We have this great little library around the corner, which is very convenient. In London, there are lots of libraries, but it’s such big city geographically that it’s not always the case that there’s a library just around the corner. It’s a nice library—it’s right next to The Keats House, where John Keats lived next door to Fanny Brawne before heading off to Italy and an untimely death. The trees at the edge of the Keats House grounds hang over the path that leads to the library doors, and in Spring there are lovely blossoms dropping petals on the path. The building itself is that curious medley that one often encounters in England, a combination of a bit of old grandeur with some 1960s crap thrown in to make the interior more “functional.” But it’s comfortable, it has a good collection of books and newspapers, an attractive children’s room, and a bunch of PCs that people use for internet access, and it used to have a neighbor’s cat, Moggy, who would wander in and sleep all day before she died last Spring, much to the dismay of the regulars.

Recently there’s been a change in tone. There have been some new people showing up behind the desk, and they’re all chirpy. They ask questions, like “Did you find everything you need?”, stuff like that. They chat up the fact that, oh look, you have this book out, and that one too. Personally, I find this a bit irritating. I like my librarians on the reserved side, and not to be salesmen. Fortunately, this has not been a regular occurrence, but it makes me nervous. And it turns out that it may be part of a general plot to change the character of libraries in the area entirely. Well, maybe not a plot–it may not be nearly as well thought out as a plot would be.

The Heath Library, as it’s called, is part of the Borough of Camden library system. And the Borough of Camden has been trying to figure out how to cut its budget. Just like everyplace else in Britain, and the US, and any number of other places around the world these days. So Camden has decided to make some adjustments to how library services are provided in the borough. As the Camden New Journal reports this week:

CONTROVERSIAL plans to make a £2million cut to the library budget by reducing staff and introducing self-service machines were finally signed off at the Town Hall last night (Wednesday).

I can’t wait to see what self-service machines are all about. Self-service for what? Ah, checking out books. What could possibly go wrong here?

Liberal Democrat culture chief Councillor Flick Rea resisted pressure for a rethink and agreed to proposals mapped out in the council’s library reform programme, known as Growing Your Library and developed by council officials and consultants over several months.

Rea said the only way libraries would survive for future generations in its current £8.2million budget. “Otherwise the service will not survive in the tooth and claw climate of modern local government finance,” she said.

The cuts will be made over four years.

The plan here seems to be Growing Your Library by Cutting Its Funds.

Before making her decision, Councillor Rea heard deputations from library users who criticised the programme, including one from John Richardson of the Camden History Society who accused her of allowing it to be “pushed through without democratic process”.

She said the time saved by putting in self-issuing machines – and thus “freeing up” librarians to help readers – would be cancelled out by the staffing cuts.

“There is no evidence that the library service will improve as a result of the changes,” she added.

In addition to the 15 posts that have already been axed, more cuts, including some compulsory redundancies, are expected.

I hope someone eventually will explain to me why there never actually seems to be any money for saving the things that are worth saving. And why we can’t just hire more librarians “to help readers,” whatever that means. Finding books? Learning how to use the catalog? Finding stuff on the internet? People need help with these things?

How did the Borough of Camden come up with these plans? Well, for all its concern about saving money, the Borough doesn’t appear to mind spending a bit of money itself. As the Camden New Journal reports in a separate article:

CONSULTANTS hired to help redesign Camden’s library service were paid more than £2,000 a day over the summer.

American firm IDEO was paid £47,000 for 23 days work on the Growing Your Library (GYL) project, according to information released following a request by the New Journal under the Freedom of Information Act.

The work was part of a major overhaul of the library service in Camden, which will see some staff jobs cut and machines introduced.

Look, those machines again.

Reports suggested consultants visited a series of businesses, including the glamorous Apple Store in Regent Street, to see what ideas could be transferred to council-run libraries.

Well, I can certainly see how hitting the Apple Store would be useful in trying to redesign library services.

On its website IDEO describes itself as an “innovation and design” company. It lists some of its better known clients, a roll call of American multi-billion-pound organisations, including the Bank of America, food giant Nestlé and the charity set up by billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft owner Bill Gates, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Actually, the Ideo website is a hoot. Where do these people come from? Oh, Palo Alto, as it turns out. It’s like a William Gibson novel, one of the recent ones—everything is symbolic, and of the moment, or something. Someone named Ted Brown seems to be the design guru of the company, and you can hear him drone on in a video the site helpfully provides. And there are lots of references to design—Climate Change and design, how design got small and then big again, that sort of thing. Now, I don’t doubt that design is important, Climate Change being a pretty good example of how better design can help us out quite a lot, but it’s still not obvious to me how this is the group to talk to in order to determine how your library services can be “improved.”

So what did they actually do for Camden for two grand a day? It’s not actually clear, because Camden won’t release the report that they spent £47,000 on.

Freedom of Information officers at the Town Hall refused to reveal what the council got out of the deal and a request to see a draft of the ideas supplied to the leisure department was refused on the grounds that they have not been introduced yet.

Although officers accepted it was in the public interest to reveal what the money was spent on for “accountability and transparency” reasons, they ruled that to “prematurely” disclose the findings would result in “partial or inaccurate information being released” and would not allow Camden time to discuss with staff how the plans might affect them.

Officials insisted it was in the “public interest” not to release any more information.

We certainly wouldn’t want to release anything prematurely, to give the wrong impression. Just as well, because I imagine the discussion of the following probably needs some sharpening up:

Discussions held during a five-day workshop involving IDEO and library staff – described as a “deep-dive” brainstorming event – have been posted on the internal Camden intranet.

Details of some of the suggestions put forward by IDEO consultants have been criticised by staff, who contacted the New Journal to say the public would be “horrified” and “amused” at the “absurdity” of the week-long session and “the way their council tax money has been spent”.

The firm visited six businesses in London, including City Farm in Islington, the Apple Store in Regent Street and Jamie Oliver’s cook shop Recipease in Clapham.

City Farm? Where the cows and chickens are? That should help.

Consultants spent time at three Camden libraries – Regent’s Park, Kentish Town and Swiss Cottage – where they held meetings with library users and observed staff “to find out how they actually provided and used services”, but staff have queried their decision not to visit any celebrated libraries outside the borough.

Or any of the uncelebrated ones within the borough other than those three, for that matter.

The firm’s main specification was to come up with innovative ideas about what libraries and librarians could offer in the future, when Camden launches the second phase of its library reform programme next year.

This must be where the “self-service machines” thing comes from. Funnily enough, try as I might, I can’t find a single reference to anything about libraries on the Ideo website other than a link to an article in American Libraries magazine about “Design Thinking” in Libraries, by Stephen Bell, who may or may not be connected to Ideo. The article and comments are great—about “human-centered” somethingorother, and–here’s the kicker–providing a “memorable library experience.” There’s the Apple connection, all right. So it’s obvious why Camden chose Ideo to come up with some visionary thinking on how libraries can be improved at the same time their budgets are being hacked to death.

A council spokeswoman said: “The council approached a number of specialists to bid for work on the Growing Your Library project. IDEO, an international company whose UK headquarters are in Camden, was chosen in competition with a number of other agencies, as they offered the best combination of experience, capacity and proven track record in the field.”

Well, if this was the best of the lot, what did the other bidders look like? I’m reminded of that D.J. Taylor novel with a running subtext of the increasing rip-off of UK governments by management consultants running around a couple of decades ago in the country’s haste to privatize everything that moved. This sort of thing is the logical result—let’s have a firm of design consultants decide what libraries are for and how they should be used. After all, librarians wouldn’t necessarily have any idea of how to improve services, obviously, or anything above and beyond what you could extract in a day-long brainstorming session

Actually, given the apparently marginal state of libraries, we may as well have a design firm given an assessment of how to improve library usage. Libraries in the UK (and apparently in the US as well) are under pressure—over the past ten years over 100 libraries have been closed in England, visits per capita have been declining (marginally, but still), and expenditures per capita have been rising sharply. I can think of lots to fault the Labour government for, but increasing funds to libraries (until very recently) is not one of them. But, ultimately, libraries in the UK really depend on local council funding—and councils are currently hurting, so it’s not surprising that libraries make an easy target. It’s not as if anyone actually makes money from them. This is a familiar story, with a number of explanations—increasing access to the internet and other electronically-delivered information elsewhere, the increasing uneducatability of a number of children, and, perhaps, the possibility that people just read less—although I would need more convincing on this last point, in this country where not only is the major book award televised, but the bookmakers give odds on the potential winners.

So there are good reasons to get a broad range of inputs here. But it’s not clear to me that having librarians and library staff become the functional equivalents of the sales force at the Apple store is the right approach. Or brainstorming sessions, for that matter. What is needed, first of all, is a commitment to culture, and its preservation, and broad public access to it. In many respects, there is an admirable commitment to this notion here, or at least there was when times were good. But for a country with the literary heritage that this one has, even the closure of one library is a measure of our failure to meet this commitment

Zombie: Don’t worry. Only people with brains
get eaten. You’re safe.

They aren’t sexy. They aren’t romantic. They aren’t tragically doomed.

In fact, they’re ravenous, violent, and virtually unstoppable. They ooze all sorts of bodily fluids. And they want to eat your brains.

So how come zombies are getting such mainstream media treatment?

As a culture, we love and loath things that go bump in the night. We have to have boogeymen, for all sorts of reasons. Because they touch deep psychological fears in profound ways, our boogeymen serve as a kind of moral check on behavior that laws and rules just sometimes can’t. At the other end of the spectrum, we seem to have a lot of fun being scared. Boogeymen do that for us, too.

For centuries, vampires used to serve that function. Bram Stoker’s Dracula serves as the very best example, but vampires existed in folklore long before Stoker immortalized the legends on paper. Fewer things unnerve the living than the dead, which is also why fewer things have been more taboo.

Since Stoker’s 1888 novel, vampires have enjoyed a rich literary tradition (and the web is full of armchair essayists trying to sound erudite by expounding on that long literary tradition). But then along came Anne Rice’s vampire Lestat, a tragic, sultry, sexy fellow who broke nearly every vampire stereotype. Lestat made vampires sympathetic—which was a huge game-changer for the genre. As a result of that impact, Entertainment Weekly recently named Lestat as the greatest vampire ever. (The Bela Lagosi fan in me nearly choked since all vampires have ever been measured against the stereotype Lagosi established.)

Since Lestat, vampires have made a smooth transformation from being terrifying to being sexy. The fact that every teenage girl in America now wants to be Edward Cullen’s undead bride serves as perfect proof. (Guys aren’t immune, either. Check out Kate Beckinsale in the Underworld movies if you think female vampires aren’t hot.) I applaud Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan for trying to reverse that trend in their new novel, The Strain, which tries to make vampires creepy again—but I fear they’re fighting a losing battle.

And so, zombies have shambled in to take the place vampires once occupied in those dark, irrational corners of our psyches. Zombies now serve as that psychological boogeyman that vampires, through their own sheer attractiveness, can no longer serve as.

There’s one key distinction, though. Vampires represented a certain kind of calculating evil. They made conscious choices about who they preyed on and why, which seemed unnerving and sadistic. It’s evil of the nastiest kind.

Traditionally, we think of zombies as evil, too (Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead is a perfect example)—but in fact, zombies are mindless engines of hunger-driven carnage. Sure, they’re bloody, gory, disfigured, disheveled messes, and they act with single-mindless purpose to wipe out people. But they do it because that’s what zombies are wired do, not because they make intentional choices about it. There’s no willful violation of moral codes because zombies have no will. They are essentially forces of nature. A zombie basically represents Jack London’s impassive hand of Nature writ large and ugly.

In that sense, then, is the zombie any different than the financial collapse or the random act of violence or climate change? You can’t reason with those things any more than you can reason with a zombie. And when people feel as though they have no control over a situation, it shakes them in ways few things can. A zombie represents that same feeling, amplified to the Nth degree.

That’s a feeling most people can relate to these days. Zombies are tapping into the cultural zeitgeist.

Pop culture has latched onto that the way a zombie latches onto flesh—and fans have been feasting on it, too. It takes something terrifying and makes it fun (even being scared at the movies, even being creeped out by a book, are still basically forms of fun). As the trend continues, zombies actually become “safer” because people become desensitized. Believe it or not, that’s another reason why pop culture latches onto something like zombies: The process serves as a sociological “coping method.”

Eventually, Zombies will lose the primal power they’ve had (the same way vampires have). Their popularity will diminish, too, although it’ll never go away.

Who knows what’s lurking under the bed to eventually take their place.

Got zombies on the brain? Well, it’s better than having them eat your brain, so that’s a plus.

Zombies are a hot pop-cultural property these days. Woody Harrelson’s buddy movie Zombieland has been eating up theaters. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies brought Jane Austen back from the dead to become one of the year’s publishing phenoms. Marvel Comics is now on their umpteeth iteration of a Marvel Zombies franchise that, pardon the pun, doesn’t want to die.

While zombies don’t have the long literary tradition of, say, vampires, there’s been plenty of recent zombie-lit out there to feed your brain. Here are a few recent favorites:

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith—This really is Pride & Prejudice with random zombie mayhem inserted into the text, although the zombie stuff is more background noise than anything else. The story will be going along just like normal, someone will encounter a zombie and slay it in a demonstration of impressive fighting skills, and then the story will continue along as though nothing happened. There are lots of ninja references, too, because of course ninjas and zombies are like peas in a pod. If you go into it knowing the book’s a lark, you’ll do fine, although the joke does get old about two-thirds of the way through the book (or perhaps sooner).

Zombie Notes: A Study Guide to the Best in Undead Literary Classics by Laurie Rozakis—If Undead Lit is your thing, then this study guide is a must. “[M]any details about classic literature get hazy with the passage of time,” Rozakis explains. Her book looks at “the effect of the undead on great books,” such as A Zombie Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Moby-Dick, Zombie Whale by Herman Melville, and A Tale of Two Cities Overrun with Zombies by Charles Dickens. Yeah, the premise is an obvious rip-off of P&P&Z, but like zombies themselves, some ideas just never stay dead.

The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks by Max Brooks, illustrated by Ibraim Roberson— The book’s teaser says it all, really: “They’re coming & they’re hungry.” A follow-up to Brooks’ seminal and deadpan-funny Zombie Survival Guide, this book puts the “graphic” in graphic novel. Ostensibly a book that recounts major zombie outbreaks through history, this book is really just an excuse for gruesome zombie carnage. Think axes, skulls, brains, and intestines in meticulously detailed black and white. (As a side note, Brooks’ novel World War Z is brilliant modern classic that recounts the world’s fall during a zombie apocalypse.)

Patient Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel by Jonathan Maberry—“When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, then there’s either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world,” says Maberry’s hard-knuckle hero. “And there’s nothing wrong with my skills.” So what’s wrong with the world? How about zombies as weapons of mass destruction? Maberry tries to do a little too much by tackling an ambitious premise and establishing characters for what he obviously hopes will be a new series. (“A” Joe Ledger novel? C’mon, it’s “the only” Joe Ledge novel!”) Still, it’s a thriller of the first order. Think Arnold Schwarzenegger’s strike team from Predator combined with Dirty Harry’s attitude, sprinkled with new, gritty James Bond sensibility. With zombies.

PLUS: Don’t forget about Zombie Haiku!

October 30 is Frankenstein Friday.

Like a lot of kids, I could not get enough of monster movies. On Saturday afternoons, I would hunker down on my living room couch to watch Creature Double-Feature on our small black-and-white TV.

I loved Godzilla, Gorgo, the giant ants of Them!, War of the Worlds, and those delightful shock-fests from England’s Hammer Studios with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

But none were better than Universal’s classics: The Creature from the Black Lagoon; Bela Lugosi as Dracula; Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man; and of course, Boris Karloff as Frankenstein. Watching Colin Clive scream, “It’s alive! It’s alive!” remains one of the most thrilling moments of movie magic ever filmed.

Those movies were so creepy because, unlike today’s horror films, they left almost everything to my imagination—and my imagination can be a whole lot scarier than anything Hollywood can dish out. It’s no wonder audiences back then found those classic monster movies shocking and truly scary.

But the beauty of a story like Frankenstein is that it succeeds on so many levels. The movie captured my imagination as a kid, but as I grew older, I began to appreciate the subtleties of Mary Shelley’s novel.

For one thing, her creature is an eloquent, thoughtful being who’s ugly but graceful. That’s a stark contrast to the lumbering Karloff, who had steel bars sewn into his costume to make him move so stiffly. Karloff’s monster barely uttered anything beyond growls and snarls, and when he does learn to speak in Bride of Frankenstein, it’s in short, choppy sentences.

More importantly, the book asks big-picture questions that are still highly relevant: Just because we have the technology to do something, should we do it? What role do ethics play in science? What is the cost of failure—and the price of success? What makes a human human?

Frankenstein raises questions about parent/child relationships, class struggle, commitment and responsibility. The text is rich with themes worthy of exploration and reflection.

We sympathize with the creature when the villagers chase it through the forest with torches and pitchforks for no reason other than they’re scared of it. After all, the creature is different. It’s not inherently evil, even though the villagers insist on casting it that way. As viewers or as readers, we feel uncomfortable at the injustice of it. The poor creature—if only they would just leave it alone!

But what’s really sad—or perhaps really horrible—is that Frankenstein happens around us every day. Angry villagers drive someone out of town just for being different: for being black or Hispanic or homosexual or foreign or poor. And when that happens, we have a tougher time seeing it for what it is and a tougher time feeling sympathy for “the creature”—especially if we’re the villagers.

* * * * *

But if it sounds like too much work to engage Frankenstein on those levels, there’s nothing wrong with sitting back and letting the story capture your imagination the way it’s been capturing imaginations for nearly 200 years.

The book has never been out of print. It’s one of the most adapted pieces of literature ever written.

Movie versions include seven Universal films, including the first three with Boris Karloff; an equally long-running series from Hammer Studios, starting with Curse of Frankenstein, featuring Cushing and Lee; a version directed by and starring Kenneth Branaugh, with Robert DeNiro as the Creature; and most recently a version from Hallmark Entertainment.

There’s Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein. There’s Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, Frankenstein and the Creature from Outer Space, and even Frankenhooker.

The first film version, though, came from the man who invented motion pictures, Thomas Edison. One of his first movies was a ten-minute production of Frankenstein.

There are songs written about and inspired by Frankenstein. Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” has almost-instant guitar-grinding, wawa-peddling recognizability, and Aimee Mann’s “Frankenstein” reminds listeners that “It’s rare that you ever know what to expect/from a guy made of corpses with bolts in his neck.”

And let’s not forget Herman Munster on TV, a role that made Fred Gwynn famous.

The first stage version appeared in 1823, just seven years after Mary Shelley published her book. She was excited at the chance to see her story staged. The play was such a success that it was revived in 1826, the same year the first foreign-language version of the play appeared. Today, no less than a dozen stage versions exist.

If anything can be said of Mary Shelley’s story, it’s that after nearly 200 years, it has a life of its own. “It’s alive! It’s alive!” indeed.

* * * * *

Several years ago, a community theater I worked with decided to include Frankenstein as the kickoff to its tenth-anniversary season. I was immediately drawn to direct the project because of my lifelong love of the story. Of the many scripts available, we settled on one by Victor Gialanella because it sticks closely to Mary Shelley’s themes.

Other scripts tend to stray too far from Shelley’s story. One reason is that Boris Karloff’s shadow is verrry long. Almost everyone who hears the word “Frankenstein” thinks of Karloff’s flat-topped creature with bolts in its neck. As a result, most versions try too hard to go out of their way to not be like Karloff.

Shelley’s story sometimes gets sacrificed as a result. The emphasis gets shifted to the spectacle and the horror—after all, those kinds of elements make for good movies and plays because they’re exciting to see.

But the meat of Shelley’s story is in all those big-picture questions. After all, what makes each of us “us” is different. It only stands to reason that we’ll each have our own answer to the questions “Who am I? What makes me me? Where do I come from?”

Frankenstein’s creation asks this of his maker. Mary Shelley’s novel asks this of its readers.

It’s the most important question any of us can ask.

I know where at least part of me comes from, and these days, I can sometimes still be found there. Only nowadays, I am curled up on my living room couch watching old monster movies with my 9-year-old son. It’s like taking a trip down memory lane while simultaneously opening the doors of imagination.

My son got a little scared by Karloff the first time he saw Frankenstein. He and hid under a blanket, trying to decide whether it was safe to steal a peek. I chuckled.

He was just one more victim of Frankenstein’s 200-year-old legacy—just like me. Just like a lot of us.

Well, confined to bed for a few days, trying to avoid anything that would tax my foggy and phlegm-filled head, I decided to tackle McCloud’s book.

Bad choice and good choice.

Bad choice because it looked deceptively light, but in fact, the book is a pretty heavy-duty, sophisticated look at comic book theory. Yeah, that’s right: “comic book theory.”

Good choice because McCloud is a brilliant theorist who explains a complicated theory in a lucid, engaging way. In particular, McCloud’s artwork continually refreshes itself in delightfully surprising ways throughout.

I learned a lot about art and a lot about comics. In fact, it was nifty to really deconstruct the craft and the art of comics, which I’ve always understood intuitively. I kept having lightbulb moments as McCloud explained the theory behind something that I recognized immediately from my own reading experiences. I knew it without knowing it, if you know what I mean.

The downside to the book is that it was written in 1993, and since then, comics have continued to undergo tremendous evolution, both artistically and in their writing. I would have been interested to know what McCloud thought of those changes and how they worked into his ideas about the medium. He’s since published two more books, so I’ll have to check those out to see if those books include responses to those changes.

Understanding Comics isn’t a book for everyone, but it is a book for more than just the comic book fanboy. Anyone with an interest in art theory would find something interesting in McCloud’s theories. It’s a serious work with serious ideas, told though a brilliant approach. Set aside the cough syrup and settle in for some serious thinking.

Steve Alten is waiting for some big news. In Alten’s case, “big” involves a seventy-six-foot-long man-eater that lives in the world’s deepest oceans and has been trying, for twelve years, to rise out of the depths and into cineplexes.

Alten is the author of Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, arguably one of the best summer potboilers in the last decade and a half. In the book, a team of deep-sea explorers accidentally bring to the surface a Carcharodon megalodon—a species of giant prehistoric shark thought to have died out about 50,000 years ago.

“I have been enthralled with this entire species,” Alten said in a phone interview from his South Florida home.

In Alten’s world, as the prehistoric seas cooled, the giant sharks gradually retreated to the deepest parts of the ocean, where geothermal vents kept the water much warmer than the water at the surface. A layer of near-freezing deep-sea water just above the geothermal zone kept the sharks from surfacing.

When in came out in 1997, Meg rocketed onto the New York Times bestseller list. The Los Angles Times called it “Jurassic Shark!” A Time magazine cover story touted it as a “cool summer read.” Disney’s Hollywood Pictures optioned the movie rights. Three sequels hit bookshelves in the twelve years since, including the most recent, Meg: Hell’s Aquarium, this past summer.

But moviegoers are still waiting for their first Meg sighting.

“It’s been a little bit of a roller coaster ride,” Alten admitted. “There have been strange extenuating circumstances.”

Disney’s option expired when the head of the studio was fired. New Line optioned Meg in 2005, with director Jan Le Bont (Speed) attached to the project.  “Every department at New Line was excited about the project,” says Alten. “Unfortunately, the new script went off course from the novel, and the two CEOs never were committed to making a giant shark movie.”

As soon as the rights reverted back to Alten, he wrote his own script with producer Belle Avery. “It rocks,” Alten says. “I can’t wait to see this hit the big screen.”

Alten and his many Meg fans may get their wish. Private funding may soon be in place as part of a $150 million budget, with producers deciding on which A-list director will helm the first in what Alten describes as “a potential blockbuster series.”

While Alten waits for news, his fans still have Hell’s Aquarium to sink their teeth into. “I wasn’t sure I was going to write a fourth Meg book,” Alten said. “I realized there was more going on, more story to tell. I think it turned out to be the best of the series.” A fifth book in the series, Meg: Night Stalkers, is already in the works, although Alten said it will probably be the last.

“I have a lot of other stories I want to write,” Alten said.

Aside from the release of Hell’s Aquarium, the paperback edition of his thriller The Shell Game was just released on September 8. Originally published in early 2008, the book suggests a neoconservative plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in an American city and blame the disaster on Iran. For the paperback release, Alten made significant revisions. “I changed it to reflect an Obama administration in power when the next ‘false flag’ event is unleashed and blamed on the so-called war on terror,” Alten said “It’s actually a scarier book.”

Alten enjoys the challenge of blending fact and fiction in his work as a way to make the books as thought-provoking as possible. “I research as much as I can. I pull together pages and pages of text, which I have to understand myself—I have to teach myself,” Alten said. In particular, he pours through newspapers and internet sites, always looking for the latest science news.

“The internet is the most important tool for me,” he explained. “When I find something, I can redirect the story toward that new information so that it becomes an important plot point. It becomes integral to the story and changes the dynamics of the story.”

His challenge, he said, is to make the factual material as “palatable” as possible. “I have to make it part of the story, not something that interferes with the story,” he said. “My hope is that the reader comes away more educated.”

He also wants them to be entertained. “We all go through stress. We’re all worried about the economy, about insurance, about whatever,” he said. “When they pick up one of my books, I want them to have fun. It’s pure escapism, pure entertainment.”

Alten prides himself on his close relationship with his fans, many of whom appear as characters in his books. “I can’t think up small bios for a hundred people,” he explained. “So, I use real people.”

Alten responds to e-mails from fans by offering encouragement and advice or sometimes just a thank you. “If someone has invested their time and money into one of my books, they deserve that,” Alten said. “It’s one of the most important things to me.”

His fans, in fact, encouraged him to write his 2005 hit The Loch. Originally, the thought of writing about the Loch Ness monster had little appeal to Alten. “That’s hokey,” he said. “I don’t believe it. It’s a tourist trap. It’s impossible for a population of air-breathing reptiles to reproduce there for sixty-five million years.”

But a readers poll convinced him to reexamine the idea: overwhelming response from his fans showed they wanted a Loch Ness Monster book. “I approached it as a skeptic in the story,” Alten said, “because readers will approach it as skeptics.”

So, he dove into the research and found some contemporary theories that suggested something beyond a stereotypical Nessie. “I attacked the mythology—attacked it with science,” Alten said. “This was not Disney; this was something nastier. I like ‘nastier.’”

But the nasty giant sharks of Meg will always hold a special place in his heart.

“As a teenager, I was fascinated by stories about shark attacks,” Alten said. He also credits as inspiration an old photo “of six nerdy scientists” posing inside the jaws of a megalodon.

Megs grew in excess of fifty feet long, and they weighed upwards of 100,00 pounds, making them the largest carnivorous fish to ever swim the oceans. Their jaws hyper-extended open some ten feet—providing plenty of room for nerdy scientists—and were filled with rows and rows of serrated teeth, each about seven inches long.

“I wondered why nothing commercial had ever been written about [megalodons],” Alten said.

The public definitely had a taste for them, as evidenced by the success of Alten’s first book. “Meg got me out of my little apartment and into a house,” Alten said.

He sounds a cautious note, though, because his career has seen so many ups and downs. He and his family had to sell their home years ago when the Disney deal went sour. He’s had to switch publishers several times when his first publisher, Doubleday, dropped his second book deal when the house was being taken over by Bertlesman; his second publisher, Kensington, only wanted more shark stories. In 2007, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a situation he blames on the stress associated with writing The Shell Game.

But good news came recently, too. The rights to his Mayan Doomsday series, Domain, were optioned by movie star Manolo Cordova and 11 11 films. Domain, translated in Spanish as El Testamento Maya, was a runaway best seller in Spain and Mexico.

“I’ve learned never to get too high or too low,” Alten said. “There are variables I can control and more I can’t. Parkinsons was a bad break, but many other people have situations strike that are far worse. I try to keep things in the right perspective. As for the movie deals, I can’t control those things. My job is to write the best books and scripts I can, and God will take care of the rest.”

And so Alten continues to write and wait, hopeful that the “big news” will come soon—and that his giant shark will be unleashed on moviegoers at last.

This year, after having amassed a collection of more than 20,000 books, officials at the pristine campus about 90 minutes west of Boston have decided the 144-year-old school no longer needs a traditional library. The academy’s administrators have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks – the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences. The future, they believe, is digital.

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

To date, this story has generated 432 comments (probably more by the time this has been posted). And you can just imagine. Leaving aside the obvious questions like “The big oversized art books too?” and “The bound copies of Life magazine?”, the commentators really get at the point that’s been nagging me as well—um, why? That sort of thing. It’s a pretty lively commentary, with about 95% of the comments running along the “How dare they?” lines.

So I was pleased that the other blogger in the family had a more sensible take on this, meaning the one with the library science degree who actually knows a thing or two about this sort of issue. And she zeroes right in:

Um, yeah. So first and foremost this is obviously a desperate ploy for publicity. I wonder if they were really expecting quite the universal derision that seems to have been heaped upon them: even the techie blogs think that this is insane. I know there’s no such thing as bad publicity and all, but I find it hard to believe that any parents looking to spend $160k on their child’s high school education will be reading this press and thinking “Gee, I hadn’t heard of Cushing Academy. AND they don’t have books in their library? SCORE!” Versus other schools that offer, y’know, both books AND the internet.

Most people talking about this article are waxing eloquent about how cozy it is to curl up in an armchair and turn the pages, and that’s all well and good, but it totally misses the way that a school library is utilized. School libraries aren’t for pleasure reading. I’m sure that even at a 4th rate school like Cushing, there isn’t much time for leisure reading: between academics and sports and extracurriculars, I know that I and pretty much everyone I knew rarely read for fun while school was in session in both high school and college. School libraries are for research, even at the secondary school level. They are depositories of academic books, often from academic publishers and with a very limited print run, and hard or impossible to find in a bookstore. They contain a wide range of reference books, not only your basic set of Encyclopedia Brittanica, but also more obscure reference texts. Trained librarians are there to assist students in learning how to do research.
….

I’m not actually as horrified as most people are over this publicity stunt, because it’s just too stupid to be shocking. It’s not even shockingly stupid because, hey, at least they’re being honest. It’s a school full of jocks doing their 5th year of high school and brain dead new money kids who like the idea of a New England prep school. The teachers don’t have any interest in enforcing limits on students using the web to research, and the students are too dull and lazy to actually do research the right way. So they’re just being honest that the kids don’t care, the teachers don’t care, and most tellingly, the parents don’t care. Because what kind of parent would send their child to a school without any books, but with a $12,000 cappuccino machine? Exactly.

This strikes me as being sensible. Prep schools are in a bind these days, like universities. Like any other enterprise, they need to meet costs, and to market themselves, and this may turn out to be a really clever marketing strategy—or a hugely dumb one. This really doesn’t speak to the future of books very much, other than to observe that a second tier prep school has decided that it doesn’t need any in its library. Well, the market will decide whether this is a winning strategy or not, and it will interesting to see whether this headmaster still has a job in a couple of years. What he’ll be judged on, of course, is whether this ploy improves Cushing’s college admittance performance. For all I know, the Cushing administrators behind this decision may have a very good grasp of the marketing dynamics relevant to the Cushing applicant pool.

There are all sort of reasons why Kindles might be a good idea—they may be greener, and they can be an interesing pedagogical tool for classroom instruction (embed the homework in with the reading assignments, say, for a chemistry textbook, with various heuristics for correcting wrong answers, that sort of thing—the technology already exists for all this). Curling up with one in the dim corner of the wood-panelled library in front of a cozy fire on a winter’s afternoon somehow doesn’t have quite the same resonance. But I can’t honestly say that that was part of my secondary school experience anyway, as fond as I was of my library—I was too busy doing research for the next dumb term paper. If we’re going to create a culture with a love of books, it’s going to come from a love of reading, and a love of ideas. Libraries with real books are necessary here, but perhaps not sufficient.

The above stamp was issued in 2000 to celebrate the bicentennial of the Library of Congress, which hopefully won’t be chucking all their books any time soon.

Meld the slipperiness of memory with the manic power of pop culture and you’ll get an idea of the lens Rebecca Brown uses to look at the world these days.

Brown’s newest book, American Romances, a collection of eight essays, mixes and matches in surprising ways: Oreo cookies and Gertrude Stein. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Beach Boy Brian Wilson. The Invisible Woman, John Wayne, Felix Mendelssohn, and the God Squad. They’re all in there—along with a lot of Brown herself.

“I’m trying to understand my individual life in the context of other things,” she explains in a phone interview from her Seattle-area home. “Clearly, some of the pieces are very personal. The autobiographical stuff is really autobiographical.”

Brown, who’s taught writing for twenty years, is best known for her novels: The Haunted House, The Last Time I Saw You, The Gifts of the Body, The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary—eleven in all. Her 2003 book Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary, a powerful retelling of her mother’s battle with terminal cancer, provided her the opportunity to explore memoir.

But nothing quite compares to the essay style Brown creates in American Romances. “This was something different for me,” she says. “It was nice to do something different.”

Brown says she sort of just happened onto essay writing. She started by writing short pieces for various alternative presses and local weeklies, penning book reviews, essays about current events, and even a gonzo-style encyclopedia entry on E.M. Forester’s Aspects of a Novel. “I try to describe what I’ve read and what I’ve looked at,” Brown says.

The experience not only opened a new genre of writing for her but it opened a new kind of dialogue for her with readers. “I loved writing about the real world and getting that reader response,” Brown says. “There’s more of an immediacy about the conversation than when I’m writing just fiction.”

Calling the pieces in American Romances “essays” perhaps pigeonholes them into a genre that might sound too formal to really capture Brown’s imaginative approach. She infused her essays with personal memories that, she readily admits, are sometimes undependable or nostalgic. She peppers her essays with endnotes that take on tangential lives of their own. She offers citations for the things she stuffed into her head, giving readers bibliographic breadcrumbs they can follow as she makes connections between fantastically disparate elements.

Who knew, for instance, that a clear connection existed between “east coast Puritanism” of early America and the “west coast hedonism” of the late twentieth century? Who knew that Susan Sontag and Oscar Wilde both had connections to the Invisible Woman?

“People are responding to the pop culture and the unexpected juxtaposition of things,” Brown says. “This was a new way to play, a new way to add to the possibilities of writing.”

Brown uses Nathanial Hawthorne as an organizing conceit for American Romances, and she gives herself creative latitude by quoting from Hawthorne’s preface to The House of Seven Gables. “When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude,” Hawthorne wrote, explaining that a romance “has fairly the right to present [the] truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.”

Brown characterizes it as “a degree of personal fantasy—a blend of personal fantasy with facts.”

Take, for instance, her essay “The Priests.” Brown had been challenged to “write a mythic story about food.”

“Well, I was a white kid from the suburbs,” Brown says. “I didn’t have anything exotic or unique. I didn’t have Mama’s home cookin’. Our home cookin’ was boxed cookies.”

So Brown’s essay begins as she and her childhood friends playact as priests, using Nico wafers for communion. The essay gets into a discussion about the history of church communion rites, which gets into a discussion about various secret church societies, which gets into a discussion about the church’s persecution of homosexuals. Oreo-like cookies get involved, which of course evolve into Oreos. “The way you opened it, then what you did, would tell you and your fellows who you were,” Brown writes. Gertrude Stein gets involved, too.

“Clearly, Gertrude Stein wasn’t a high priestess of Oreo cookies,” Brown chuckles. “But all the history stuff in the essay is true. Some of it’s pretty horrible. I’ve found tying together humor and tragedy to be a useful tool for getting at things.”

Brown tried to get at some equally sensitive topics in her other essays without coming at them head-on. “I don’t know how to write about those ‘Big’ things directly—things like ‘Love’ or ‘God,’” Brown says. “That’s the kiss of death to me. I have to look at those things from a sideways angle.”

She cites her essay “My Western” as an example. “I started writing about westerns and all those images of heroism and masculinity, and suddenly I realized, ‘That’s my father,’” Brown says. Suddenly, her discussion of the closing scene of Shane—when the cowboy rides off at the end with a kid yelling “Come back! Come back!”—parallels her own experience as a child when her father left his family.

The essays touches on other westerns, like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Shootist, for instance, and Brown draws parallels between her father and John Wayne. “He grew up in a culture with ideas of how men should be,” Brown says. “He really was a man who mourned the heroism of his earlier life. If he had been born as part of the Rat Pack, that would’ve been perfect for him but, y’know, he was a dad. He didn’t fit. He was born in the wrong era.”

This intermingling of cultural zeitgeist and personal reflection is pretty typical in American Romances. Brown also threads a nuanced sense of history throughout her pieces. “[T]he past is not so long ago, you tell me, and neither is the future,” she writes. The same could be said for the essays themselves: the past and the future are never far from each other, and sometimes the lines even blur.

“I guess I consider these ‘lyrical essays,’” Brown says. “How is that different from a memoir? How is a memoir different from a novel? There’s a contemporary, fiery conversation going on about those things. But you know what? It’s not a new conversation at all—we just think it is. Hawthorne and his contemporaries had the very same conversation.”

That conversation interests Rebecca Brown, the writing professor, but Rebecca Brown, the writer, seems interested more in the impact of her work than how its categorized. “Art is about touching the heart,” she says.

Brown is sure she’ll write more essays, but she’d also like to get back to her fiction, so she’s not yet sure what form her next major project will take. “Nothing’s worse than sitting down and looking at a blank page,” she says. “I’ve written a number of books by now, so you’d think I’d know how to do it—but I don’t. I’ll just have to wait and see.”

For answers to these burning questions and more, check out what the Scrogues have on their nightstands these days.

Brian Angliss: I’m reading two things right now—the manga Ghost in the Shell and an old copy of Numerical Recipes. The first is purely for fun, but Shirow still plays around in the border between man and machine: is a brain in a synthetic body still human? How about an A.I.
with a partially human body? As for Numerical Recipes, well, that’s so I can understand statistics well enough to detect when someone is trying to manipulate me or others with bad math.

Jim Booth: I’ve recently finished a biography of Bob Dylan and a book on the stories behind the composition of most of The Beatles’ songs. I’m currently re-reading the completed novels of Jane Austen as I do every couple of years. Right now I’m early into Sense and Sensibility, having just completed Northanger Abbey. Once those are finished, I’ll be reading a biography of Mark Twain. After that, re-reading Pickwick Papers—jonesing for some Dickens….

Lex: Opium by Martin Booth. Anything that manages to combine botany, the seedy underbelly of society, and the historical evils that governments do is a page-turner for me. Also, Loise Hole’s Tomato Favorites because there’s no such thing as too much horticultural knowledge or too much reviewing of previously acquired knowledge.

Chris Mackowski: If a poetry collection can be a dazzling meditation, then Charles Wrights’ Sestets hits it pitch-perfect. It’s the strongest poetry collection by Wright to date, proving that some masters just get better and better with time.

Following up on my China visit from the spring, I’m also reading Prisoner of the State, the secret diary of Zhao Ziyang, former general chairman of the community party in China. Deposed by party rivals or being too reform-minded, the highly popular Zhao was kept cloistered from public view until his death in 2005. Chinese officials have banned the book and have been confiscating every copy they can find, which of course makes the book a must-read for me!

Finally, I’m listening to a tremendously entertaining audiobook edition of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, performed by Joe Barrett. Henderson is a quirky book, for certain, but the writing has such flashes of brilliance that I would need sunglasses if I was actually reading it. Barrett really brings the book to life in a way I didn’t fully appreciate when I first read it years ago. I’m going through a kind of mid-life crisis right now, I guess, so Henderson resonates strongly.

Sam Smith: I’ve been reviewing the greats and catching up on some classics lately. I recently re-read Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and William Butler Yeats’s Collected Poems and am currently working my way through a collection of Mark Twain’s great shorter works. My array of interests is so wide that it’s too easy for me to get caught up in what’s timely, so every once in awhile I need to retreat and reestablish contact with what’s timeless.

Russ Wellen: Much to my surprise, a post entitled JFK and the Unspeakable by filmmaker Oliver Stone was one of the most heavily promoted at Huffington Post a couple weeks ago. It was less a review than a tribute to a 2008 book of the same name by Christian peace activist James Douglass. I just happened to finish reading it since the last Nightstand was posted.

Subtitled “Why He Died and Why it Matters,” JFK and the Unspeakable is simply the most exciting book I’ve read in years. It incorporates much of the current thinking on John Kennedy’s presidency and death, leaning heavily on documents acquired by use of the Freedom of Information Act.

Stone, who directed a movie titled JFK, sums it up:

[Douglass] traces a process of steady conversion by Kennedy from his origins as a traditional Cold Warrior to his determination to pull the world back from the edge of destruction. Many of these steps are well known, such as Kennedy’s disillusionment with the CIA after the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion, and his refusal to follow the reckless recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis. … Then there was the Test Ban Treaty and JFK’s remarkable American University Speech where he spoke with empathy and compassion about the Soviet people. …

But many of his steps remain unfamiliar: Kennedy’s back-channel dialogue with Khrushchev and their shared pursuit of common ground; his secret opening to dialogue with Fidel Castro (ongoing the very week of his assassination); and his determination to pull out of Vietnam after his probable re-election in 1964.

All of these steps caused him to be regarded as a virtual traitor by elements of the military-intelligence community. These were the forces that planned and carried out his assassination.

Know how when the subject of alternate histories of 9/11 is brought up, you’re often met with the response “They could never have kept all the people needed quiet”? Or “The government isn’t competent enough to pull off a plan like that.” This book shows how people’s mouths are kept shut (not pretty), as well as how a government agency (the CIA —no surprises there) carries it off—with considerable clumsiness.

Those skeptical of 9/11 alternate histories also tend to think of 9/11 in a vacuum. Once you start learning about the assassinations, it comes to seem like a continuum (okay, a mega-conspiracy). The author, in fact, though aging, also intends to write books about the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

If you’re wondering to what “the Unspeakable” refers, it’s the evil embodied by a U.S. military and intelligence that not only would brook no talk of peace with the U.S.S.R., but sought to wage war in Vietnam and use nuclear weapons at will. Unspeakable enough for you?

I’m also on the final stretch of The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Third Edition by Lawrence Freedman, 2003, Palgrave. Required reading for those who wish to understand the nuclear mentality, it was more of a slog than it needed to be. While I have no head for gamesmanship, the more experienced I become poring over demanding texts, the more I’m willing to lay some of my difficulties with their comprehension at the feet of the author. Anyway, all you ever wanted to know about deterrence and then some. Nevertheless, Brian still leads in the competition for wonkiest books read.

Finally. . . Loren Estleman, Loren Estleman, Loren Estleman. Or have I mentioned him before?

William Forstchen has a bad dream—a really bad dream—that goes something like this:

A cataclysmic attack throws the United States back to the dark ages, with no electricity, no communication or transportation networks, and no medicines. The most vulnerable members of society—the very young and the very old—begin to die off first, but soon hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people, begin dying. Rogue bands of lawless predators, living by rule of force rather than by rule of law, prey on weakened communities. The government, crippled, can’t come to anyone’s rescue.

And all it takes is a single bomb detonated high in the atmosphere, two hundred miles above the continent.

“Welcome to my nightmare,” Forstchen says with the kind of grim chuckle usually reserved for gallows humor.

But this is no joke. “It sounds like it’s science fiction, Mayan-prophecy, end-of-the-world stuff,” Forstchen admits, “but it’s dead-on real.”

Forstchen is a professor of history at Montreat College, a small liberal arts school in the Great Smokey Mountains of North Carolina. He’s written some forty books, including a series of successful “alternative history” novels with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

His most recent novel, One Second After, outlines his nightmare in chilling detail.

At first thought, it might seem far-fetched to imagine a single bomb wiping out the entire country. But it wouldn’t be the power of the explosion, per se, that would cause the problem. Instead, the real problem would be the electro-magnetic pulse—the EMP—generated by the explosion.

Traveling at the speed of light, the EMP would act like an enormous ripple in the earth’s electromagnetic field. As that ripple hits electrical systems, it would get amplified way beyond anything a typical circuit breaker could handle.

“This energy surge will destroy all delicate electronics in your home, even as it destroys all the major components all the way back to the power company’s generators and the phone company’s main relays,” Forstchen writes. “In far less than a millisecond, the entire power grid of the United States, and all that it supports will be destroyed.”

And if the power goes, everything goes.

“Everyone remembers the aftermath of Katrina,” Forstchen says. “It covered fifty-thousand square miles, but it was basically a local event. An EMP would be a nation-wide Katrina-like event.”

Some experts predict the resulting casualty rate could be as high as ninety percent by the end of the first year.

“This will raise a lot of moral questions, too,” Forstchen says. “Are we going to let people out of maximum security prisons? Do we triage off the elderly?”

The scenarios Forstchen envisions in the book aren’t necessarily fictional, either. “I didn’t want to turn this into some kind of Mad Max thing,” he explains.

Forstchen drew on his background as a historian to look for scenarios of desolation and desperation that would fit his post-EMP world. The WWII sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad provided a terrible bounty of examples: tiered rationing, bread with sawdust baked into it to make it more filling, vicious bands of murderous thugs, communal graves.

His visit to the cemetery outside of Leningrad proved especially haunting. “There were six-hundred-thousand dead after the siege,” Forstchen says. “And the Russian have a tradition of putting laminated photos of the deceased on their tombstones. I will never be able to shake that.” That trauma, he says, is still on the Russian soul.

And, the novel argues, America would suffer trauma even worse if an EMP strike hit us.

“I imagined my daughter being in that (post-EMP) world,” says Forstchen, a single parent. “I imagined my daughter being ill in that world.”

As a result, he says, “it got really bad for me” writing novel. “I will never be able to shake that.” Other parents who’ve read the book have had similar reactions. “’I saw my kids in the middle of this,’ they’ve told me,” Forstchen says. “Any parent who reads this, it’s going to hit hard.”

But for most people, the threat of an EMP attack is so abstract and remote, it’s hard to get them to take an interest. “Some people look at it and think it’s too big: ‘I don’t want to think about it,’” Forstchen says. “Well, we have to think about it.”

Forstchen has worked with Reps. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Denny Thompson (D-Miss) to educate other lawmakers about the potential threat of EMPs, but he admits the going has been tough. Even the House Armed Services subcommittee that was studying EMPs was disbanded. “Unfortunately, this is an issue that doesn’t have a constituency,” Forstchen says.

One reason he wrote One Second After, he says, was to “put a voice” to the issue. So far, the strategy seems to be working. The book peaked at number eleven on the New York Times bestseller list and is being developed by Warner Brothers into a film.

“I’m more optimistic than I was six months or even a year ago, when I was working on the book,” Forstchen says. “Lawmakers are starting to get the word again.” In late June, Forstchen met with a group that included members of Congress and intellectuals from various political think tanks to again press his argument, which suddenly has new urgency because of missile testing in North Korea.

“Look at North Korea and Iran,” Forstchen says. “Why are they so interested in building small-scale nuclear missiles? Only one model fits.” It’s the fact that the U.S. is so vulnerable that our enemies are even contemplating such an attack, he adds.

But even beyond the national defense reasons, Forstchen points out that there are significant environmental reasons for protecting ourselves against EMPs. The biggest reason, he says, hangs high above us in the sky every day.

In late August of 1859, a series of solar flares erupted from the sun with such magnitude that they burned out telegraphy grids across Europe and North America. Similar solar storms have taken place in 1921 and 1960. According the Forstchen, research suggests that we’re heading into a period that could see another, similar upswing in solar activity.

“We built this delicate, elaborate infrastructure without thinking about how vulnerable it is,” Forstchen says. “We need to get off the stick and do something about our infrastructure.”

Just one percent of the money allocated in the recent bailout package could be enough to create a survival infrastructure, Forstchen says. “It wouldn’t save the entire system, but it could be used to create nodes of infrastructure that could be quickly built upon. Otherwise, what good is a bailout of there’s no country to bail out?”

Most importantly, Forstchen says, individuals should learn to prepare and protect themselves. “What’s the big lesson from Katrina: Don’t wait for the feds,” he says. His website offers a variety of simple, precautionary things people can do. It also offers tips on how to recognize an EMP should one occur.

“People need to think on three levels: on the level of citizens of America/citizens of the world, the personal level, and the community level,” Forstchen says. “Eight, ten, fifteen people thinking together can do a lot. We have to learn how to think together.”

Forstchen realizes he may sound like “a crazy old crank” for sounding alarmist. (During his first-ever radio interview on the book, the first caller rang it to accuse him of being a paranoid right-wing survivalist.) “I just want to see bipartisan action on this,” he says. “I don’t care who gets the credit. We’re all Americans. We need to get by the partisan bickering, at least on this. Otherwise, we’re all going to be on the same sinking boat the next day.”

Forstchen urges people to contact their congressmen about EMPs. “If enough people do, suddenly the issue has legs, and something can get done about it,” he says.

And that, Forstchen says, will definitely help him sleep easier.

S&R will feature a review of Forstchen’s book, One Second After, on Tuesday.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A wonderful analysis on the difficulty of knowing and the impossibility of predicting.

Brian Angliss:

The End of Faith by Sam Harris

I’m not done with this book, but it’s been an interesting read thus far. Harris chronicles a long list of atrocities committed in the name of faith, with an understandable focus on the three major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. While it took me a long time to put aside my own biases (I’m an animist neo-pagan) and actually be able to read the book at all, I’ve found it an illuminating if occasionally frustrating read.

He’s spent almost no time on non-monotheistic faith thus far in my reading, and he’s said “the good things that religion has accomplished don’t matter” far too often. It feels too much like he’s saying “talk to the hand” when he should be spending more time explaining why the good stuff doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. And I say this as someone who generally agrees with Harris’ sentiment that religion has been a largely negative force over the course of human history.

Whythawk:

I am reading, with great dedication:

Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional, Magnus Lie Hetland

Essential SQLAlchemy, Rick Copeland

wxPython in Action, Noel Rapin and Robin Dunn

Programming Collective Intelligence, Toby Segaran

I heartily recommend them all to anyone hoping to become proficient at the Python programming language and, if I could just keep half of it in my head, I would much appreciate it, thank you.

Dawn Farmer:

The Logic of Life by Tim Harford (yes, at Whythawk’s recommendation — terrifically interesting book)

Why We Make Mistakes by Joseph Hallinan

Righteous Porkchop by Nicolette Hahn Niman (I’m curious to hear if anyone else is reading this book.)

In Righteous Porkchop Nicollette Hahn Niman recounts her work as the lead lawyer for the Waterkeeper Alliance’s Hog Campaign.  This campaign is designed to force factory hog farms into a more level playing field with the smaller farmer.  They have some important legal success using the Clean Air and Water Act, but the current economicclimate has made actual permits too expensive for the states to issue and enforce.  If you’ve never read anything about factory animal “farms” the book is an eye opener.  The author provides examples of well run farms and without being preachy offers suggestions to the consumer on the types of shops likely to have the products of these ethically run farms.  The author provides one more voice in a story that needs telling.

Just started:

The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser

Thumbs, Toes and Tears by Chip Walter

Chris Mackowski:

The Survivor’s Club by Ben Sherwood

Alexi Koltowicz:

The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels (actually a reread from years ago). An interesting alternative look at Christianity, though not deep enough to be called scholarly.

Bad Samaritans (The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism), Chang Ha-Joon. An excellent book from a Cambridge economist that pretty well tears down our idea of capitalism without attacking capitalism. Chang points out that the great economic powers like Britain and the US did not get to the top of the heap by practicing what they currently preach. He points out inconvenient truths like the US being the most protectionist country in the world up until the 1920’s, during which time the US was also the world’s fastest growing economy. With his intimate knowledge of Korea, he points out how both Korea and Japan became economic powers by not following the development prescriptions of the free-marketeers. This one is well worth any reader’s time; it’s deep enough to be satisfying and illuminating, but also short enough to be readable and briskly written.

Motherland (A Philosophical History of Russia), Lesley Chamberlain. A book that is probably long overdue. It brings together the narrative of Russian history with a new perspective and goes a long way towards explaining why Russia is so different than the West.

Russian Nights, Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky. A forgotten work of Russian philosophy presented as a series of short stories.

Street Gang (The Complete History of Sesame Street), Michael Davis. Behind the scenes and most concerned with the personalities that made the show possible, as well as their motivations. For someone who’s only allowed television was Sesame Street and who’s still a Sesame Street YouTube junky, it’s an indispensable volume.

For the Common Good (Redirecting the economy toward community, the environment, and a sustainable future), Herman Daly and John Cobb Jr. This is an Agonista book club read, and I’m not far enough along to speak with any depth about it.

Truck, Michael Perry. A year in the life of Mr. Perry as he works on semi-restoring his his 1951 International Harvester pickup truck, plants a garden, falls in love, and ruminates on life from the view of his small, Wisconsin town. Somehow farms, deer hunting, NPR and green tea come together naturally. He’s an outstanding writer who manages to speak both intelligently and plainly; moreover, he can turn a phrase and make you laugh.

Roads to Quoz (An American Mosey), William Least Heat-Moon. An impulse buy fueled by a gift certificate burning a hole in my pocket. I cannot refuse a beautifully made book with a collection of words on the cover that include Least Heat-Moon, Quoz and mosey. The jacket blurb says “Heat-Moon is a travel writer the way Faulkner was a county historian” and that sums it up pretty well. An extraordinarily literate account of seeking out the local flavors, idiosyncrasies and stories that make travel a spiritual experience.

Mike Sheehan:

On my nightstand: I was at the comic shop not long ago and picked up a couple of Bad Planets and some old issues of Creepy and Eerie, favorites from my youth. Also got the recent issue of MAD about Obama’s first 100 days (surprisingly, MAD’s still quite funny, has talented new artists, and some of the legendary old 70’s crew is still around). Also re-reading the classic Y no se lo tragó la Tierra (…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him) by Tomás Rivera for the zillionth time. It’s a story of survival and acceptance from the point of view of a migrant workers’ son. The last pages always get to me… in a positive way. Also reading Machiavelli’s Il Principe (The Prince) for the first time. Watch out, world.

Russ Wellen:

His Excellency George Washington
Joseph Ellis
Knopf, 2004

When I was a boy, my most cherished book may have been The Golden Book of the American Revolution. Intended for early adolescents, it was illustrated with period paintings and prints, which served to imprint me on the era. But I don’t recall actually reading the text. In fact, it’s only in recent years that I’ve read about the Revolutionary War and learned about its causes, battles, and what life was like for the soldiers, as well as the colonists.

It wasn’t long before I discovered that George Washington was not someone to take for granted just because we overdosed on him in school or because he looks stiff and imperious in paintings and statures. However, I was unwilling to invest my time in a 500-page or two-volume biography. I especially avoid those authors who insist on kicking off their bios by chronicling the subject’s ancestry and dragging the reader through his or her parents’ lives. They lose the reader before he or she even gets to the subject of the bio.

I considered a popular bio of Washington similar to John Adams by David McCullough. However, I’m leery, though, of popular bios, especially since the late Stephen Ambrose, author of books like Band of Brothers, got caught plagiarizing. (Not that I mean to imply that of McCullough.) Another popular “brothers” history book was Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph Ellis. But when I noticed that his Washington bio, His Excellency George Washington (Knopf, 2004), drew strong reviews, I checked it out of the library.

It immediately became apparent that Ellis deserves to be widely read: How many historical bios have you read that are page turners? Neither do the liberal insertions of Washington’s own writing slow the book down. However contained, Washington always made his feelings known. In fact, even though his life was scandal free — no children by slaves, no apparent affairs — Washington was one of those rare figures who kept bumping up against history at every turn, from the French and Indian Wars to the Revolution to the Constitutional Convention to his presidency.

Because he kept slaves, singing the praises of Washington is seen as less than politically correct. He eventually felt guilty about it, but, a businessman before he was a humanitarian, the only option he saw open to him wasn’t freeing his slaves but selling them. In the long run, he did neither. But, as with many planters, his slaves became a money-losing proposition.

As they populated his farms, he couldn’t bring himself to break up their families by selling them. Furthermore, he was caring for those too old to work. In essence, many of his slaves were in a state of forced welfare, complete with teenagers with too much time on their hands. In other words, Washington was torn between benevolence and business.

The central paradox of his life, however, is that a man as ambitious and obsessed with his personal legacy as Washington resisted overweening power. Perhaps the only American who received as much open adulation as him was Elvis Presley. Yet, once president, Washington disregarded the public’s urging that he reign like a king. He was that rare man who realized his ego and his ethics could be on the same page, that by doing what was right for the country — ratifying separation of powers, limiting the power of the executive branch — he was ensuring his own legacy.

Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S.
Trita Parsi
Yale University Press, 2007

Though the author is Iranian-American, the book, which I’m halfway through, is a dispassionate account of relations between the three countries. Most Americans have no idea that Iran and Israel, however reluctantly, were on good terms until the first Iraq War. They needed each other as buffers against rising power Iraq, though for the sake of the Arab world, Iran publicly denigrated Israel. In fact, while Israel sought a long-term commitment, Iran acted on a case-by-case basis.

To give you an idea of how important Israel viewed Iran to its security, Israel actually provided Iran with arms during the hostage crisis. Further courting U.S. ire, while the United States was supplying Iraq with arms during the Iran-Iraq War, Israel continued to sell them to Iran. Until the Iraq War, Israel appeared to be a beat behind Iran when it came to diplomacy, even, at times, in denial of how little regard in which it was held by Iran. One can’t help wondering if the years Israel spent as what amounted to a spurned suitor helped fuel its present-day bitterness towards Iran.

The United States, as well, often fumbled its dealings with Iran. As for Israel and the United States, we forget, but the United States often kept Israel at arms length. The author quotes a phone conversation in 1991 when President George H.W. Bush told Israeli President Itzhak Shamir, “I’ve just read the wire story quoting you about a confrontation with the United States. If you want that — fine.” During the same period, Secretary of State James Baker sent Israel this public message: “When you’re serious about peace, call us.”

Even though Treacherous Alliance is exclusively about diplomatic dealings, with little in the way of anecdote or character, thanks to the author’s gift for narrative, it too fairly flows.

Despite that, the book still requires concentration and when I started it I soon rediscovered why it was the first ambitious book I’d embarked upon in a while. Most of my book reading (as opposed to keeping up with events and research) is done while commuting to work on the train. But, interrupting my concentration, passengers speaking to each other or into cell phones became a source of frustration.

Thus, a few months ago, I swore off ambitious books and plans to renew that vow once I finish reading Treacherous Alliance (okay, and one or two others). Whenever I hear about the latest tempting (to me, anyway) tome, it’s hard to resist the impulse to check it out of the library.

The Peter Macklin Series

Fortunately, reading less taxing books on the train doesn’t present the same problems. In previous Nightstands I beat the drum for author Loren Estleman. Though, come to think of it, his signature series, featuring “hardboiled” detective Amos Walker, is challenging in its way. This is especially true of the later novels in the series, where his writing has became honed and, in places, dense.

But the only challenges most crime-fiction readers want from the genre is puzzling the out who, how, and why of the crime. They lack both an eye and the patience for the literary. Between the dialogue, action, interior life, and description — Estleman was once an artist and has no qualms about halting the proceedings and lovingly describing a scene — he’s the only crime novelist besides James Lee Burke whose work I’d classify as literary. (I’m sure there are crime-fiction aficionados who’ve drawn up their own lists.)

To keep from depleting the supply of Amos Walker books, I just finished another series of Estleman’s: the five-book Peter Macklin series. Far from solving crimes, this character commits them. Macklin, in fact is a hit man. But he describes himself as simply a killer, just as he uses workmanlike guns of modest caliber. Nondescript in appearance, killing’s just a job to him and while his work excites him, it’s neither pleasurable nor repellent to him.

Wait a minute — what is someone like me, who not only shuns excessive violence in books and movies in books, but comes dangerously close to being a pacifist, doing reading books about a hit man? Chalk it up to the power of Estleman to beguile the reader, no matter what he writes.

Though, of course he’s not the first author to make you care for a violent offender, Estleman further tempts you into rooting for Macklin in the last two books of the series when he’s ostensibly out of the game and trying to start a new life with a young wife. But when his old life comes back to haunt him, he has no qualms about killing again to protect his new life.

To what extent have I fallen for Estleman’s work? I just started reading one of his Westerns. Wait — what self-respecting reader reads Westerns? Overexposed to Westerns on TV as a kid, I became indifferent to the genre. But, as with George Washington, I guess I was destined to come full circle and find out just why they matter.

What, Scholars & Rogues readers, are you reading?

After eighteen years, I finally got around to reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X—the novel that literally defined my generation.

In a way, that makes Generation X sort of like the Moby Dick for Gen X-ers—one of those novels that one should read because it’s a Classic-with-a-capital-C. It’s Important. It’s defining. It’s about me.

Right?

Published in 1991, Generation X tells the story of three unfulfilled, uninspired twenty-somethings who float through life, tell stories to each other, and experience a nagging sense of being adrift in their own lives despite their best efforts to ground themselves. You can almost hear U2 belting out “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” in the background.

Being young means getting old, and middle class means boredom. “You see, when you’re middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you,” Coupland writes. “It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile….”

Because the characters are so unfulfilled, the story itself felt unfulfilling. It left me wondering “What’s the point”—although that, in itself, is the point. Twentysomethings in the early nineties were wondering what the point was to their own existences even as they felt both smug and dissatisfied in their own hipness. They wanted less in life yet they wanted more out of it, too. (I wonder if twentysomethings today feel the same way.)

“What’s the point?” sounds like something straight out of Beckett, but Coupland doesn’t seem to think life’s absurd. He’s not asking a rhetorical or unanswerable question. He characters really do want to know what the point is. They don’t like feeling as unmoored as they do.

The book managed to tap into that zeitgeist, which I partially identified with, but there was much more to the book that I could not identify with. The characters felt too disenfranchised, too resentful of the baby-boomers, too intellectually superior. I thought the book did a better job of labeling my generation rather defining.

Or, perhaps the book really just defines the older half of the Gen X generation. In 1991, cubicle farms and corporate America and disposable marriages meant nothing to me. I didn’t feel resentment toward baby boomers who’d suddenly turned into The Man whom they’d railed against in the sixties. I didn’t feel angst about my own unrealized potential or disconnected from my own dysfunctional family. I’d not made my way in the world long enough or far enough to have those struggles. Hell, back then I was even a die-hard Conservative.

All that aside, Coupland is a helluva of a writer. He turns a phrase and captures a sentiment as well as any of the best writers of his (my) generation. The book was endlessly quotable, and Coupland packed it with plenty of worthwhile ideas to chew on (in my mind, always the hallmark of a good book). The epilogue was as beautiful a thing as I’ve read in a long, long time.

But after years of listening to the hype about Generation X, I felt a little underwhelmed. That’s my fault, I guess, for expecting a mirror instead of a book.

What have others seen when they’ve read it?

Despite lukewarm reviews and a running time that nearly hits three hours, the movie still managed to pull in a hefty $55.7 million dollars. While that’s apparently at the low end of industry expectations, the movie exceeded my fanboy expectations.

What I didn’t expect, though, was the spectacular time capsule-on-a-movie screen that Watchmen turned out to be.

As ground-breaking as Watchmen was as a comic book back in 1986-87, it was also very much a product of its time, infused with Cold War sensibility and anxiety, set in a crime-and-slime-ridden Times Square atmosphere writ large upon the world. As a topper, America’s Conservative government runs amok. (What’s the only thing worse than two terms of Ronald Regan, the book posits? Five terms of Nixon.) The story itself is grim, and it embodies a pessimistic view of human nature. The graphic novel manages to evoke sick-to-your-stomachness with its examinations of society’s self-degradation and man’s personal darkness.

Film director Zach Snyder chose to keep the movie set in the same time period of the original comic. He resisted attempts to update the script to reflect the war on terror and clung loyally to the Cold War zeitgeist. That choice, to stick with the graphic novel’s original setting, makes the movie feel a little like a wax museum on performance-enhancing steroids.

For most young people, the Cold War means little or nothing, so the movie carries little or no Cold War dread for them. I’m probably too hopeful to think that the film might inspire Millennial moviegoers to learn more about the Cold War (the way that films like Gettysburg or Glory inspired people to visit battlefields and learn more about the Civil War or the book and film versions of John Adams inspired people to learn more about the most overlooked Founder). Of course, that’s not the movie’s job. Watchmen is meant as entertainment—and thus far, all the Millenials I’ve talked to who’ve seen the movie have raved about it. And many have been inspired to read the book, which is pretty cool in and of itself.

For people my age or older—Gen X-ers or Boomers—the Cold War evokes pretty specific anxieties about annihilation, but the alternative world of the Watchmen keeps those anxieties at an observable but unengageable distance. Snyder is almost Brechtian in his insistence at keeping his audience disengaged from the political context of the story—which, in turn, keeps audiences from engaging in the story emotionally. I always felt like I was watching the story rather than really connecting with it. (The overall spectacle of the movie, though, certainly provided lots of cool stuff to watch.)

Theses will be written about the relationship between the movie and the book—what armchair movieviewer or fanboy doesn’t enjoy the ol’ fashioned compare-and-contrast?—but ultimately,Watchmen, the film, really has little to do with the book itself. Some moveigoers have no relationship with the graphic novel at all and can just enjoy the cinematic spectacle. Others, like me, have so much baggage and so many fanboy expectations that it’s nearly impossible to walk into the theater and enjoy the movie as a movie. And so, like any art, the movie’s meaning is largely drawn from the personal experiences of those who see it.

For me, that relates to one of the criteria of great art: How does art make us engage in discussion with ourselves? How does it force us to critically challenge our ideas and assumptions (and decades-old anxieties)? How does it help us see the world?

In that regard, I’ll argue that the movie serves as a more relevant form of art than the graphic novel (at least for the moment). I always found Dave Gibbons’ artwork to be underwhelming and uninspired; Snyder’s onscreen extravaganza, on the other hands, seems highly inspired—even if that inspiration comes from the graphic novel itself. Writer Alan Moore claimed his graphic novel was unfilmable, but Snyder did a damn fine job of proving Moore wrong.

Even if the movie doesn’t capture the bygone zeitgeist of a world that never existed, it captures something. It’s of-the-moment—a stylized, Hollywoodized moment—in the same kind of way the graphic novel was of its own gritty moment in the mid-80s. Whether it’s great art or not, Watchmen makes a fascinating time capsule and a great spectacle in the best ways movies can be.

In the intervening years, the town has reinvented itself around the rain. Homeowners have rigged giant sheets of plastic, like umbrellas, over their homes. Officials have constructed a series of canals around the town to siphon off water. Townsfolk have to go to the giant gymnasium if they want a rain-free place to exercise.

And the town itself has even earned a new nickname: Mudville.

The world is a whole lot cozier for Mudville’s creator, author Kurtis Scaletta. He sits on the couch of his living room with Torii, one of his five cats, meowing at him. Scaletta is eagerly awaiting the start of this year’s baseball season because it brings with it the release of Mudville, his first Young Adult novel.

“People are still excited about baseball in early spring, so that’s when baseball books tend to come out,” Scaletta says.

But Mudville has more than just baseball. The story centers around a pair of foster brothers, one a pitcher and the other a catcher, who share a close friendship but also a sibling rivalry. “I’m really interested in the relationship between a pitcher and a catcher,” Scaletta says. “That friendship is maybe the tightest friendship in sports.”

Roy, the catcher, narrates the story. He’s a very agreeable guy, Scaletta says—in contrast to his foster brother, Sturgis, the pitcher, who’s a bit more volatile. “But he has a lot more talent, too, so Roy really needs him,” Scaletta says.

During the big game against their arch-rival, Moundville’s team falls way behind early. Then the storm clouds move in. As the rain begins, a batter steps to the plate and manages to keep Moundville’s team alive by fouling off seventy pitches—and then the umpires call a rain delay.

“I like to think of it as a tall tale,” Scaletta says.

The story picks up when the rain lets up twenty-two years later and the big game has to resume. By that point, the kids of the original players have to step in where their parents left off.

“There’s a lot going on in the larger story,” Scaletta explains. “There’s baseball involved, but thee are also family dynamics, there’s history, there’s mystery. I hope it’s all inseparable.”

* * * * *

Like a lot of other writers, Scaletta had a few manuscripts under his belt before he finally sold Mudville.

His first novel, written in 1995 as his graduate thesis at the University of Maine, focused on a virtual reality similar to “Second Life.” “It was Second Life fifteen years before Second Life existed,” Scaletta says.

He has cooked up stories about a young girl whose editorial cartoons become a smash sensation; a circus elephant who lives on a dairy farm and teaches the cows there to dance, turning them into a roadside attraction; and a young girl who finds a book with her name, Samara, on the cover, which opens to fanciful adventures.

His follow-up to Mudville, Mamba Point, is currently working its way through Knopf’s editorial department toward a 2010 publication date. Inspired by his time living in Africa, Mamba Point features a boy who’s made a pet out of a black mamba, one of the world’s deadliest snakes.

“I’m basically a workaholic,” admits Scaletta, who tries to time his projects so that he’s actively writing one manuscript while another is at the editor’s. “There’s always something going on. I’m always busy.”

Mudville was the first of his manuscripts to work its way through the editorial process, and as a first-time author, Scaletta found the process rewarding. “I didn’t realize how much an editor becomes part of a book,” he says. “If Mudville had gone to a different house, with a different editor, it would be a somewhat different book. It’s like the producer of a record—an editor makes that same kind of stamp on a book, but unlike record producers, who have their name on the record, you can’t see the editor’s name on the book.”

Mudville began its journey to publication in 2004, when Scaletta first “jotted down some ideas” for the book. By 2005, he had a complete manuscript, which he then consigned to a desk drawer for a year. “I got married. I earned a [second] master’s degree. It was a busy year,” Scaletta says. “My wife’s the one who saved the book. She’s the one who encouraged me to pull it out of the drawer and whip it into shape.”

The “really thorough” revision that resulted took almost as much work as the original draft, Scaletta says. “I changed the tense to present tense from past tense. When you change every single verb in a book, that gets pretty intensive,” he says.

Mudville finally gets its call on February 24. It will be one of several baseball-related books to hit shelves around that time—which is when spring training gets under way for Major League Baseball.

“The competition is fierce,” says Scaletta. “Not only are there are dozens of baseball books coming out, there are even two other baseball books by Minneapolis authors coming out at the same time as mine. Even if I had the modest goal of being the best-selling author of a baseball book from Minneapolis, I could still be third.”

Those books, The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane and Top of the Order by John Coy, come out February 24 and March 3, respectively. “Apparently you can’t spit in this town without hitting a YA baseball author,” Scaletta jokes.

But like the characters in Mudville—and like every baseball team preparing to start the upcoming season—Scaletta has high hopes for his own book. Perhaps, he says, Mudville will even end up in the Baseball Hall of Fame—in their bookstore, that is.

“Everyone has high hopes in the spring,” he says. “In a world where the Tampa Bay Rays can end up in the World Series, anything’s possible.”

“To my wife, who read all the drafts of my book. I am the lucky beneficiary of not only her wise editorial comments, but her loving encouragement.”

“To my husband, whose generosity of spirit enables him to laugh at the irony that my writer’s solitude has imposed a life of solitude on him too.”

Ever notice how many volumes of poetry and prose these days are bookended by gushing dedications and acknowledgments like the fictional examples above? Writers outdo themselves in expressions of gratitude to their loved ones for their help and patience. It’s as if we’re in the midst of a golden age of support — emotional anyway — for writers.

Unpublished writers, however, can be forgiven for wondering: Do husbands, wives, and lovers like these really exist?

Where are those who grumble about a writer’s slim prospects for a payday? What’s become of the Nora Joyce type, who makes no bones about a lack of confidence in the writer’s work? Or the spouse or lover who, jealous that the writer has a calling, tries to hold him back.

It’s not hard to understand why a writer rhapsodizes about his lover or spouse. Aloft on the euphoria accompanying publication, all is forgiven. Besides, where’s the harm in tossing a few laurels in his direction? (Spanning genders, pronouns are masculine throughout. Also, we’ll call the unpublished writer’s partner Blake.) They might go a long way to eroding his resistance to the work the writer plans to put in on his next book.

Hey, whatever works. But by failing to speak up about road blocks thrown in his path, a writer does a disservice to those who would follow in his tracks. An unpublished writer’s days are already dogged by disappointment. Stumbling across dedications and acknowledgments like those above will just make him feel like he’s the only writer bereft of a partner who’s not only a patron of the arts, but a muse too.

By flaunting his felicitous choice in a mate, a published writer pours salt in the wounds of the unpublished writer, who thinks, if only my partner would stop bundling my dreams into the bath and turning a cold shower on them. Among the problems Blake can pose, perhaps the most formidable is objecting to the amount of time a writer spends writing.

There’s no denying that when Blake threw his lot in with a writer he was in for a surprise. His previous relationships might well have been a round of restaurants, films, and concerts, or, at home, watching movies and TV. Aside from those who are studying for a degree, most men and women who have yet to start a family spend their evenings either out or unwinding at home.

Unless he’s an artist as well, the first time Blake catches sight of the writer retreating to his computer, his heart sinks. Does writing, Blake wonders, mean more to him than me?

Following the advice, however well-meaning, of Beth Mende Condy on WriteFromHome.com — “You must declare to the world that. . . you have the right to write” — will only add fuel to the fire. Of course, if the writer is paid, Blake cuts him some slack — or does he?

We decided to give writers who have attained a degree of success their big chance to come clean. We first asked them if they had ever experienced resentment in a relationship over the amount of time they spent writing.

Kim Addonizio, author of Little Beauties (Simon & Schuster, 2005) reports that a man she lived with told her, “I really should do more housework since I was home all the time.”

Edward Falco, author of Wolf Point (Unbridled Books, 2005), says of his significant others: “I have been in relationships when my significant other rebelled against the ways in which I prioritized writing.” Though he doesn’t draw the conclusion himself, perhaps one form that rebellion took was the interruptions that he’s found endemic to a writer’s life, especially by “someone who lives with you and knows that many of those hours. . . are spent pacing around the room.”

Poet Robert Earl Price Wise Blood (Snake Nation Press, 2004), also experienced resentment. “It took burning through several relationships before I realized that most writers probably need a partner with a life of their own.” (His wife is a visual artist.)

Christopher Klim, author of The Winners Circle (Hopewell Publications, 2006) reports that he’s been down the same road as Price. He “purposely married a strong and independent person who didn’t need me, but preferred to be around me.”

Diana Abu-Jaber, author of The Language of Baklava (Pantheon, 2005), also married someone who “was entirely supportive of my work and the time I put into writing. He’s always trying to help me find ways to get away and improve my focus.”

In other words, a writer mired in a relationship in which his pursuit is not honored, or at least tolerated, would be advised to seek an escape route. Some writers, however, seem to have been spared writer’s resentment entirely.

Phyllis Tickle is the author of The Night Offices (Oxford University Press, 2006), the latest in a series of fixed-hour prayer manuals. “Writing certainly did not pay well enough in the beginning to support a household,” she reports. But her husband, Sam, “supported my efforts at every turn.”

Now that that Phyllis is the principal breadwinner, Sam does the housekeeping. Demonstrating an outlook that no doubt helped attract such a supportive partner, she adds, “It’s all just an indivisible whole.”

On the other hand, we must take care to refrain from reflexively painting lovers or spouses who are less than supportive, like Blake, as intolerant or immature. He could just as easily be called practical. After all, someone’s got to keep an eye on the finances.

Purists, of course, maintain that a writer’s true reward is the act of writing itself. They fail to understand a key point: Generating cash can be crucial to justifying the vast expanses of time to which a writer lays claim. “What most people don’t get,” Edward Falco said, “is the kind of drive and dedication it takes simply to make the time to write.”

However undeniable his calling, an unpublished writer is essentially a hobbyist, no better and no worse than someone who repairs to crafts or woodworking after dinner. In fact, if the writer has children, he may find his writing district gerrymandered to near extinction. It’s not until dinner is done, the kitchen cleaned up, and he’s finished helping the kids with the homework that he’s free to escape to his own zone.

But wait. There’s a final hurdle to clear: Blake is counting on time alone with him to catch up on the day.

Who can argue with that? It’s just that fatigue is already breaching the perimeters of the writer’s consciousness. Worse, in what amounts to an admission that Blake’s jealousy is warranted, the writer fears he’s standing up his muse. Will she ever return?

Even a full-time writer may find himself in this predicament. If he works past his day shift, he’s liable to be met with the same resistance as the unpaid writer.

In his article, “Into the Clear: Philip Roth” from Reporting (Alfred Knopf, 2006), which was excerpted in Poets & Writers, David Remnick captures this dilemma with a quote from the great man himself. (Overlook, for the moment, Roth’s not-so-veiled swipe at his former wife.)

“Usually,” he said, “I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don’t have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day.”

But, even yielding to Blake’s need for his presence may not be the end of it. If the writer is white-knuckling it, as they say in support groups, Blake will sense he’s looking ahead to writing. Their time together will have been poisoned.

However sympathetic we are to his plight, it’s at this point that the frustrated writer must be taken to task. What did he expect? After all, he doesn’t want one of those passive typist types from an earlier era, does he? Besides, if Blake doesn’t voice his objections, his resentment will only accumulate and, with a writer’s luck, blow sky high just as the writer faces a deadline.

We asked writers if preoccupation was not only an occupational hazard, but a hazard to the health of their relationships.

Niala Maharaj, author of Like Heaven (Random House, 2006), responds: “My boyfriend of nearly 10 years actually threw me out of his house because I was too preoccupied while writing Like Heaven.”

Phyllis Tickle is “not safe around sharp objects,” according to her husband. Conceding that, she adds: “Any writer who says he or she does not move into another zone of consciousness when actively writing is just fooling him or herself.” His partner “must accommodate to the realities and exigencies of the process.”

Edward Falco says, “A loved one has a right to have you present when together, not off thinking about invented characters. But when you’re working on a story, really working, the mind is going all the time, dreaming those characters, living their imagined lives.”

Christopher Klim explains that his wife understands “that’s part of the artistic mind. Whenever I gear up for a new novel or script, I go through periods of intense focus. . . [which can't help but resemble] self-absorption.” Then he adds, “There are quirks about my spouse that must be honored. It’s the least I can do.”

Robert Price, meanwhile, attempts to head the problem off at the pass. He and his spouse “maintain a genuine interest in each other and each other’s work.” He has learned that “we are both insecure.”

Klim sums up. “There’s nothing to prepare you for living with an artist, only a strong, self-affirmed, independent mind.”

You can warn a young writer of the perils of pairing off with a partner from outside the arts all you want. But a writer, often weighed down by an inferiority complex about his introspective ways, may be drawn to someone whose idea of an interior life is drapes, valences, and modular sofas.

The subsequent unhappy relationship may provide a young writer with choice material. However, one who’s in writing for the long haul soon wearies of the home as a battlefield. He needs a refuge, in which, to paraphrase Wordsworth, he can recollect his conflicts in tranquility.

Isn’t there a tradition that he can fall back on, the young writer wonders, which entitles him to a certain amount of time? Aren’t there industry standards of some sort? Even suggested guidelines that he can present to Blake would be helpful.

Perhaps it’s time that devising some became a project for writer’s conferences. In fact, why not comp Blake a free pass and invite his input? The results of these workshops would be aggregated at a conference of a group like the National Writers’ Union, which exists, in part, to improve the working conditions of all writers. A sample contract may then be drawn up.

Think of it as a variation on a pre-nup. While distinctly un-romantic, it would help Blake understand that time taken from the relationship is the only way for a writer –- or any artist, or even an entrepreneur — to take his shot at success. In turn, Blake can rest assured that nether will he be short-changed. In fact, he’ll see many of his claims on the writer’s time validated.

In the interim, the writer needs to understand that, when it comes to convincing Blake of his commitment to the relationship, nothing beats his full, undivided attention. When Blake sees how present he is, he might learn to be content with less quantity.

In practice, the writer should count on at least half an hour of time alone evenings with Blake. What about weekends? If time management is unexplored terrain to a writer, weekends are virgin territory that await mapping out.

No more than marriage vows, the proposed contract can’t guarantee you won’t end up just another lonely writer. But what choice do we have other than to behave honorably? After all, isn’t empathy the currency of our realm? A writer who doesn’t hold up his end of a relationship is at least at much at fault as a partner who fails to honor a writer’s calling.

Stage and film star Claire Bloom and author Philip Roth took no prisoners when their 17-year relationship ended in a firestorm.

When one of the partners in a marriage is a man who’s been called “a gleeful misogynist” –- in a complimentary article, no less –- it comes as no surprise when their union is torn asunder.

Claire Bloom and Philip Roth became a couple in 1976. She was not only a classically trained actress, but her beauty rivaled that of fellow English-woman Elizabeth Taylor (who she actually beat to Richard Burton, with whom she had an affair). He, of course is the American novelist whose career ebbed and flowed, until, after bypass surgery in 1989, he devoted his whole being to writing and was been on a tear ever since.

Why re-visit their marriage over a decade later? How about as a case study in why two people of opposite temperaments shouldn’t pair off? Or as a cautionary tale about airing your dirty laundry in public? In truth, it’s fascination lies in the incongruity of artists behaving like tabloid trash.

I first became curious about them while working on an article about writers and their lovers or spouses. The sticking point in those relationships has always been, aside from insufficient remuneration for the writer’s work, the amount of time he or she devotes to his labors. During my research, I came across this quote from Philip Roth, when he was interviewed by New Yorker editor David Remnick:

“Usually I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don’t have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day.”

Roth must have been referring to the days when he was married to Ms. Bloom, especially when they were in residence at his country home. They didn’t marry until 1989; in 1993 he served her with divorce papers.

Then I learned that their relationship occupied a central place in her memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House (Little, Brown and Co., 1996). Thus, if you care to assign blame for who turned their relationship into a public vendetta, it was Ms. Bloom.

But, as Time reviewer Elizabeth Gleick wrote about Bloom’s book, it “is hard not to wonder what will happen when Roth turns his novelist’s eye to this same material. Claire Bloom has good reason to shudder at the prospect.”

Drawing First Blood

Why, one wonders, did she strike the first blow when the odds were she’d be subject to fierce retaliation? Perhaps she was seeing a therapist who encouraged her to write the book as a way of standing up for herself with someone to whom she felt subservient. Ms. Bloom wrote of Roth, “that I was intimidated: Philip always gained the upper hand in any argument, and with his razor-sharp wit could easily say something amusing and cutting.”

Also Ms. Bloom likely needed the money. After all — “The better to get the whole ugly business over” — she’d brought the divorce proceedings to a premature close. “After a relatively brief period of negotiation,” she wrote, “and much against my lawyer’s strong advice, I settled with Philip for the sum of $100,000.” Though she was a star, she was still prone to the vagaries of casting and suffered dry spells during which she generated no income.

Nor did Ms. Bloom reveal anything, um, icky, about the “gleeful misogynist” — no sexual quirks, not to mention shortcomings. Their main bone of contention was Ms. Bloom’s daughter by her first husband, actor Rod Steiger. “Above all else,” she wrote, “both for him and for me — the subject of my relationship with Anna became an eternal battlefield.”

She admits that: “I clung to Anna in ways that were extremely unsuitable, especially as she grew older; this made Philip feel as though he was an intruder in our closed circle.” But “I hadn’t recognized how deep his prejudice ran. … I was caught in the middle. … Placing Philip’s needs over Anna’s meant hanging on to an important relationship at the price of my daughter’s trust in her mother’s protection.”

After an operation on his knee went awry, Roth sank into a depression and spent time at a psychiatric hospital. The reader may fault Ms. Bloom for holding Roth responsible for his odd behavior while ill. But there was no ignoring the extent of the cruelty to which he subjected her, especially when it turned out he’d met someone else and was trying to drive her away. To wit:

“Philip demanded the return of everything he had provided for me during our years together. His [itemized to a fare-thee-well] list included. . . $28,500 per annum he had given me over twelve years. . . $150 per hour for the “five or six hundred hours” he had sent going over scripts with me. . . and ‘a little something’ for adapting The Cherry Orchard and writing a play about the writer Jean Rhys.”

Roth, whose publishing contracts may be the largest a writer of serious fiction has ever received, saved the best for last: “. . . for refusing to honor my prenuptial agreement, he levied a fine of sixty-two billion dollars –- a billion dollars for every year of my life.”

Ms. Bloom’s response: “At first, the element of mockery I was doubtless intended to read into these messages was entirely lost on me.” Why would that be? Oh, because it wasn’t funny.

Blood Feud

In 1999, Roth wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books: “Over the past three years I have become accustomed to finding Miss Bloom’s characterization of me taken at face value.”

But by then he had already sought revenge to set the record straight by means of a novel published in 1998 called I Married a Communist (Houghton Mifflin). The title refers not to the book’s plot but to another book that plays a part in Roth’s book — one chronicling the failed marriage of its author, a character named Eve Frame, in a spirit similar to which Claire Bloom wrote Leaving a Doll’s House.

In his novel, Roth makes no bones about the problem the protagonist, Eve’s husband Ira Ringold, experiences with her daughter by a previous marriage. Ringold is not the author’s alter ego; as in some of Roth’s other books the task falls to Nathan Zuckerman. To make it more confusing, Zuckerman sub-contracts much of the narrating work to Ringold’s now aged brother, Murray.

Ira Ringold is an outsized (in physique as well as character) radio star after World War II, known as Iron Rinn, with Communist sympathies. Murray describes domestic life at Ira and Eve’s Manhattan apartment:

“Eve would be in the living room doing her needlepoint and listening to Sylphid plucking away and Ira’d be upstairs writing to O’Day [Ira's Communist mentor]. And when the harp [in real life, Anna Steiger is an opera singer] went silent and he went downstairs to find Eve, she wouldn’t be there. She’d be up in Sylphid’s room. … The two of them in bed, under the covers, listening to Cosi Fan Tutte.”

Eve becomes pregnant with Ira’s child. But he’s unable to talk her out of an abortion, which, he comes to realize, “wasn’t Eve’s decision –- it was Sylphid’s. … What he hears Sylphid saying to her mother is, ‘If you ever, ever try that again, I’ll strangle the little idiot in its crib!’”

Then Ira rents a well-appointed apartment for Sylphid:

“That night [Eve] gathered her courage and went upstairs bearing the drawing she’d made, the floor plan of the new apartment. … It took no time at all, of course, for Sylphid to register her objection and for Ira to be racing up the stairs to Sylphid’s room. … But no Mozart this time. … What he saw was Eve on her back screaming and crying, and Sylphid in her pajamas sitting astride her, also screaming, also crying, her strong harpist’s hands pinning Eve’s shoulders to the bed [with] Sylphid, screaming, ‘Can’t you stand up to anyone? Won’t you once stand up for your own daughter against him? Won’t you be a mother, ever? Ever?”

Leave us not forget the anti-Semitism (the self-hating kind — Claire Bloom was born Jewish) Roth ascribes to Eve as she lashes out at her sister-in-law, Murray’s wife: “‘You! What are you staring at, you hideous, twisted little Jew!’”

If you think this is pretty over-the-top for a supposed world-class novelist, you’re not the only one. It’s as if Roth is so intent on seeking revenge against Ms. Bloom that he fails to notice that his writing has sunk to the level of melodrama.

Worse, he describes a scene in which Eve seeks out Ira, who’s left her. She prostates herself before him, throws her arms around his legs, and begs him to come back. In her book, Ms. Bloom admits that she swallowed her pride in her attempts to keep Roth from leaving. But, Roth portrays Eve’s craven imploring not as a cry for help at some level, but as an assault on Ringold. That’s judgmentalism from the most imperious and frigid of heights.

Worst of all, he equates Ms. Bloom writing about their marriage with Eve Frame outing Rinn’s communism (which may be a metaphor for the single-mindedness with which Roth pursues writing).

No Grist Too Coarse for the Mill

One can hear the objection: All’s fair in love and fiction. Isn’t all life fair game for fiction, no matter who gets hurt? Perhaps, but in life as well as art a balanced portrait aligns fiction more closely with the truth.

While I Married a Communist is a wild ride of a book, the character of Eve Frame is a caricature that has no place in a novel by an important writer. Furthermore, while Roth’s reputation may have suffered harm from Leaving a Doll’s House, there’s no way it ruined him like Ira was when Eve outed him as a communist during the McCarthy era.

Today Roth enjoys accolades as America’s greatest living novelist. After the divorce, Ms. Bloom who’s played in everything from Shakespeare to a Charlie Chaplin movie to Ibsen to a Woody Allen movie, accepted a role in the soap opera As the World Turns to pay her bills.

In the end, the revenge Philip Roth sought with I Married a Communist boomeranged on him. Its author comes off as petty, narcissistic, and vicious — unbecoming traits that could work to keep this perennial Nobel-Prize-for-literature candidate perennial.

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Wendy Redal

Hermann Hesse, especially for Narcissus & Goldmund: His study of the tension between reason and emotion as told through the 14th century lives of these two protagonists has served as a backdrop for my enduring awareness of this often troubling juxtaposition — throughout culture and in my own life. I grew up as cool Narcissus — a means to cope with a childhood fraught by chaos — and have been wrestling ever since with how to handle my inner Goldmund.

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: Here, too, I found myself immersed in the struggle between what is conventional and proper versus passion and yearning. Maybe this book fostered my lifelong anglophilism, which has always been drawn more toward the wild moors of the North than the sedate farmland of Sussex.

C.S. Lewis: For his masterful use of argument, love of myth and its power, and rich insight into the heights and depths of human character. The Great Divorce in particular, where Hell is a tired, gray suburb peopled with self-absorbed denizens consumed with their own pettiness, has provided a context within which I think about much human weakness and failings.

T.S. Eliot: Postmodernists will have a hey-day with me for putting Eliot right after Lewis, won’t they? (I could throw Matthew Arnold in, too, and really get in trouble!) Tackling “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in my 11th grade honors English class brought me face to face with existentialism, and fomented perhaps my first crisis of meaning. “The Wasteland,” which I read subsequently, didn’t help matters any. But the “Four Quartets” later came to frame a view of the world and our perplexing place within it that still holds for me today. My hope when I pass on from this material life is that I will indeed come to where I started from and know the place for the first time.

Speaking of poets, and here thinking very much of the sheer beauty of language when adeptly wielded, I have to add Gerard Manley Hopkins to my list. “God’s Grandeur” and “Pied Beauty” remain for me a gorgeous study in rhythm, alliteration and what I find to be truth, that the sacred is revealed in the material. Rather than being at odds, I find them paradoxically of a piece.

That last thought is a segueway to Terry Tempest Williams, whose “Refuge” was a deeply moving story in that vein. Her simultaneous telling of the flooding of a bird refuge on the Great Salt Lake, and her mother’s gradual demise from cancer, frames the way I think about loss and responsibility, and the possibility of redemption on some plane. I love her voice of poetry and moral passion, enlisted in the service of environmental preservation — and in the latter, our self-preservation as well.

I should add a few lines about Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi but I have 33 papers to grade and the mundane is going to get the better of me today. But that’s a start.

Oh, and I would be remiss — seriously — if I didn’t extend a nod to fellow Scrogue Denny Wilkins here. His post on this subject made note of many of his own professional mentors, whose names would not be known to the wider public, and I will add him to my own list. My writing sadly does not reflect Denny’s marvelous ability to say a lot with less, but he is the editing conscience on my shoulder when I struggle with how to cut, trim, omit, condense and otherwise tighten up my overweight prose. Imagine what I’d produce if it weren’t for Denny’s subtle voice! I so admire his talent in saying only what’s essential, and not losing anything in the process (see, that’s redundant right there: if it’s “only what’s essential,” then you can’t lose anything when you eliminate anything else. Sheesh, Wendy, you’re wordy.).

Russ Wellen

I used to operate under the assumption that my writing style was influenced by the books I’d read in my youth. It was as if their authors convened in a faceless phantasm that hovered over me as I wrote. A couple of years ago, though, it occurred to me that I couldn’t pick out any faces. I was unable to zero in on writers who had influenced my style.

My writing had long been marked by a commitment to just the right word (I’ve since become slack) and, when I finally switched from fiction to nonfiction, a veneration for the essay form. But not only couldn’t I remember any special writers, I could recall no essays that had inspired me.

Nothing by Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or George Orwell. Why the amnesia? Oh, maybe because I never read them. Consisting of only two years of indifferent college, my education, like that of many auto-didacts, is full of gaps.

I can only conclude that I must have read great essays in a previous life (belief in reincarnation is second nature to a Buddhist, however secular, like me). Apparently, my bias toward the form was teleported to this life. As for my quest for the perfect word, though, I was finally able to identify not one, but two sources.

Many have sung the praises of William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style. But, as I learned over the years, much of that was lip service. It’s almost impossible to find a writer who adheres to the principles of the style section of the book — which have been summed up as, “Do not overwrite, avoid qualifiers, don’t over-explain, and avoid adverbs.”

But at the time I wasn’t aware that, to most, Strunk and White’s principles were as unrealistic as a mystic’s asceticism. In fact it was probably for just that reason — I was soon to become a Zen student — that I swallowed Strunk and White whole. Clearing your mind of clutter and stilling your internal noise were prerequisites for not only realization (as the American Buddhist community now calls enlightenment), but good prose.

A style book may seem like an unimaginative choice for an influence on style. I was, however, able to identify an author who shaped, if not my style or consciousness, the form of my writing: Norman Mailer. Not the novelist (though he produced some fine fiction), but the author of Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968. Though Mailer wrote other books as a pioneer of New Journalism, Miami and the Siege of Chicago was the equivalent of what Hunter Thompson and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 were to some of the other Scholars & Rogues.

It wasn’t New Journalism’s intrusion of the author onto the scene of reportage that appealed to me. It was re-assigning the creativity and less-constrained language of fiction to journalism –- none were better at it than Mailer. (Actually his influence on the my writing form lay dormant for over three decades until I finally undertook commentary and then journalism itself.)

Unlike Thompson, Mailer didn’t use the facts as a starting point for the action, just for his discursiveness. No disrespect intended to Thompson (one of my favorite writers — all the way to the end at ESPN.com). But, to me, no viler words exist in the English language than “creative nonfiction.”

Oh, and thanks Norman, wherever you are, for that infernal litote tic with which you bequeathed me — “not unlike.”

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Denny Wilkins

I wrote and edited news and commentary for a living for 20 years. I, as they say, “pumped out lots of copy” in two decades. That necessarily had as much of an impact on my progress and perspective as a writer as reading the well-regarded and much-honored fiction and non-fiction of others. Those people with whom we personally engage as mentor and mentee often play critical roles in our development as writers.

My first editor, John Haywood, taught me to shorten my sentences. (Sadly, after I left the news biz, that wisdom languished.) My old editor, Bob Dolan, showed me how to tell what needs telling and nothing more. My dissertation chair, Bob Trager, remains the best editor I ever had. He made me incredibly finicky about errors of any kind. Carrie Andrews, a young woman I worked with as a tutor in grad school, introduced me to “free writing” and not-so-gently helped me shed my “just the facts, ma’am” approach to writing.

Now I teach writing for a living. Again, it’s the engagement with others — particularly my students — about the craft of writing that continues to shape my approaches to putting words on a page. Some of these students — Carri Gregorski, Pete Kendron, Mike Trask, Rebecca Campana, Maddy Fitzpatrick, Leah Goodman and many others — never knew how much I had to reinvigorate my own writing skills to teach them. My faculty colleagues, too, have been wonderful teammates in the writing game.

Forgive the dropping of names you probably don’t know or care about. But they are meaningful to me — as your mentors are to you.

There are many others in my writing life. For me, developing as a writer comes from being a member of a writing community, one that’s personal and involves the people I live and work with. Many writers may find that haven in a community blog such as S&R. Here we try to collectively grow, we hope, by taking more steps forward than backward.

For the record, I have read all that John McPhee has written. I interviewed him once, about 20 years ago. I asked him the secret to his success. “Take lots of notes,” he said. McPhee teaches a course called “The Literature of Fact.” No one uses detail as well as he. So I am always prepared to take lots of notes.

From William Zinsser, who wrote On Writing Well, I took to heart his lessons of brevity, clarity, economy and humanity. From Robert B. Parker I took a sensibility for compelling dialogue. From Robert Heinlein, Rex Stout and Louis L’Amour, I learned that behind every fantasy, mystery and moral tale lies a human story.

Writers are shaped in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For me, who has been writing for a living in one way or another for more than 40 years, the passage of time and the long journey through the lives of other writers have been my wisest teachers.

Now we’d like to hear from our readers about writers who influenced you. (We’ll ask again tomorrow when the last installment of this series runs.)

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

J.S. O’Brien

The most influential writer and book of my life didn’t influence my writing style one bit (thank God!), but he and his book changed completely changed my life. Most deeply rural, Southern kids back in the day were exposed to no ideas outside the generally accepted ones of their fiercely insular society. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was my first look at American social institutions and mores from outside the mainstream, and it instilled in me a voracious appetite for moving my frame of reference outside the superego to get a wider, and extremely useful, perspective.

Mike Sheehan

Tolkien, Twain, Thompson. That is all.

Sam Smith

This is a tough one for me. As a prose writer I’ve read and absorbed so much that I’d be hard put to name influences, although I could give you a list as long as my arm of those I admire (Twain, for instance, who I revere for his relentless verve, and Hawthorne for way he manages the rivers of torment surging through his soul).

On the poetry side it’s a little easier. We could talk about any number of writers, but when it boils down to influence there a mainly four names to consider: T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Charles Wright.

Each works in different ways. Wright is the only contemporary in the pack, and I was mightily influenced by how powerfully his poetry works at an intuitive level. Even when I’m not able to follow the overt narratives, it’s exactly as one of my former classmates put it: “I don’t know what it means, but I feel something.” Of course, meaning isn’t limited to the bounds of the rational. We live in an anti-intellectual culture where unenlightened emotion is routinely allowed to substitute for thought, but when pursued properly — as with Wright — the intuitive takes you beyond the rational, adding dimension upon dimension to how we can perceive our world.

His formal style was also very important for me — the way he breaks lines halfway, and allows his words to cascade down the center of the page, for instance, opens up my verse and gives it room to breathe.

Next, Dylan Thomas. I have, unless my grandmother lied to me, a smattering of Welsh in me, so maybe that’s why the music in Thomas’s words seems to affect me in ways I can’t quite grasp. For him, words were nothing short of the components of magic, and with them he transformed what looked mundane to most into something transcendent. I have tried desperately to emulate this style, and regret that I’ve had not much success.

Then there’s Yeats, who’s certainly the greatest poet in the history of the English language and quite possibly in any language. (Of course, I’m not fluent in most languages, so I can’t really say for sure, can I?) Words bow down before Yeats and worship him. They accede to his will. They do the most remarkable things, but the most remarkable thing of all is that it is all accomplished so effortlessly. Yeats shapes language in ways I have tried to mimic, and I’ve decided that it’s like watching Tiger Woods play golf: he makes the impossible, the sublime, look so easy that it’s maddening when we can’t do it ourselves.

As a result of this, I’ve come to view Yeats as someone I admire instead of someone who has influenced me. After all, if I can’t do it, if I can’t point to moments where that inspiration shines through in my own work, how have I really been influenced?

But something odd happens occasionally, as it did when I was seeking feedback on my last book. A couple people remarked at the obvious Yeats influence. I have no idea what they saw or where, but in my entire life as a writer I’ve never heard greater praise.

Finally, Eliot, who I think has had a very obvious and lasting influence on my writing. I began imitating his style the first time I read “The Waste Land,” I think, and while I’m hardly the master he was, my own work has been well served by lessons he taught me about voice. With Eliot, sometimes it’s like walking through a crowded market and recording the words you hear, regardless of who’s speaking them. Voices trail off and are replaced by others, entirely disconnected, in mid-thought, and the result is a cultural melange, a pastiche that somehow crafts a penetrating picture of the whole out of a few disconnected individual snippets.

I think Eliot also taught me that it’s okay to loosen the reins and let the darkness and despair have its head. As a result of his influence I’m comfortable abandoning preconceptions and letting the poem lead me where it wants to go. Few lessons in my life have been more valuable than that one.

Writers who shaped the consciousnesses, and influenced the styles, of Scholars and Rogues.

Lex

As a reader of mostly non-fiction, with its division by subject rather than author, this is kind of a tough one for me. It forces me pretty far back, and hence sounds cliched to me…but here goes.

Conrad and Dostoevsky for their examination of the dark recess of the human psyche. Dickens for teaching me that it’s okay to laugh at starving orphans. Melville (Billy Budd) and Conrad (Heart of Darkness) have always impressed me enough to reread and reread for the admirable ability to get whole novels into very short works. I’ve been through Billy Budd looking up and writing down every word that I couldn’t define and would probably have to look words up if I read it again tomorrow; that impresses me. Moby Dick needed an editor.

Joseph Campbell has probably influenced me the most. A good part of that is the subject matter on which he wrote: myth and religion. But if I could be someone, it would be the type who thought, “I should read War and Peace, but I’m sure the translation doesn’t do it justice. I’ll learn Russian in order to read War and Peace.” Campbell was the kind of man who actually carried out that sort of threat. It gave his writing a depth that I admire and would love to possess. He could tell a story. But more than anything it was his style of comparing, rather than contrasting. He was one who could see and explain connections amid apparent disparity. And as the man who gave Star Wars its structure I kind of owe him at least part of my childhood.

In 12th grade I took Ron Quick’s AP English course at Livonia Stevenson High School. The pastel shirts, striped Yves Saint Laurent ties, and his love for Danielle Steele novels were apt to make you underestimate him. He was an English language slave driver. He taught me to write, and he expected first drafts with no mistakes. He was a big fan of William Zinsser (author of On Writing Well). He gave us an assignment that entailed reading X number of pieces by a journalist of our choosing. I bitched and moaned about it at home because I wanted Literature.

My stepfather handed me a copy of The Great Shark Hunt, Vol. 1 and it was all over. Hunter had me from the first incoherently perfect paragraph. Here was someone who broke every rule of writing that I’d been taught, and it came out sounding like it was how writing was supposed to sound. Not many people can write like they talk; or maybe it’s talk like they write. When I’m at my best it’s because I can almost hear Hunter slurring, “go on, just fucking say it…quit being a pussy and let it roll.” Quick’s on the other shoulder, but Hunter’s cooler.

Chris Mackowski

I first read Harold Pinter early in my playwriting career as one of about a dozen diverse playwrights I really studied closely. As someone with a radio background, I had an ear that was particularly attuned to voices and rhythms, and so Pinter strongly resonated with me because he was SO intentional about the rhythms in his writing: the rhythms of dialogue, rhythms between characters, rhythms in scenes, and the overall rhythm of a play.

But the more I read his work, the more I found things that translated beyond playwriting to other genres, as well (certainly rhythm is something that all writers should be conscious of). He taught me a lot about subtext, about what’s NOT said, about why people don’t say the things they want/need to. He wrote a lot about the fallibility of memory, which is something I’ve become really interested in, particularly from an historical angle.

Much of his work is hard to fathom but it’s thought-provoking and challenging — and much of it is political, too. He’s definitely a writer worth reading if you’ve never had the chance. The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter are probably considered his best-known works, but I would suggest starting with Betrayal, Old Times, or The Hothouse.