non-controversial to most Americans, that is like a fiber of celery caught uncomfortably between my molars.  No floss can remove it, my tongue is constantly playing with the irritating strand every time I’m reminded of it.   I don’t know if Anwar al-Awlaki went all the way over to becoming an active al Q’aeda recruiter, as his accusers claimed when they put him on the secret presidential kill list, and after they turned him into chopped meat with a missile launched by a Predator drone.  I doubt it, but I don’t absolutely know for sure.  Neither did Jeremy Scahill, who researched the issue in depth, but he also strongly doubted that Awlaki was affiliated with terrorists and presented a good case that no evidence whatsoever of terrorist ties was produced before his extrajudicial execution.

I know, at least in the first part of his railing against the American worldwide war against Islam, that Awlaki probably felt he had a right to free speech under the First Amendment.   It’s an argument his lawyer could have made in court, Awlaki’s right to dissent, if he’d been tried, even in absentia.   As an American, Awlaki believed he had an absolute right to express his opinions, to argue against the murderous policies of his government, to appeal in the strongest possible terms to the sense of justice in those he addressed.  

The American president had a different idea and, being a brilliant Constitutional law professor brushed aside all the legal issues raised by the targeted murder of an American citizen for giving speeches the president deemed the dangerous incitement of a deadly enemy combatant.  Brushed aside all legal arguments and zapped the American citizen with a drone-launched missile.  The story forever after would be that Obama wisely and decisively took out a dangerous terrorist leader, the number two man in al Q’aeda and heir apparent to Osama Bin Laden himself, if you believe Obama’s representations about  Awlaki.

I don’t begrudge Obama his accomplishments.  The elimination of the obscene ‘pre-existing condition’ loophole in health insurance was long overdue and something every American should applaud.  At the same time, Obama handed expanded executive prerogatives to the volatile, angry man who succeeded him as president.  

Included in these prerogatives was the absolute right to say who is an enemy combatant and, based on that unappealable status determination, to take any steps necessary to make sure the dangerous terrorist is neutralized.

“Your classic slippery slope, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father.  “You heard about those ALEC introduced Ag Gag laws which call for complete opacity when it it comes to the systematic industry-wide torture of animals raised for slaughter.  In the states where these laws have been passed it is illegal to take unauthorized videotape of violence against farm animals.  

“Violence seems like a ridiculous thing to talk about in connection with animals raised to be meat.  And it is.  The standard for what is acceptable in the animals-for-food-industry, of course, is determined by industry standards.  If ten chickens per square yard of cage means you have to cut the beaks off them to keep them from pecking each other to death, so be it and there’s nothing cruel or unusual about it.  Cruel it might arguably be, but unusual?  I’m afraid not, we all do it, sir.  Industry standard.  Nothing to see here.

“Animals being raised for slaughter and sale as meat certainly have no rights a white man is bound to respect.  But here’s the kicker, Elie.  As you know, these laws allow the State to prosecute vegan activists as ‘terrorists’.  Try that ass hat on for size.   If you’re a PETA activist and you take a video of factory workers beating a cow or pig to death, you are a terrorist under these Ag Gag laws.  What can you do to a terrorist?  Some believe torture is too good for those motherfuckers, you dig?”

“But see, Elie, torture is nothing to worry about either.  That’s because our Constitution protects us against a psychopathic element of the government deciding that, in spite of treaties we’ve signed and prosecutions we’ve successfully waged against torturers from other nations, Americans can legally torture people — if we secretly redefine it and call it something else.  

“We all know Americans don’t torture unless the country’s most powerful skillfully play to the terror of the populace, which will allow such formerly hideous practices to become ‘normalized’.  You know, like if we’re facing an enemy so terrible that all measures must be employed to destroy that enemy.  You know, an enemy that has no hesitation to slaughter as many children as it takes to rid the world of what they perceive as evil.”

OK, dad.  Calm down now.  Life goes on.  

“Not for me it doesn’t,” said the skeleton.  

Not for me either, really, not all the time.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2017

The myths we live by can sometimes break your heart.  Myths have sustained humans forever, brought people together, torn us apart.  Myths can teach us the most important truths or entrench us in ignorance.  I have no insight into Christian mythology, though I have been swayed in my life by the righteous voice of a Baptist minister, a voice that could not be silenced by the bullets that killed him.    It is that Baptist minister whose life and message we celebrate today.   

Jesus, born more than two thousand years ago– if he was born at all (a book I read makes a convincing case about the total absence of contemporary evidence that Jesus ever existed) — is believed by more than two billion people to be the son of God.   God, it is written, sent His only son to preach love in a world of human hatred and cruelty.  God, the all-knowing, understood that a powerful apostle of peace and kindness in a corrupt and vicious world must inevitably wind up tortured and crucified.  And so it was.

The myth continues that because Jesus allowed himself to be nailed to a cross for a long, painful death, while being mocked, believing in Him will cleanse a person of their sins, including their original sin– a concept I am a bit hazy about, I must admit.  I am no Christian, even as I greatly admire Jesus’s message of love and generosity.

It’s been impossible for me to disentangle the Christian message of peace and mildness from the Christian history of killing and enslaving in the name of God and His son;  good Christian killing good Christian in Thirty Year and Hundred Year Wars, good Christian killing Muslim, good Christian killing Jew, good Christian enslaving Africans who are then converted to Christianity, like millions in South and Central America converted under the sword.  There are many good Christians today who are intolerant, righteous in their hatred of homosexuals, in their support of preemptive wars.

The hypocrisy done in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace and the Son of God, ruins Christianity as a myth I can take much comfort from.   The Catholic Church’s long corporate cover-up of horrible crimes, actual sins, committed worldwide by priests and the church hierarchy adds a very bitter note to the mix.

The heart of a religion cannot be judged on the actions of those who distort its teachings.   It is good to remember that today as we celebrate a belated national holiday dedicated to Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., a true Christian in the best sense of the word, a man whose life became a legend.  

Many of us were alive when King preached, when he was sent to prison for his outrageous insistence that American blacks deserved the same rights as all other Americans.  He was a hero to many decent, God-fearing Americans, even as he was hated by millions of other decent, God-fearing Americans who believed that King was a privileged Negro troublemaker who simply didn’t know his place.  

King inspired.  He spoke truth that rings across time.  See if you can listen to his Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam speech without being moved, consider the tragedy of its unheeded, irrefutable wisdom,  without tears beginning to flow.

“An unjust, evil and futile war,” he explains in his distinct and sonorous cadence.   His conscience, he said, leaves him with no other choice but to speak of it.  The time, he said, has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war.  You can read the transcript, if you prefer reading to hearing the tones of one of history’s great orators.  

The speech connecting racism, poverty and war cost him many things, his place among America’s most admired, a canceled invitation to the White House and, a year later, to the day, his life.  More on that here.  There is a strong parallel between the story of King and the story of Jesus, especially in the endings– both were ready to die to speak truth they knew would mark them for death.  

That is at the heart of our most inspiring myths; a genius who can unharden hearts and is willing to die for the truth is the rarest of humans.   I keep thinking about the millions of American blacks who still live in hopeless, inherited poverty in a nation still deeply divided about “race”.  I often think of how little has changed for millions of Americans originally from Africa, most now several generations deeper in poverty, since the sacrifice of Martin Luther King, since the outright assassination of Malcolm X.  We will never know for certain how James Earl Ray, another lone gunman, a lifelong jailbird with at best average intelligence, and no particular resources, eluded arrest during a long international manhunt after killing King.  Speculating on who would have ordered King killed one year to the day after his Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam sermon, when he was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, already deep into his work to unite those in poverty, is best left to the “conspiracy nuts”.  

I have no light to shed on Martin Luther King’s murder or the horrible coincidence of his killing one year to the day after he articulated why America must address racism, poverty and a war culture, and how all three are inextricably interconnected.   The night before his murder King gave the fiery and prophetic “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech.  Listen to it now unmoved, if you can.  

John Lewis was with Martin Luther King in the deep south.  Lewis had his skull broken by police nightsticks in Selma, Alabama, if I’m not mistaken.   Lewis has been in Congress for decades.  The other day he announced that he would boycott the inauguration of the new president.  I didn’t hear the announcement, but heard he questioned the legitimacy of this highly questionable candidate, who lost the popular vote by 3,000,000 but managed to win the electoral college fair and square, arguably, by a margin of less than 80,000 total votes in key districts of several swing states.  

The president-elect fired back, via tweet, that Lewis ought to pipe down, that he’d be better off looking after his business in his “crime-infested” district. PEOTUS also canceled his Martin Luther King Day trip to the Smithsonian’s new  Museum of African-American History and Culture.

This was a neat bit of tweeting, for a man who reacts swiftly and strongly to any provocation.   A lesser man might have burst forth with a racially charged epithet.  The genius of this reality TV superstar is to make such things perfectly clear with printable phrases like “crime-infested.”  It conjures the hateful thing beautifully.  The crime one immediately imagines is far from the Goldman-Sachs boardroom where the most lucrative crime schemes are hatched.  One instead immediately pictures dark, angry faces, disgusted by the narrow electoral college victory of history’s most divisive and historically unpopular president-elect.

I saw a clip of John Lewis on TV the other day.  He was refuting the idea that there has been no progress for American blacks since Martin Luther King’s day.   I was glad to hear him making the point, I am glad to agree.   There has been progress.  On the other hand, for millions in generations of eternal poverty, I think of an image of Malcolm’s from Alex Haley’s autobiography. There is a knife plunged deep into your back.  The knife is pulled out a couple of inches, but is still deep in your back.  That is undeniably progress, even if not precisely the full measure of progress one might wish for.

I imagine heaven, a place where good people go after they die.  I picture Martin Luther King sitting with Gandhi and Malcolm X.   They talk about history and the long, slow bending of its moral arc toward justice.   They all agree that had they lived at another time in history they would have likely accomplished little, died unknown, instead of as international icons of hope and inspiration.  

They were each blessed to have lived at a moment in history when their voices could be heard, when they could move masses to work toward a better world.  Gandhi could not have used Ahimsa to launch a successful movement for independence except at that moment when the British Empire was collapsing.   Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were preaching and organizing at that particular moment in American history, when the country was ripe for overdue change after decades of hard sacrifice by the despised. They were good-looking, charismatic men alive during the earliest days when electrifying men could mesmerize masses of people in their homes, from a TV screen.  Had they lived at any other time they could not have been known so widely or been so influential before their early deaths.  

I imagine Martin Luther King, Jr. is the angriest of the three of them up there in heaven.  He may be less angry than I am, true, less angry, perhaps, than those who must continue to protest a nationwide pattern of police killings of unarmed black youths, but I picture him angry up there.   He was pissed off in that I Have Been To The Mountaintop speech, as he had every right to be, having endured what he had.

This would have been the great man’s 88th birthday.  His father lived to be 84, so his son had a chance to live a long life.  He would have preferred a longer life, longevity has its place, as he said, but he was fearing no man the last night of his life.   Ponder that for a moment, along with the ongoing heartbreak of his sacrifice, before you head out to the mall for the Martin Luther King Day sales.

A Culture of Powerlessness

“Powerlessness is the single factor that makes you most angry, if you think about it.  Put powerlessness and frustration together, which they usually are, and you have an explosive mix. It’s at the root of all violence, powerlessness and shame over being powerless.  It’s supposed to be the shame that makes people into violent psychopaths.

“I wish I’d had this insight sixty years ago, had some time to work on it before I was given eternity to mull it over when it was already too late.  

“In fact, I am only having this thought at all due to my son, a dreamer who marches to his own marching band, who carries on this extended conversation, even though he knows he’s not really talking to me. Don’t you, Elie?”

That’s right, dad.

“To everybody else, I’m already long dead, going on twelve years this April 29th.  It’ll be seven years for mom not long after that.  Then, possibly you, motherfucker.”  The skeleton flashed a sardonic smile.  

“Seriously, Elie, I’m glad and touched that you’re doing the book.”

That’s enough of that.

“A culture of powerlessness is an engine of discontent and violence, it produces crowds of people who seethe, but there is nothing they can do about how fucking mad they are all the time. They have their powerlessness shoved in their faces over and over, they are bitches and will be slapped and handled like bitches.  The rage is like a toxic river, ready to overflow its banks and gush forth in a torrent, causing mass death.  The trick of the elites who profit from the utter powerlessness of the majority of the society is to turn the anger away from themselves on to the Other, as that vilified other is called.

“You get the lynch mob killing blacks and whites for being ‘uppity’ and causing trouble, the Ukranians, literally starved to death by the millions courtesy of fucking Stalin, taking some vodka and the satisfaction of getting to shoot a line of Socialist kykes in the heads, taking their clothes and kicking some dirt over their dead bodies.  Over and over in history massive societal rage has called for organized atrocities.  The dark side of the homo sapiens genius for organization, if you will: the pogrom, the lynch mob, war, the chanting, arm raising crowds.

“The other dark side of powerlessness is that the people who are powerless, members of the frightened herd that works for low pay to enlarge the immense profits of a few, having no other healthy outlet, often become extremely mean to those closest to them.  It’s safer to snarl at your kid than at the guy your size, younger and in much better shape, who just cut in front of you on line at the DMV.  

“Since a culture of powerlessmess keeps most people without any power in any sphere of their lives, they become peevish, bossy, and snappish.  So when you’re dealing with a powerless person, you’re often dealing with someone who seems mild mannered enough but who can deliver a nasty bite.  

“There are few happy people in a powerless culture, and these are often low status people in the society, at least as far as my experience.  These are committed and serious artists and people like that who opt out and live by their own values rather than the ‘free market’ values that fuel the engine of our economy.  These low-status people are not weighted down by and preoccupied with their accumulated failings the same way their striving, stressed out, more successful fellow citizens are.”  The skeleton pantomimed the average commuter, hunched grimly under the weight of his life.    

“Or maybe I’m just romanticizing the whole thing.  Homo sapiens has been power thirsty from the start, weak, cunning, terrified, vicious prey animals who figured out how to become the number one predator at the top of the planetary food chain.   As a species, impressive, perhaps.  On a one to one level, in a straightforward ‘power’ relationship, fucking horrifying, Elie, if you think about it for a moment.”

You’re singing to the choir director, pops.

“Hah, you know, I wonder how it can possibly be that I seem to keep hitting every note you have me sing?”  

The universe is mysterious, my father, and God is unknowable.

Merry Christmas From New York

I was headed downtown to visit friends in from far away.  After a groggy start to Christmas Day, a day that generally fills me with despair,  I was running late, well after the time I’d told my friend I’d aim for.   I had a twenty minute or so southward train ride to get there, then a short walk west.  

As you approach the elevated Number One line at Dyckman Street you can see up the track almost to the next station north.   If you see the southbound train coming around that bend, experience teaches you can catch that train if you run into the station, Metrocard in hand, and make a smart dash straight up the steep steps.  

I went through the turnstile and made my dash smartly, but there was no train.  The one I’d seen, apparently a mirage.  There was no train on the horizon either.  I noticed how winded I was, I’ve run up these stairs many times– this was the most winded I’ve been.  I walked it off.  

At the end of the platform a man was talking on the phone with his back to me.  He had a baby carriage with him.  The baby was also turned away from me, but I noticed how solicitous the man was, walking the baby carriage in little circles to soothe the baby.  I watched them absently for a moment, thinking of the human parent’s instinct, if everything falls right, to comfort their child.  I recall feeling impressed with how this guy was taking care of his baby.

The train came.  The man turned the baby carriage slightly to move his child on to the train.  I could now see that the baby was a full grown beagle, sitting very patiently upright in the baby carriage.   I made a note to tell this story to my friends when I arrived, but as things happened I forgot about it.

We exchanged handshakes, hugs and pleasantries and then my friend said “I have a small gift for you,” as if remembering some trifle.  He went into the other room and returned with the best gift anybody has ever given me, possibly the best gift anyone has ever given anybody.  “It’s really nothing,” he said, handing me a hard-shell ukulele case with the imprint of a palm tree on its shell.

Over the years my friend has mentioned a dream image he has, of himself, sitting on a porch somewhere beautiful at sunset after his work day is done.  His work would be gently but firmly bending wood, plying it, smoothing it, skillfully using tools to turn beautiful wood into a beautiful musical instrument.  In another life, he’d have loved to have been a luthier.  

A few years ago he took a course from a master luthier and made a tenor ukulele, out of beautiful wood, over the course of several weeks.  He sent me photos of it at the time and mildly self-effacing comments about the instrument when it was done.   I opened the case and there was the hand-made ukulele, a very beautiful one.  Everyone I showed it to later could not help stroking it.  It is lovingly detailed, with several unique flourishes, and finished to the texture of perfect skin or something like that.  It is so silky that it’s hard not to pet it if you hold it in your hands.   Everyone who held it did.

It plays beautifully, with a rich tone I haven’t heard from most ukuleles.   He also somehow rigged the lowest string to be in a lower octave, as on a guitar, making this uke a much more useful instrument to play melodies on.  I smiled as I played a little Django ending that had been impossible to play on my other ukes.  Sekhnet could not stop commenting on its beautiful tone, just as I could not stop playing it in the car after we left our friends.  

“What an amazing gift!” Sekhnet said, “I hope you really thanked him.”  I assured her I did.  I think I did, I’m sure I did, I had to have.  Of course, now that I’ve played it for hours, and re-tuned it to concert pitch, I’ll sing its praises some more when I talk to him tomorrow.  He’d looked at the label inside, with his name and the year he made it, 2009, and told me, since he never played it (although he certainly could), that I should have it, since I would play it.  I certainly am playing it.

I played it happily for an hour or so in the background with Sekhet’s family.  Each of them had admiringly held and petted the beautiful instrument, a few even strummed the open chord it plays if you don’t finger the frets.  I then played it all the way back to the city.  When we got back I was concerned that the constantly sleep deprived Sekhnet get some sleep.  I left her and walked to the subway to head uptown.

Being Christmas, it was only natural that the train service would be fucked up.   The high-tech interactive electronic information signs on the subway platform gave random misinformation.   According to the fancy new sign the next A train was a Brooklyn-bound one scheduled to arrive in 46 minutes (average wait is supposed to be about twelve minutes).  There was no information about any uptown trains at all.   “We’re working harder to serve you better,” I said finally to two other sour-faced men waiting for information on the uptown train to take them home Christmas night.

A moment later there was an incomprehensible PA announcement and a Brooklyn-bound A train rumbled in on the downtown platform.   Another announcement began as the Brooklyn-bound train was departing, making a great racket across the station.

The MTA had decided, in its infinite puckishness, to have the crackling, irrelevant, over-driven announcement delivered by the employee with the heaviest and hardest to decipher foreign accent.   I don’t know where this guy was born, but I’m sure the last thing his parents ever dreamed of for him was delivering this incomprehensible message to disgusted New Yorkers over the public address system moments after the end of Christmas Day. I have no idea what he said, but I do recall sincerely muttering something about fucking retards that I do not now feel very proud about having muttered.  

A dirty, smelly beggar was striking out as he made his way toward me on the platform.  He’d start to speak and get waved off.  I saw this happen a few times, found I had a single dollar bill in my pocket and thought “what the fuck?”   When he came toward me I handed him the dollar, which he dropped.  

Before he picked it up, he looked me in the eyes and asked “could you please help me out with two or three more?”  I told him I didn’t have it.  It was true.  My other bills were twenties, and outside of that, I had two pennies.  He continued down the platform and I was reminded of my dislike of people who don’t have the grace to say thanks. 

On the uptown A, which finally arrived, a large man asked “may I sit next to you?”  This is not a question anybody phrases this way on the New York City Subway.  It was the only seat in the car, and I nodded, almost imperceptibly, and without looking up from my book, only because it was the right thing to do.  

Then, because you know what they say about unpunished good deeds, he began humming in a soulful way, and turned his head toward me as I tried to read, which made his humming suddenly way too loud.  He began to sing, in the same manner as his humming, turning his head like a slow moving leslie-speaker to heighten the effect.  

He did that African spiritual-inspired melisma, making every quavering note a long, stylized, if cliched, statement of his soul.   After a few minutes of this I wanted to do something to make him stop. I thought about my vow to remain mild and kept reading.  

A seat opened across the way, and I took it.  I couldn’t hear his fucking singing from over there, and it was a relief.  Suddenly, I smelled ass, dirty feet, filthy clothes.  The smell was coming from the seat behind me, turned out to be a homeless woman.  But the smell wasn’t that bad, it was better than the fucking soul singer.  

The singer got off a few stops later and I went back to where I’d been sitting.  I watched the poor homeless woman, who appeared to be very much insane.  I thought of the almost infinite varieties of suffering in this world, and of God and the mythical baby Jesus weeping over it all, less than an hour after Christmas.  I  took out the ukulele, played a bit of Django’s version of “I’ll See You In My Dreams” and put the lovely instrument into its protective case as the train pulled into Dyckman Street.

As I walked up the hill to my apartment, carrying the perfect tenor ukulele my old friend had made, I thought of the blessings of this life. Those blessings are not the physical things everyone is taught to covet, of course, but what lies behind them, what we might call their spiritual dimension– what they represent in terms of our souls.   If the physical manifestation is also a beautiful thing, that’s ideal.

I thought of my friend’s ancient mother, now well-past ninety and noticeably much older than the last time I saw her, not that long ago.  She made mention tonight of her approaching death.  I’d never heard her speak of death, but when I quickly broached the subject of Trump, during a moment when her son had gone back upstairs to fetch something she’d forgotten, she told me that the only good in it for her is that this would be a good time for her to die.  

I told her that my mother, at the end of her life, had begged me to promise her that Sarah Palin would never be the president.  I made the promise and I’m as sure as it is reasonable to be that Sarah Palin will never be the president of the United States.  There are things as unthinkable as President Sarah Palin, but that’s an imponderable story for another time.

When I put her son’s ukulele in her hands she immediately began stroking it.   She admired it for a long time, and mused about how many other hidden talents her talented son had (he was cooking a delicious smelling dinner at the time).  

Later, sitting around the coffee table, my friend’s mother smiled, and pointed at her son and her grandson, huddled over the young man’s cellphone, looking at photos of some of the grandson’s recent architectural projects, I assume.   To her daughter, with a big smile, she said “kvelling…” This is Yiddish for a parent’s pleasure in seeing their child do something that makes them kvell with pride.  The daughter looked at her blankly and asked “who?”   

“Me,” said the old woman happily, as she pointed to her chest with a gnarled hand.

Writing in “Public”

Here’s the thing about being one of the fifty million “content creators” out here, opining in the public space that is the internet: it feels like taking a stand.   I put my stories and arguments out here to give the several people who read them, friends and strangers, my honest thoughts and feelings, set out as clearly as I can set them out.  

The craft, writing clearly and, when called for, choosing the right words to move the reader, is the same for the blahgger as for the professional writer.  Standards vary, of course, but good writing is the same whether you read it in a book or here on the ‘internets’.  

The problem with reading things on the internet is that you are often in the hands of people who are, how to put this delicately, contemptible morons.   It may be easy or hard to click away, sometimes they suck you in by the sheer shock of their violence, like the tweets of our new troll-in-chief.

Writing “in public” serves another important purpose for me, someone who feels a rising urge to be paid for writing.  It holds me to a higher standard than writing emails, or keeping a notebook.   Before I hit “publish” I have to carefully consider every word I’ve set down.  I also have to comb through the words several times to make sure they are disentangled and say exactly what I mean them to.

Are they all in the right order?  Are there extra words that are not only unnecessary but distracting, or disruptive to the flow or mood? Typos?  Have I ended at exactly the right place?  Included all the detail to make the story understandable without burdening the reader with unneeded side-stories?   When I feel the piece is clean, and says clearly what I intended to say, I put it up for others to read.

The next question, and one entirely distinct from writing well and the considerations involved in doing that, is: how to build a wide enough internet audience so that I have a “platform”?   Publishers nowadays want an assurance that you are already popular enough to invest in before they publish your work.  

If your blog is read by 100,000 people a day, and you have that many “followers”, you have a robust platform and are well on your way. Having a million followers means, no matter how well or badly you may write, that you have the ability to get people to click on your words, which sounds exactly like “cah-ching!”  If your blahg is seen by a handful of people a week, a publishing corporation would be foolish to give you a large advance, no matter how intriguing or compelling your book might otherwise seem to be.

I am not writing this piece to whine about the obstacles in front of me as I try to reorganize, cut and prepare the next draft of the 750 page monster memoir of my idealistic monster dad.  There will be plenty of time for that whining when the time comes.   I am explaining some of the reasons I, and many others, write on the ‘internets’.  

There is love of writing, a good in itself.  There’s the satisfaction of having communicated something clearly, a nice feeling to have every day.  Then there is the pursuit of a livelihood from writing, also an excellent  thing– the livelihood more than the pursuit, of course.  These are three different things– love of writing, writing well and selling writing– none dependent on the others, and it is good to keep that in mind.

I heard two very clever English chaps, reading their own audiobook about how they sell a million words a year on the internet, between them, and make very good money following the principles that made them the tireless and successful self-promoters they are. Being a good writer, says this smooth-talker, is but one part of the equation; the other part, astute business sense and energetic and ingenious self-promotion, being the more crucial part for making money as a writer.  

These fellows had a solid, and perhaps indispensable, grounding in professional advertising, copy-writing, did it freelance for years, made enough money to keep them going until they cracked the lucrative fine art storytelling market they are wizards in now.  Writing ads and writing wildly popular fiction are different genres of writing of course, but the principles are the same. 

These ingenious chaps put together a solid “platform” based on catering to the demographics of their target audience– fans of a certain type of fiction.  They then built a thirsty, twelve-mouthed “funnel” to draw others into their network and soon were creating daily interest for over a million people.  Now they had something publishers were drooling for a piece of.  But not so fast!   They were able to keep virtually all the profits by monetizing their platform themselves, as well as half of their dozen voracious funnels.  $0.005 a hit on one their funnels comes out to $1,500 a day, money that comes in handy for cross-platform promotion.

You see, old boy, this is how we do it, and with a bit of verve and elan, you can do the same, no matter how well you might think you write.  We cater to the buyers in a professionally engaging way, we build the infrastructure to produce and distribute our virtual wares, we have professional designers create beautiful covers for our virtual works– and don’t skimp on this part, readers DO judge books by their covers, at least at the cash register, and we publish what we want them to devour, leave the story at a dramatic cliff-hanging spot at the end of each book to create a frenzy for the sequel, and we keep all the profits.  This is how you do it.  

Or, you can sit alone tapping out the most beautiful prose your talent allows.  You might be an amazing writer with fantastically rich stories to tell, even valuable stories, who can say?  If this is the case, and you are not devoting as much time to monetizing your talent as you are to writing every day, you are like the batter who can consistently hit a 95 mph fastball 500 feet– in a batting cage somewhere in suburbia, with nobody to jump up and cheer or offer you the million dollar bonus your rare, work-honed skill and god-given ability would otherwise command in the marketplace of sluggers.

The Excitable Optimism of Sekhnet

From time to time Sekhnet, who meets countless people during the course of her work gathering news for a national network, reports a fascinating conversation she had that relates to my life and plans.  She brings me a business card, or contact info written on a scrap of paper and urges me to call them.   Often things come to grief, since I am not always quick to make these potential contacts.   That most have so far been in vain is no excuse for my glass-half-empty pessimism.    

She heard a bright and funny man give a fantastic talk on becoming pitch perfect at sales meetings, during interviews of any and all kinds.  He pointed out that people have one chance to make a good first impression and clinch the deal, and that there are a hundred ways to blow it.  Read his book, aptly titled “Pitch Perfect” and you can weed out many of these ways, have a crisp phrase ready, delivered in the same winning style you see before you today, saying exactly enough to make your point crisply, and not one phrase more.  

Being pitch perfect is the difference between getting a major donation, or any kind of big yes, and getting that gassy baby smile and limp handshake at the end of a meeting too long by crucial moments.  The man’s talk and style were both excellent, she enjoyed it and found it valuable.  She bought his book, which I read cover to cover.  It was excellent.  

I took the next step and contacted his office to make an appointment for the four hour personalized master class.   It was, not surprisingly, $4,000.  I explained that I represented a small, money-strapped non-profit and was cheerfully told the tiny non-profit rate was $3,600.   My silence was met by an offer to do the half course, more than 60% as good as the full one, for only $2,000, certainly our budget could manage that.  

Well, I thought, the $2,00o, a quarter of our operating fund, could go for that or for two new animation set-ups.  I thanked her, even as a bit of bile was coming up in the back of my throat.

Sometimes helpful people, hearing my idea for the child-run interactive animation workshop, have suggested I pitch the idea on Shark Tank to get funding.   Shark Tank is a show where business owners try to strike deals to get funding from a group of wealthy sharks who evaluate the ideas looking for monster profits.

Experience has taught me the difference between what I was trying to sell and something an angel investor in the Shark Tank would salivate over. In Shark Tank the family that invented the fantastically lucrative Squatty Potty was looking for millions to take their product, a short plastic foot stool that made passing stools as easy and pleasant as operating a soft serve machine, to the next level, international super sales.   The investors were looking for a credible sign that every million they put in would have a good chance of turning into ten million for them.  It is straightforward.    

If the idea is to transform a boring public school classroom into a fun ninety minute imagination-fueled, problem-solving, peer-teaching playground where kids have the final say on every aspect of the product they are producing, a short bit of stop-motion animation, a process that leaves them collaborative, energized and engaged in learning and teaching, no angel investor worth his dorsal fin will so much as stop circling to sniff that particular patch of water for blood.  

“Sounds like a great idea, you got funding?  What’s your marketing budget?”   These are the first two questions anyone bright and practical asks when I finish my brief answer to “so, what have you been up to since last year?”  

“You have to find fellow idealists,” Sekhnet has always told me.  

I was referred to a non-profit called idealist.org, signed up.  Was invited to a mixer at a bar.   Went and met the people who worked for idealist.org.  They explained all the benefits of being a member.  I joined.  I haven’t had an email from them, or anyone else on the site, in years.  

I had an email from two guys who founded a nice outfit to introduce non-conformists with big society-improving ideas, a mutual help organization for idealistic types.  They would match people up according to their skills, interests and needs.  The first rule, when you met, was to listen to the other person’s idea and needs first and think about how you could help.  In the end, their emails stopped coming too.  It was a great idea, but I guess they didn’t have funding or an adequate marketing budget or business plan.

Having lunch with the sister of an old friend the subject of the nonprofit came up.  She thought it was a great project and then told me about a woman she’d recently met, a dynamic older woman, who was on the inside of Mayor Di Blasio’s Department of Education.  She was a great lady, and good friends with this woman’s good friend.  She shepherded many great new programs through the Education Department’s doors, knew how to get them funded and contracted as pilot programs, that was her speciality.  She was, literally the perfect person for me to meet.  In fact, we’d meet for Dim Sum, with the mutual friend, and I could run the idea by her at an informal meeting, that would be best.  

That offer turned into the old can-do idealist’s phone number being texted to me, followed by a series of supportive follow-up texts asking if I’d contacted her yet.  Presumably I was supposed to set up the informal Dim Sum meeting where the no pressure chat could unfold.  I called her a couple of times, introduced myself in short, hopefully well-pitched voice mails, I texted her this and then  this.   We never met for Dim Sum, nor did I ever hear back from her.  

It reminded me of the introduction I’d had a year earlier to the director of a large arts non-profit, with a twenty million dollar annual budget.  I was told this woman, a good friend of a close friend of mine, would love my idea and her well-funded organization could definitely help.  If our mutual friend had been present at the meeting, things might have gone better, the well-funded nonprofit could definitely have helped.  As it turned out, I was chided for my defeatist attitude before the meeting, felt dread on the way to the meeting, and the results afterwards were the opposite of helpful.    

Sekhnet remains undaunted.  Her mechanic’s daughter, it turns out, by pure whimsical chance, works at a nonprofit that features creative programs for public school children in Queens.  This friendly young woman was very excited about the student-run animation workshop, gave Sekhnet her card.  Sekhnet has learned about such things, knows that I’m currently concentrating on a book about the life and times of a man nobody’s ever heard of, and told the young idealist that it might be a while, but that I would get in touch with her.  

The same goes for the twenty-one year old idealist she spoke to in the computer department at Costco the other day.   He works at Costco and is completing a business degree at Baruch.  He and his brother love stop-motion, are idealists, think a student-run animation workshop for young kids sounds amazing and want to help.  Plus, he’s getting the business education to help with funding and marketing.  Win-win-win.  He was cautioned that it may take a while to hear from me.  

Thanksgiving I hear Sekhnet piping at me from across the room, calling me by my Christian name, if I was a Christian.  I never know what the deal is when I hear her urgently piping “Eliot!”   She’s talking with a smiling, friendly woman who it turns out works for Simon and Schuster.   She works in HR, hiring and firing like a demon, but she has found her home in publishing, after years in electronic media, and loves being around book people. She reads like a fiend since she’s been working there.  Sekhnet informs her I’ve written a book, I get a big smile.  

“It’s a manuscript, a first draft, around 700 pages.  It’s like wrestling with an anaconda at the moment, but I’m really enjoying it,” I say to the big smile.  

“I love book people,” she tells me, with that beautiful smile.  

I describe the idea that gets me out of bed every day, excited to write: a three-dimensional portrait of a great idealist who was also a monster, and how he rose from dire poverty to live the American Dream, a historian passionately involved in the historical events of his lifetime.  A dreamer and a destroyer of dreams.

I tell her that one day, as I was writing about his painful childhood, the skeleton of my father sat up in his grave to bitterly dispute something I’d just written.  I’d dismissed it at the time, went with it, had the chat, figured I could cut it later.  Then found him popping up again and again and now much of the ms. is an ongoing dialogue with the opinionated skeleton, a talk I look forward to every day.  

The smile continued as she told me it sounded cool, and that this kind of soul-searching memoir is currently a very hot genre and that if I find the right agent things could go well with this idea.  She then told us of a website where you can do a detailed search, by genre , of agents, and that no publisher will accept anything unless submitted by an agent.  Sekhnet jotted down the name of the website where I could find the highly specialized agent I will need to find.

I then told her everything I knew and felt about Jim Dale’s deightful audiobook performance of the marvelous Harry Potter books.  I promised her that she would love it, based on everything she’d told us about the books she liked best, then smiled, curtsied to Sekhnet, and went to have another muffin.