Roy Miller's Blog, page 193
May 11, 2017
3 Revelatory Books About the F.B.I.
This content was originally published by CONCEPCIÓN DE LEÓN on 11 May 2017 | 8:11 pm.
Source link
President Donald Trump’s abrupt dismissal of James B. Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on May 9 truncated what is typically a 10-year term, the length of which is meant to protect the bureau from political pressures. The decision took many aback, both for the implications for this presumed political insulation and for its timing — the F.B.I. is in the middle of investigating whether any Trump associates colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election. These books offer a better understanding of the institution’s history, as well as an account of what it’s like to be on the inside.
Photo
THE BUREAU
The Secret History of the F.B.I. (2002)
By Ronald Kessler
496 pp.
Ronald Kessler, a longtime reporter on the F.B.I., recounts the organization’s history since its creation in 1908, when Theodore Roosevelt proposed the idea of a national police force to a dubious Congress. At the time, Congress expressed concern that a secret bureau would merely carry out the mandates of whoever was in office. Still, the “special agent force” began work with 34 agents, and its power and influence expanded relatively quickly. Kessler investigates the relationship between F.B.I. directors and sitting presidents and also includes exclusive interviews with Robert Mueller, who led the F.B.I. in the period immediately after 9/11.
Photo
J. EDGAR HOOVER
The Man and the Secrets (1991)
By Curt Gentry
846 pp.
The greatest influence on the F.B.I. since its inception, J. Edgar Hoover led the bureau for 48 years, up until his death in 1972. But that influence, Curt Gentry argues, extended far beyond the grave. Hoover’s autocratic leadership is part of the reason a 10-year term limit was implemented for future F.B.I. directors. Gentry interviewed hundreds of people for the book, including former agents who were at first afraid to talk for fear of Hoover’s infamous blackmail files. Gentry weaves in findings from previously undisclosed documents that illuminate the notoriously paranoid director’s career and the role he played in major investigations into prominent figures like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy. Gentry also gives insight into the Watergate scandal — of particular relevance now as comparisons have been drawn between President Trump’s firing of Comey and Richard Nixon’s so-called Saturday Night Massacre.
Photo
THE BLACK BANNERS
The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda (2011)
By Ali H. Soufan
608 pp.
For an insider’s perspective on the F.B.I., consider this memoir by Ali H. Soufan, a former bureau interrogator who investigated Al Qaeda leading up to and after the 9/11 attacks. He cites mismanagement of interrogations — including missed opportunities and the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” like waterboarding — as a reason a number of terrorism plots were neither anticipated nor prevented. This is a detailed and revealing book, so much so, in fact, that parts of it were redacted by the Central Intelligence Agency, which Soufan accuses of deliberately withholding crucial clues about the 9/11 plot until it was too late. The F.B.I. is so shrouded in secrecy; Soufan’s book provides some transparency.
Continue reading the main story
The post 3 Revelatory Books About the F.B.I. appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Why My Book is Both Traditionally and Self-Published
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 11 May 2017 | 5:00 pm.
Source link
When I decided to self-publish The Color of Our Sky in 2015, it was after submitting my manuscript to several literary agents over a two-year span, and receiving many rejection letters in the process.
Leading up to that, I had arrived at a final draft of my novel after four years of writing and rewriting (and a lot of drafts!). After I started submitting it to agents, a couple of them responded with feedback and encouraged me to keep going. One suggested that I show the book to an editor, which would help the manuscript get better attention from literary agents. So I approached many freelance editors within the publishing industry and eventually found one that took interest in my book.
This guest post is by Amita Trasi. Trasi is the bestselling author of the novel The Color Of Our Sky, a Kirkus Indie Best Book that she self-published in 2015. Two years later, the Amazon bestseller was picked up by William Morrow—an imprint of HarperCollins—and re-published in April 2017. It’s currently a Globe and Mail bestseller in Canada. Trasi was born and raised in Mumbai, India, and has an MBA in human resource management and a bachelor’s degree in microbiology. She currently lives in Woodlands, Texas, with her husband and two cats, and regularly supports and donates to organizations that fight human trafficking.
In early 2014, I read one of Hugh Howey’s (Wool) interviews in Writer’s Digest. I remember him saying, “Instead of [having your manuscripts] in a drawer or in self-addressed, stamped envelopes, have them out there where readers can find them.” And this sentence stayed in my head. When I broached the topic of self-publishing this novel, my editor (who had previously worked in the publishing industry), strongly advised me to keep trying with literary agents. She felt this book would do much better with a traditional publisher. At the time, I agreed with her. Because The Color of Our Sky is based in India, it includes the feel of Mumbai, the colloquial language of the land, and, as such, we thought it was a genre that wouldn’t be an optimal fit for the self-publishing route. So I tried submitting the revised manuscript to agents for a few more months. But by the end of 2014, I thought all my efforts were coming to naught. I just wanted to move on and write another novel.
So I started researching the self-publishing route. I decided it was the path I was going to take. If that meant I had only a slice of the audience, so be it! I was assured that at the very least, I had a few readers out there who would be reading my book.
I didn’t set out to self-publish my novel thinking that it would take off or that it would find a traditional publisher. I just wanted to move on, write another novel, and I liked the idea that my book wouldn’t be languishing in a drawer. Once I made that decision, I researched online for 2–3 months, then found a proofreader/copyeditor to work on my book, researched the best cover artists and worked with them on the cover. I read books on self-publishing, I followed Jane Friedman’s blog rabidly. I also highly recommend Joanna Penn’s blog, author Theresa Ragan’s blog, and The Book Designer.
Within self-publishing, there are so many paths one can take. I mixed-and-matched a few avenues for my book. I started months before the book was out in the world: I decided on the investment amount, how I was going to spend it and where, and carefully planned the outreach strategy. I used Createspace to publish the paperback, and put the e-book up for pre-order via KDP on Amazon, and also on iBooks, Kobo and Nook. I put an advance reader review [ARC] e-copy up on NetGalley, and did ARC paperback giveaways on Goodreads 1–2 months before I published the book. I also applied for reviews from a few important review outlets. It ended up receiving overwhelming positive feedback from bloggers and reviewers. Kirkus Reviews gave it a great review and selected it to be one of the Best Books of 2015 (Indie). It also got the five-star Readers’ Favorite Badge.
It was only after the book was published in June 2015 that I realized how much work went into it. It was almost like being a one-woman publishing company! Even after the book was published, the promotion activities had to be continuously planned and carried out. Then readers started writing to me with questions: Was this book available in bookstores? How could they order it from libraries? It was difficult getting it to libraries, and bookstores weren’t selling it!
During that time, I received an email from a publisher in Turkey who was interested in translation rights. They liked the book, but wanted to talk to an agent who could represent me. I went looking for an agent, once again, and Aroon Raman, a terrific author, recommended Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane agency. When I approached her for representation, she suggested instead that we try to sell it to a big New York publishing house.
When HarperCollins picked it up, my book had been out for about three months. When I self-published, I was under the impression that a traditional publisher doesn’t ask for your opinion or consult you on important aspects of your book, but that simply hasn’t been true. I’ve actually enjoyed the experience with my publisher so far: There are so many people from many different departments supporting this book. And I know that my book will be available to more readers now, and I think ultimately it has done much better with a traditional publisher than I could ever dream of achieving via self-publishing.
Ultimately, this is what I have to say on the self-publishing versus traditional publishing debate: I don’t think there is a right or wrong decision about choosing either way. It’s a lot about what each author wants from this journey. I don’t think any one way can assure success. There are too many factors that go into it. Only the author, who knows his book better than anyone else, can decide the path they want to take. Despite all the kind advice out there, it’s better to rely on one’s instinct to make this decision. Self-publishing is a complicated road. It takes a village—good editors, proofreaders, cover artists, copyeditors, formatting services, marketing advisors, etc. It requires a great deal of research to navigate. A few genres do tend to do better than others with self-publishing. But it does require considerable investment and work if one wants to reach a wider audience.
I personally found self-publishing to be limiting in the sense that many bestseller lists and reputed review outlets may not necessarily accommodate self-published books. It’s also difficult and may require a lot of work to gets one’s self-published book translated into other languages, while a traditional publisher has a rights department to help with that. And royalties from translations can be a good addition to one’s royalties from the English edition. Self-publishing is not something I would recommend jumping into blindly, or too quickly, just because it’s an option that’s available. But it is good for a writer to have this option available, and I think it is still a very viable path to consider, depending on one’s own publishing goals. Either way, expect to put in a lot of work—all of which will pay off when your book finally gets in the hands of readers.
The biggest literary agent database anywhere
is the Guide to Literary Agents. Pick up the
most recent updated edition online at a discount.
If you’re an agent looking to update your information or an author interested in contributing to the GLA blog or the next edition of the book, contact Writer’s Digest Books Managing Editor Cris Freese at cris.freese@fwmedia.com.
You might also like:
The post Why My Book is Both Traditionally and Self-Published appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Solve a Puzzle in the Past, Save New York Present
This content was originally published by JOHN STEPHENS on 11 May 2017 | 9:00 pm.
Source link
But the Morningstarrs’ most intriguing legacy was the Old York Cipher, a series of clues buried in the bones of the city. Solve the clues and claim a great treasure. A century and a half after the Morningstarrs’ disappearance, no one has come close.
Enter Tess and Theo Biedermann, precocious twins named after the Morningstarrs, who live in one of the Morningstarr buildings. Theo has won a competition for building the Tower of London in Legos (an architect like his eponym), while Tess trots around Manhattan with a giant part-cat part-wolf, and has a tendency to imagine every worst possible situation. (“What if a great white shark swam up the Hudson River? What if a tornado touched down in the middle of Broadway?”)
But Tess’s fears prove real when their building is bought by an unscrupulous real estate developer named Darnell Slant, who plans to tear it down. The twins’ only hope is to solve the Old York Cipher, whose treasure will allow them to save their home. They’re helped by Jaime Cruz, a budding artist who lives in the building with his grandmother, and when the children discover a letter from Theresa Morningstarr which promises a clue in the Cipher, the game’s afoot.
Their journey takes them around New York and into the city’s past, both real and fantastical, as they encounter the nefarious henchmen of Slant, delve into the bowels of the Old York Cipherist Society (a group of either learned scholars or paranoid cranks), and try to parse whom they can trust. Along the way, there’s action and peril, including a scene involving a giant mechanical insect that eats dirt and sometimes people; but at key junctures, it’s each child’s individual talents that lead him or her to solve a particular element of the puzzle. The result is that the children’s victories feel won by bravery, creativity and intelligence, which makes them true heirs of the Morningstarrs.
The pleasures of the novel go far beyond the crackling, breathless plot and the satisfaction of watching the puzzle fall into place. The book is shot through with humor, both laugh-out-loud and subtle, and Ruby, whose Y.A. novel “Bone Gap” won a Printz Award and was a finalist for a National Book Award, takes delight in a beautiful, evocative phrase. “The Underway rumbled under her feet,” she writes of Tess, “as if she were walking on the back of some great murmuring beast.”
Continue reading the main story
And like a good debater, Ruby anticipates a reader’s doubts. Tess asks: How can it be that adults have been trying to solve this puzzle for a century and a half, and now three kids will be able to crack it? Or, as Theo wonders, with the New York landscape constantly changing, how could the Morningstarrs have expected that the clues to their Cipher would survive?
The answer — which promises a deeper mystery to come (this being the first in a trilogy) — is that the Cipher and the Morningstarr machines are actually responding to Theo, Tess and Jaime by providing them with fresh clues. The suggestion is that the Morningstarr creations are an early version of A.I., and that this treasure hunt will reveal that the city itself is built upon a giant living mass of machinery, waiting to be awaked.
Continue reading the main story
But for that, we’ll have to wait for the next book. Maybe there’ll even be pirates.
Continue reading the main story
The post Solve a Puzzle in the Past, Save New York Present appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Bookseller Suing California Over ‘Autograph Law’
This content was originally published by on 11 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
Source link
Bay Area bookseller Bill Petrocelli is filing a lawsuit against the state of California, hoping to force a repeal of the state’s controversial “Autograph Law.” The law, booksellers claim, threatens to bury bookstore author signings under red tape and potential liabilities. Petrocelli, co-owner of Book Passage, filed Passage v. Becerra in U.S. District Court for the North District of California, pitting the bookstore against California State Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
Last year, the California legislature broadened a set of civil code regulations focused on autographed collectibles to include “all autographed items” with a value over $5. Assembly Bill 1570 requires anyone selling autographed books to provide an extremely detailed “certificate of authenticity” with each book, describing the book, identifying the signer, noting witnesses of the book signing, insurance information, and other details. Per the new law, booksellers must keep the certificates for seven years or risk substantial damages, court fees, and a civil penalty if the autographed book gets questioned in court.
These new regulations took effect in January, prompting protests from around the state—including a Change.org petition with over 1,700 signatures urging the state legislature to repeal the bill. Petrocelli’s suit marks the first time a California bookseller has challenged the law in court.
The Pacific Legal Foundation, a non-profit law firm defending “private property rights, individual liberty, free enterprise, [and] limited government,” mounted Petrocelli’s lawsuit free of charge, as it does for all its clients. “We spoke to booksellers up and down the coast,” said Anastasia Boden, one of the PLF attorneys representing Book Passage in the suit. “But Bill was the only one so far brave enough to join a constitutional lawsuit and act as a civil rights plaintiff.”
The lawsuit argues that common bookstore practices like guest author lectures and book signings “are fundamental to First Amendment freedoms.” By that argument, the regulations Assembly Bil 1570 places on booksellers violates a basic freedom accorded to all Americans by the Constitution.
According to the lawsuit, the new paperwork and penalties “significantly burdened and seriously threatened” Petrocelli’s efforts to sell books autographed by their authors. Book Passage hosts around 700 author events every year, as well as a “Signed First Editions Club” for dedicated members. These programs, under the new law, would generate thousands of pages of paperwork, as well as the potential for massive liabilities.
The suite is being brought today and, once it is filed, the attorneys will await a response from the state.
“We’re eager to get Bill and Book Passage relief as soon as we possibly can,” Boden said. “They’re in the business of selling autographed books and this law threatens them with massive liabilities just for doing business the way they have for the past 40 years. We’re going to do everything we can to get this struck down.”
The post Bookseller Suing California Over ‘Autograph Law’ appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Justice served: comic creators announce Judge Dredd TV show | Books
This content was originally published by David Barnett on 11 May 2017 | 1:58 pm.
Source link
After two attempts to bring classic British comic character Judge Dredd to the big screen, the publishers of 2000AD have decided that the only way to properly adapt the leather-clad lawman of a dystopian future is to do it themselves.
The game developer and comics publisher Rebellion, which bought the title in the year 2000, is creating a TV series called Judge Dredd: Mega-City One. The project is still in its early stages, with no director or cast yet in place, but fans are hoping the square-jawed judge, jury and executioner who patrols the future-shocked streets of the 22nd century will finally get the adaptation he deserves.
While 1995’s Judge Dredd movie, starring Sylvester Stallone, had something of the look of the comics, it was roundly derided for missing the mark. And when Karl Urban went under the helmet in 2012’s Dredd – staying true to the original by keeping it on at all times (unlike Stallone) – he found more favour with fans, but both movies failed to tap into the sharp, satirical humour that has fuelled the character since his introduction in the second issue of 2000AD in 1977.
Judgment reserved … Sylvester Stallone as Judge Dredd. Photograph: Allstar/BUENA VISTA/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
Dredd was created by the writer John Wagner and the artist Carlos Ezquerra, unleashing a character loosely based on Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry on the remains of the eastern US after an apocalyptic war. He was an instant hit, riding around the monstrous Mega-City One on his Lawmaster bike, dispensing justice to a parade of grotesque “perps” with his Lawgiver gun.
According to Jason Kingsley, who runs Rebellion with his brother Chris, it’s time for a screen Dredd to be done right at last.
“The films didn’t tackle the satire very well,” Kingsley says, “but in the TV series we’re certainly going to be giving that a good try”. In the past they’ve licensed characters to other people, he continued, letting them “have fun with our toys. But we have so many people wanting to play with our toys now we thought: ‘Let’s do this ourselves.’ As Rebellion Productions we will put a studio together, and pull together the cast and crew. It’s very exciting but also a bit nerve-racking.”
Rebellion has teamed up with IM Global Television to look for big-budget commitments from networks in North America and Europe, with Kingsley aiming to be “well above” the £1m an hour budget a major TV show demands. “If everything goes according to plan, we’re going to make one of the most expensive TV shows the UK has ever seen.”
While Judge Dredd will get top billing, the series is due to explore a broader canvas, Kingsley adds, bringing the city and its sprawling cast of characters to life. “We want to capture the atmosphere of Dredd, we want all the crazy fashions and the kneepads. We’re not going for comedy but there will be moments of light and dark, just like in the comics.”
In the longer term, Rebellion has ambitions to develop screen adaptations of other 2000AD stories, as well as video game properties including Sniper Elite and titles from their science fiction imprints Abaddon and Solaris.
So given a hypothetical unlimited budget tomorrow, who else would Kingsley get on the starting blocks for a 2000AD-based TV series? “Good question, and one that we’ve discussed at length. It’s a classic pub conversation!” he says. “So … well, Rogue Trooper, obviously, and Strontium Dog, and definitely Absalom”.
The post Justice served: comic creators announce Judge Dredd TV show | Books appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Kosztolnyik Named V-P, Editor-in-Chief at Grand Central Publishing
This content was originally published by on 11 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
Karen Kosztolnyik, who formerly served as executive editor at GCP, is returning to the Hachette division. In her new role, she will lead the publisher’s hardcover line.
The post appeared first on Art of Conversation.
William J. Baumol, 95, ‘One of the Great Economists of His Generation,’ Dies
This content was originally published by PATRICIA COHEN on 11 May 2017 | 3:32 am.
Source link
But those same increases in productivity, he found, do not apply to labor-intensive activities like concert performances, doctor examinations, college lectures, soccer matches and oil changes.
For example, he said, it takes exactly the same number of people and the same amount of time to play a Beethoven string quartet today as it did in, say, 1817. Yet the musicians who spent years studying and practicing — and still have to eat and live somewhere while doing that — cannot be paid the same as their 19th-century counterparts. Their wages, too, will rise, even though they are no more productive than their predecessors were. As a result, their work eventually becomes increasingly expensive compared with more efficiently produced goods.
There is no cure for the cost disease, Professor Baumol said, and he warned that the rising relative expense of health care, education and other essential services, including garbage collection and police patrols, would make them seem less and less affordable.
Photo
Professor Baumol’s book “The Cost Disease.”
Credit
Patricia Wall/The New York Times
“What this says is that the quality of life 30 years from now could deteriorate,” Professor Baumol said in 1983, “because many of the services that we associate with quality of life will become relatively more expensive while mass-produced things become cheaper and cheaper.”
Continue reading the main story
His work influenced not only generations of economists but also policy makers, including the architects of the Clinton administration’s health care initiative — even if his ideas were not always incorporated in the final product.
Continue reading the main story
His warnings about efforts to halt the spiraling increase in health care costs still resonate.
“Cost increases are in the nature of the health care beast,” he wrote in an essay in The New York Times in 1993. “Efforts to alter this nature will be fruitless or harmful.
Continue reading the main story
“The real danger is that the nation, mistakenly thinking it must rein in runaway costs, will curtail valuable health services and render them inaccessible for the less affluent. Well-meaning reformers may take the same misstep in education, law enforcement and other handicraft services.”
His insight about the low productivity growth in services also helped explain why overall growth in an economy increasingly dominated by services can stagnate.
Professor Baumol did pioneering research — published in dozens of books, hundreds of papers and several congressional testimonies — on entrepreneurs, environmental policy, corporate finance, stock sales, the economics of Broadway theaters, inflation, and competition and monopolies, winning a wagon-full of awards and prizes along the way.
William G. Bowen (later a president of Princeton) and Professor Baumol essentially invented the discipline of art economics with their work on the example of the rising costs of a string quartet. Professor Baumol later argued that most performers were subsidizing nonprofit arts performances by accepting low salaries.
William Jack Baumol was born in the South Bronx on Feb. 22, 1922, to Solomon and Lillian Baumol, immigrants from Eastern Europe. His interest in economics, he said, began in high school, after he started reading the works of Karl Marx. His parents, he said, instilled in him a strong social conscience.
Continue reading the main story
He served in the Army in World War II and got a job at the Agriculture Department, where he worked on allocating grain supplies to starving countries.
He graduated from City College, where he met his future wife, Hilda Missel, and he enrolled in the London School of Economics in 1947 after initially being rejected. Less than six weeks after school started, he was hired to become a member of the faculty.
Continue reading the main story
He landed at Princeton in 1949 and remained there for the rest of his life as a researcher and eventually as a professor emeritus. He joined the faculty of N.Y.U. in 1971 and retired from there only in 2014.
Continue reading the main story
Art was Professor Baumol’s other passion: He painted in oils and had a one-man show in New York. He braced himself against the possibility of negative reviews by declaring that he rejected the idea of set standards for aesthetic criticism. “I like Mozart better than rock ’n’ roll,” he said, “but that’s because of the way I happened to have been educated.”
Continue reading the main story
He later began sculpting in wood before moving on to computer art.
His death, at his home in New York City, was confirmed by his son, Daniel. Other survivors include his wife, a former management consultant; a daughter, Jasmine Wolf; and two grandchildren. Dr. Bowen, his former collaborator, died last year.
“Nobody ever explained to him the difference between work and play,” Daniel Baumol said of his father. “During a long trip, he would sit in the back of the car, oblivious to the world, and as we pulled in, he would announce, ‘I just finished that article.’”
Continue reading the main story
Patrick Bolton, a professor of economics at Columbia, described Professor Baumol as “someone who could come to a big problem and bring an extremely simple analysis that really shaped the way people would think about it.”
Asked by the economist Alan Krueger in 2000 where his blockbuster ideas came from, Professor Baumol said he was always looking for a theory to explain any given human phenomenon, and if he were lucky, his speculation would turn out to be right.
“And sometimes I’m very lucky,” he continued, “and I turn out to be totally wrong. Because when I turn out to be totally wrong, that’s when the best ideas come out.”
Continue reading the main story
The post William J. Baumol, 95, ‘One of the Great Economists of His Generation,’ Dies appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Bookstore News: May 11, 2017
This content was originally published by on 11 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
Source link
New bookstores are coming to Tennessee and Colorado; a Boston bookstore becomes a publisher; a documentary on indie bookstores hits YouTube; and more.
Memphis Bookstore to Open August 1: A new bookstore named Novel is opening in the former location of The Booksellers at Laurelwood and will hire many of the people who worked at the previous store.
New Bookstore Coming to Colorado: Bookbinders Basalt, a new independent store, will open in Basalt, Colo., this June.
Boston Indie’s Small Press Blossoms: Papercuts J.P., in the city’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood, has begun publishing books under the name Cutlass Press.
Short Documentary on Indie Bookstores Released: A bookseller at Learned Owl Book Shop in Hudson, Ohio, has posted a ten-minute documentary called “Independent Bookstores: Ever Resilient” on YouTube.
Arizona Bookstore Bought and Renamed: Flagstaff’s Barefoot Cowgirl Books has been acquired renamed Bright Side Bookshop.
Alabama Bookstore Expands: The NewSouth Bookstore in Montgomery, Ala., is expanding, prompted by the closing of nearby Capital Book & News last year.
The Last of Delhi’s Octogenarian Booksellers: At age 86, Mirza Yaseen Baig continues to manage the beloved Midland Book Shop in Delhi, India.
The post Bookstore News: May 11, 2017 appeared first on Art of Conversation.
May 10, 2017
A Kinder, Gentler Portrait of Prince Charles
This content was originally published by WILLIAM BOYD on 10 May 2017 | 11:00 am.
Source link
Photo
Prince Charles at Highgrove, his house and gardens in Gloucestershire, in 2002.
Credit
John Stoddart/Getty Images
PRINCE CHARLES
The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life
By Sally Bedell Smith
Illustrated. 596 pp. Random House. $32.
I first met Prince Charles in 1966. It was at Gordonstoun School when I was 14 and the prince was 18. He was the head boy, the so-called “Guardian” as that position was known, and I was a faceless junior. I was standing alone in the entrance hall of my boardinghouse when Charles came through the front door on his way to visit a friend. The air was loud with raucous bellowing and jeering as an illicit boxing match was underway in the nearby shower rooms. “What on earth is going on?” he asked me. I told him about the boxing match. He shrugged. “How strange,” he said and walked on by.
I’ve met Prince Charles subsequently several times, both formally and informally, but there was something about the faintly surreal nature of that first encounter — the civil inquiry in an atmosphere of near-anarchy and violence — that has stayed with me. Though Charles has said he didn’t enjoy his time at Gordonstoun, the experience of those years has had a lasting effect. Paradoxically, his time at the school was probably one of the few periods when his life approached a kind of normality, however unlikely. Gordonstoun was then a very democratic place.
The details of Charles’s public life over the years are well known — and it should be said that Sally Bedell Smith’s new biography covers them in diligent and exemplary fashion — but it’s the private man we’re interested in, the individual behind the numerous grand titles. And it’s clear that, at the center of any account of his almost 70 years, is the crucial matter of Charles’s marriage to, his divorce from and the death of, Diana, Princess of Wales.
“Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life” is that rare portrait — pro-Charles and anti-Diana. “I found,” Smith writes in her preface, “that much about Prince Charles was poorly understood, not least the extent of his originality.” She reveals that “Poor Charles” was “a constant refrain” as she conducted her interviews, “spoken in despair by those who loved him, with sarcasm by those who resented him.” And she sympathetically reminds us that “his every step along the way” has been “inspected and analyzed: his promise, his awkwardness, his happiness, his suffering, his betrayals and embarrassments and mistakes, his loneliness, his success — and especially his relentless search for meaning, approval and love.”
To paraphrase Tolstoy: Happy marriages are all alike; every unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way. The marriage between Charles and Diana was unhappy virtually from the outset, so Smith claims and, I think, establishes with great judiciousness. The initial problem was that in his 20s Charles had fallen in love with Camilla Shand, a young woman who was deemed unsuitable because she had a “history” — in other words, previous lovers. Camilla Shand duly became Camilla Parker Bowles and had two children, but Charles never forgot her. As he entered his 30s, however, the need to find a future queen, and thereby provide an heir, became paramount. Encouraged by his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, a domineering and wrongheaded presence in his life, Charles was directed toward the virgin of choice, Lady Diana Spencer, age 19. Charles was 12 years older than his fiancée, but she ticked all the boxes.
Diana was also unstable, even dysfunctional, and after the fairy-tale marriage in 1981, she quickly began to go off the rails. Bulimic, self-harming, suicidal, paranoid and contrary to a maddening degree, she engaged in behavior that led to the failure of her marriage, despite the requisite arrival of William, the heir, and Harry, the spare. I used to think that Charles’s union with Diana was the result of cynical calculation, but Smith’s biography, and other sources, have convinced me otherwise. It was a grave miscalculation, from one point of view, or, to put it less kindly, the result of purblind arrogance, yet Charles seems to have given the marriage his best shot. He tried, but it didn’t work. The marriage was soon effectively over — separate bedrooms, non-speaks, public slights and acts of bitter retribution. In 1986, Charles resumed his love affair with Camilla Parker Bowles; Diana dallied elsewhere. Pandora’s box was well and truly opened. Separation was followed by divorce. And, eventually, by the tragedy of Diana’s needless, horrible death.
Photo
Smith is very shrewd and accurate on the aftermath of the gruesome accident in Paris that ended Diana’s life, and she makes a point of establishing both Charles’s genuine grief and his serious attempt to mitigate, as much as possible, the effect of their mother’s demise on her children. But in the mode of Ruritanian fantasy that this story seems to encourage, the disappearance of the beautiful princess proved a kind of liberation for her former husband. It certainly marked the end of that episode of the royal soap opera. Charles’s life since Diana’s death has conformed cleverly and carefully to type. He eventually married Camilla — presented here as a strong and attractive personality — and his sons seemed to have dealt admirably with both their loss and their father’s remarriage. Only recently have William and Harry begun to discuss the sadness of their early years, as part of a campaign for more compassion in dealing with depression and mental illness.
It’s a real compliment to Smith, an American and the author of biographies of both Charles’s mother and his ex-wife, to say that she understands the British upper classes and aristocracy (including the royals) very well indeed. This country is obsessed, dominated and shackled by class to a still unhealthy degree, and that obsession is focused on the royal family, with the consequent trickle-down effect through the social strata. Smith’s narrative conveys the system’s unthinking superiority, the lazy morality, the philistinism, the sense of demanded privilege and analyzes it cannily. What’s remarkable about her portrait of Prince Charles is that he emerges as a man not deeply tainted by the complacent values of the world in which he was raised. Her Charles is a complex, somewhat troubled, sincere and questioning individual. More interestingly for a royal, he is also, as Smith puts it, an “intellectual striver.” He has a passionate, serious interest in painting, gardening and architecture. He’s an ardent environmentalist. He‘s an accomplished watercolorist. He loves the opera. He’s something of a discreet dandy. He enjoys a powerful cocktail.
Smith makes many telling, shrewd points in pursuit of realigning the popular image of Prince Charles, but the observation that stuck with me, one that brings us full circle, is a perfect illustration of her acumen. It’s true that Charles disliked his school days at Gordonstoun. However, Smith notes that over the years he has stayed in touch with two of his teachers there, Eric Anderson and Robert Waddell. As it happens, they were my teachers too. This bond provides a fascinating glimpse into what Charles holds dear. It reveals much about his personality to see that his relationships with these two men have endured. They are both very worldly, very amusing company and both are highly cultured men. Charles may, as Smith points out, be “the oldest heir to the throne in 300 years,” but her book suggests that we can look forward to the reign of Charles III with quiet confidence.
Continue reading the main story
The post A Kinder, Gentler Portrait of Prince Charles appeared first on Art of Conversation.
In Joshua Ferris’s Stories, Couples Lead Lives of Quiet Desperation
This content was originally published by WILL BLYTHE on 10 May 2017 | 1:00 pm.
Source link
Anxiety, along with its fraternal twins, self-consciousness and humiliation, are the default inner states of Ferris’s characters, who find their uneasy minds exacerbated by perilous new forms of modern communication. Cellphones, for instance, serve as inadvertent agents of chaos, as in “Fragments,” when a wife butt-dials her husband, who picks up and overhears a static-ridden dialogue between wife and lover. “Just wish … could spend the night … hungry all right, but not for.…” With a cacophony of New York yammer (eavesdropped in bars, offices, streets) threaded throughout, the story runs the danger of being a mere exercise, clever, technically adroit, but lacking soul. Instead, it is devastating. Night after night, the protagonist waits in bed for his wife, a lawyer working overtime on a case (so she says), to arrive home. But even when she does, they never connect. The city speaks to him in an array of untethered voices, like a Ouija board writ large, delivering shards of a narrative in which he has no place, as is also true of his splintering marriage.
Photo
As befits the era of social media, in which self-advertisement is ubiquitous and image rules, the characters in “The Dinner Party” view their lives as scripts or online profiles in need of constant revision. The protagonist of “The Pilot,” an actual writer, albeit for a TV program he’s attempting to sell, second-guesses himself at every turn, scratching out one persona, trying on another, forever afflicted by “the pedestrian sorrows of social anxiety.” The enemy, he decides, is “thought — looping destructive gnawing thought.”
Having borrowed, then rejected, his roommate’s “bad-ass” jacket as potentially uncool, he decides at last to model himself at a Hollywood party after “Coach” from a popular TV series. He saunters unrecognized among the guests, sporting a ball cap and blue windbreaker, and chewing on a toothpick. Networking is half his job, he has realized. “And what was the better option — going to the party of the year, to which he’d been invited, and networking with actors and executives? Or returning home to Atlanta to die? …So what the protocol for air-kissing hello kept shifting on him?” As he flounders in a swimming pool in the wee hours of the party, he’s planning once again, though perhaps belatedly, to change his life. It would be tragic if it weren’t so funny, and vice versa.
Continue reading the main story
That same interplay between buffoonery and pathos animates “More Abandon (Or Whatever Happened to Joe Pope?),” an apparent precursor to or outtake from “Then We Came to the End,” Ferris’s extraordinary first novel. The title character, who works in advertising in Chicago, spends the night at the office, leaving confessions of love on the voice mail of a co-worker who is married and pregnant. He spies through borrowed binoculars on workers in high-rises across the way, does some redecorating of offices down the hall, steals cigarettes and lies down on the floor for a smoke and a nap, only to be discovered by the cleaning lady, the two of them sharing “in the recognition of catching and being caught doing something human.”
This is a Marxist critique of late capitalism, as in Groucho Marxist. Like “Then We Came to the End,” an exhilarating depiction of cubicle culture, “More Abandon” succeeds not just because of its deeply informed sendup of white-collar workday rituals, but also because of its warmth toward the very same. One detects in Ferris, a former ad copywriter, a freelancer’s unanticipated nostalgia for the communalism of gossip by the copy machine and desultory Nerf ball tossing.
Continue reading the main story
The final story, “A Fair Price,” features yet another self-involved, largely clueless dolt, but this guy lacks even the minor charms of his neurotic predecessors. No other story in “The Dinner Party” ends so violently. Jack hires Mike, an apparently down-and-out day laborer, for 20 bucks an hour, to help empty out a storage unit. He tries to engage his hired hand in inane and unreciprocated chitchat, and has gone so far as to bring him a croissant from Le Perche, a fancy French bakery, which he can’t decide whether to give him. “What are we here for?” Jack asks Mike. “Is it just to move things? Or do we have some greater purpose?”
In response to his boss’s attempts at rapport, Mike grunts and says things like “huh?” and “what?” Jack’s resentment builds; he can’t stand it whenever Mike takes a break to talk or text on his phone. Jack suffers from a kind of class insecurity as experienced by an employer who fears he is being condescended to by his employee. When Jack’s paranoia finally escapes his lips in a mad outpouring similar to the guilt-ridden narrator’s of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” he beats his hired hand to a pulp. It’s a cringe-worthy spectacle of the sort that occurs when a solipsist free-floating through the universe collides with an actual human being.
Continue reading the main story
For some accomplished novelists — and Ferris is one of the best of our day — short stories are mere doodles, warm ups or warm downs, slight variations on themes better addressed at length. In culinary terms appropriate to the collection’s title, appetizers. Not so for Ferris. Dynamic with speed, yet rich with novelistic density, his stories make “The Dinner Party” a full-fledged feast, especially for readers with a particular taste for the many flavors of American crazy.
Continue reading the main story
The post In Joshua Ferris’s Stories, Couples Lead Lives of Quiet Desperation appeared first on Art of Conversation.
