M. Thomas Apple's Blog, page 65

Thoughts on the eve of tomorrow

As I sit here in front of my computer late at night, on the verge of the 2016 US presidential election, I’m struck by the choice I had to make. Two different versions of a future US society: one that invites multidiversity and multiethnicity in all their chaotic, unpredictable combinations, and one that shuts the door and preserves a traditional us vs them, insider vs outsider mentality.

By all rights, I should support the latter. I’m from a small town of less than 3,000 inhabitants, close to 99.99% white, deep in the heart of Upstate New York. I grew up surrounded by people who basically looked like me, enjoyed camping and hiking, canoeing and fishing, playing baseball and football and video games. Driving. A lot. I did yard work when I was old enough to get my working papers (back then, you didn’t get your social security number until you applied for it after age 14). In the spring, I helped my father in the garden. In the summer I mowed lawns. In the fall I raked leaves. In the winter I shoveled driveways. In high school, I had a part-time at a local pizza place, then at McDonald’s, then washed dishes in a nearby town. All our customers were white. All of them spoke English. It was all just fine, everybody looking the same and acting the same. Everybody just like me.

It could have been so easy to turn the anger to hate…

But, of course, reality is more complicated, and memory is 20-20. My family moved into the area from another rural area down south, closer to Albany. So I was the “city boy” (despite having lived in an even smaller hamlet of 300 during elementary school). I was the outsider (despite my grandfather having been born in the new town). I was made fun of for being Irish Catholic and having lots of siblings. I was mocked for taking advanced subjects in school, for playing in band and singing in chorus, for wearing glasses. And of course there was always my name. Johnny Appleseed. Apple Sauce. Apple Juice. Apple Pie. Apple Computer (these were the days before Apple took over the world…)

So I tried to fit in. I tried to be a jock. I tried to hide my love of math, chemistry, history, literature. Tried going to parties. Tried the ethnic jokes. And all seemed OK. But the anger remained.

It could have been so easy to turn the anger to hate. Understandable. I couldn’t make more than minimum wage ($3.35 an hour at the time). I couldn’t get more than 20 to 25 hours a week. I couldn’t afford a decent car (mine kept breaking down all the time and sometimes wouldn’t start). Some of my friends and relatives got into “Japan-bashing” and signed pledges not to buy Hondas and Nissans (never mind that we were nowhere near any car manufacturing plants). Locals criticized “King Cuomo” for not allowing land development in areas near state parkland. Taxes were too high, they said. Rich downstaters and city people trying to tell us what to do with our own land. Lazy blacks and corrupt Jews taking handouts from our taxes. It wasn’t fair. The system was rigged.

Probably sounds familiar. This was the ‘80s, though.

I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to college, but I still had to borrow a lot. But I was lucky. Not just to get into college. Lucky to meet people that didn’t look like me. The first person I ever met at college, on my first day entering the dormitory, was a student from India who had grown up in England. I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying. I soon met my roommate: Asian-American, from New York City. Then Malaysian students. Korean. Chinese. Japanese. Kenyan. Nigerian. South African. Serbian. Hungarian. French. Dutch. People from all over the US: San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, Austin, Seattle, Nome, Boston, Cheyenne, Santa Fe, St. Louis, Louisville, Memphis. I was the outsider again. I was the local. The unsophisticated rural hick, feeling far out of my depth.

It would have been so easy to hate.

After a while, I started writing for the college newspaper, and in time became Assistant Editor, and then Editor-in-Chief. I was perceived as conservative. Anti-liberal. Anti-choice. Anti-PC. An opponent of interdisciplinary trends such as African-American studies and women’s studies; a supporter of the old-fashioned Eurocentric educational ideals.

It would have been so easy. Really.

But I voted for Bill Clinton in my first presidential election, in 1992, because I opposed the Persian Gulf Distraction. I voted for him again in 1996, despite feeling that there was no real difference between him and Bob Dole. By 2000 I was overseas, living in Japan and teaching English in high school, feeling distant and disconnected and thoroughly disillusioned.

I didn’t bother voting in 2000 or 2004.

Regrets. I’ve had a few.

But by 2008 I was voting. For Barack Obama. What had changed?

I missed 9/11. I witnessed the Second Gulf Distraction, from the outside looking in. The ill-prepared and ill-thought out invasion of two sovereign nations for the purpose of filling rich men’s pockets. The waste of human life. The increasing bipolarity of a country that shouted “Love it or leave it” at relatives who questioned supporting war.

I left America. Did that mean I didn’t love it?

In 2005, I married a Japanese woman. Or, rather, I should say that a woman from Japan chose to marry me. Me! Of all people. We now have two children, two “biracial,” bicultural (and hopefully bilingual) daughters, who have both Japanese and American citizenship.

My family doesn’t look like me. But they kind of do. I don’t look like them. But I kind of do, in a way.

You see, it’s taken me 44 years and living in four states and two countries to realize that what I was taught as an elementary school kid in a rural hamlet in Upstate New York was not exactly accurate.

American culture and society aren’t a “melting pot,” in which people from various backgrounds dissolve their differences and turn into “Americans.” People in the US may think they look alike, but they don’t. Americans are obsessed…obsessed!…with genealogy. They are completely absorbed in finding out where their families came from, who their ancestors were, what cities and towns, what countries and cultures they came from. White people are especially interested in finding where in the world their great- and great-great grandparents hailed. From all different parts of England, Scotland, and Wales. From different areas of Ireland. From the Netherlands, France, Belgium (Flanders, Wallonia…) From “Scandanavia” (which hasn’t been a combined kingdom in a millennium). From what is now “Georgia” (Kartvelebi). From Armenia. From what used to be the Kingdom of Poland, but what at the time was parts of other countries and now is Poland again. From Greece and Macedonia (or are they the same…not judging here….) From the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. From what used to be Czechoslovakia but is now the separate countries of Czech and Slovakia. and Yugoslavia but are now several smaller independent countries. From what is now called Germany but until 1870 consisted of dozens of smaller states. Same for Italy. From Austria and Switzerland.

And now these are all “white.”

My own ancestry is mostly Irish, but also German, Dutch, French Canadian, and English, with possibly some Kazakh and/or Native American (unconfirmed). In school I was already “multiethnic” and didn’t even know it.

In America’s past, the Scotch-Irish were called “squatters” and loudly complained about. The Germans were sent to the worst farmland, followed by the Polish, the Russians, the Ukranians and Scandanavians. The Irish were given the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs, before the Chinese and Japanese appeared and were discriminated against in turn. “No Irish.” “No Chinese.” And of course “No Colored.” Catholics, Jews, Huguenots, Mormons. Each of us in turn. Once we get settled in after a generation or two, another new group arrives to take its turn.

Latinos. Mexicans. But of course, they were already here. (Florida, “New” Mexico, Arizona, California, Texas…)

Build a wall? Sign another Alien Exclusion Act?

Americans are not part of a melting pot. We are part of a mixed salad, forever adding and subtracting and multiplying. Some want their salad with white ranch dressing. I prefer a thousand islands. Another mix that tastes better together than separate.

Today, I picked up my older daughter from her after-school program, on my way home from work. I walked home with her, talked about her school day and her homework. As we talked, we constantly switched back and forth between English and Japanese. Different languages and cultural identities. There was no confusion. After we arrived and started preparing dinner, my wife came back a few minutes later from work with my younger daughter, who launched into a lengthy, detailed description of how she had been walking along the hallway in her nursery school when a boy in her class, running quickly, bumped into her and hurt the side of her face. They both cried, and he apologized to her. Should she have become angry and violent? Should my wife? Should I? Does living together with people who don’t act the way we do somehow mean we are weak?

We live in a dangerous world, one candidate says. We can’t let any more of these people in. Who knows what they’ll do. We need to protect our borders. We can’t tolerate difference. Different ways of thinking, believing, acting. Different people. They don’t look like us.

Half a century ago, my marriage would have been illegal in many parts of the US. My children reviled, openly discriminated against, made to feel inferior because they were not “pure.”

Is this the America you want to revert to?

I’m a “white” man. Not Asian, black, Pacific Islander, Latino. Not a woman. I will never truly know what it feels like to be discriminated against in the US. But I’ve been mocked. Made to feel separate and isolated. Worked low paying jobs and felt ignored by a larger society. I have every reason to hate the system.

But to what avail. Will hate help my daughters? Will it help my wife, my family…myself?

I see my children…multiethnic, multicultural…and my students…multi-selved, flawed but filled with potential and looking for opportunity…and I reject hate. Categorically.

I made my choice. Flawed, yes. Imperfect and occasionally too stubborn to listen to the counsel of others, perhaps.

Hateful?

No.

I choose hope over hate, facts over innuendo, honesty (even half-honesty) over openly bald-faced lies.

Determination over desperation. Inclusion over exclusion.

Not us vs them. Us and them. There is no them. Only us.

Stronger together. My conscience is clear.

It’s your choice.

Stories from next to the grave

In April, my grandmother died. She was my last grandparent.

In August, I was finally able to visit her grave. Anyone who is living overseas for an extended period of time (or permanently, as I probably am) will tell you how difficult it is to have a sense of closure at the death of a loved one. Particularly a close family member.

But as we were standing there, gazing down at the names of my great-grandparents (whom I had barely known) and my grandfather and grandmother (whom I had known very well from a young age), it wasn’t just a sense of closure I was seeking.

It was a sense of history. Of stories.

When the three cars of relatives arrived at the cemetary — myself, my wife, my two daughters; my parents and one younger brother and sister (I have eight siblings in total), one of my aunts and uncles (I have at least twenty…yes, it’s complicated…) an interesting thing happened.

We all started telling stories. Maybe it’s the Irish in us (Bushnell, Connally, O’Leary, and Dougherty, among others). But telling stories has always come naturally to people in my family, as natural as eating and breathing.

My uncle started it. Stories about my grandfather when he was in the Navy during World War II (he never left Florida).

My aunt followed. Stories about my grandfather when he was growing up. Stories about my grandmother when she was the same age as my cousin. (A recently discovered photograph showed her to be almost identical in appearance, too. Scary, that.)

My father continued (with a little prodding from me) with a story from when I was a child. (This is how I found out that the United Methodist Church-owned apartment building I had lived in as a young child had been and has been occupied by family members for at least four generations.)

When I mentioned my intention to write a book of non-fiction about my grandparents and their generation — I’m thinking of calling it “My Three Grandfather” — the stories came fast and furious.

Right next to my grandparents’ grave.

There we were, in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of a centuries-old cemetary overlooking the Hudson River Valley (near HVCC, as a matter of fact), telling stories about the dead, with the dead. With the living.

Stories aren’t just all that’s left. Stories are what we always had, and have, and will have.

Eat your heart out, Washington Irving.

Freebies and previews

Finally, a post after two and a half months! Yes, I was/am/will be busy. And so it goes.

As requested, I have finally managed to put some previews of my work online. The new page of “Freebies” has one short story so far (The Lost Bunny Shrine of Annandale), which is currently available as a .mobi download for Kindle. One commenter on Goodreads complained that it was about a bunch of drunken college guys.

Yep. And a bunny shrine is, of course, involved. The horror…

I don’t view that as much of a criticism, to be honest. It is what it is. Check it out for yourself!

I can make other formats available (maybe, if I can figure out how to convert it) if people ask. Other stories have a pic but now file right now. (Coming soon!)

I’ll make another story available as a download in about a month. I hope these will be enough to give you a sense of my writing style and content. (Hint: I don’t do vampires, werewolves, or everything-is-blowing-up-but-the-teenager-will-save-the-world.)

In the meantime, I’m struggling to find the time to finish a horror short story set in rural Japan, and while I’ve sent out several SF short stories to various magazines, there have been no bites yet (one editor commented that he liked the concepts in my novelette but wasn’t satisfied with the pace…so, uh, give me a chance to revise, then!). Still working from time to time on a series of SF novels, but scene by scene is taking too long. Synopsis and outlines are all finished, character backgrounds need a bit of fleshing out. And my kids need dinner.

Priorities…

1000 Isles

Some people have asked me on FB for some previews of Notes from the Nineties. It’s difficult to prepare excerpts from short stories (which are already short). So while I’m thinking of what’s appropriate as a teaser, here’s another poem from the volume. It appears right after the story “Boys Will be Boys” together with the poem “Grandmother.”

 

1000 Isles

 

Summers of my Upstate youth were spent

in the family station wagon, the six of us, or was it seven,

traveling to the great St. Lawrence

Seaway of a thousand islands.

 

The first time we stayed one night at Mosquito Heaven,

sleepless in a brown canvas tent,

and four nights on the biggest island—

half in the US,

half out.

 

I learned how to gut a fish, how to swim,

how to roll up a sleeping bag,

and where to buy fireworks—

I mean sparklers.

 

On my 12th birthday, I got a wallet,

put in a year’s allowance,

then when I forgot it in the campsite bathroom,

got advice in return the next morning—

“I told you so.”

 

Looking back, it makes sense

to me now

that I hate dressing.

On “En”

I’ve been meaning to add a personal essay page to my web site for stories that didn’t seem to fit into any neat categories. The immediate impetus is an essay that was recently “rejected” by my former graduate program’s in-house literary journal…probably because it’s an essay and not a short story (I posted elsewhere an article about the quirkiness of the English-speaking world’s insistence on an artificial separation of “fiction” and “nonfiction”).

Rather than wait up to half a year to see whether I could get it published online in a magazine (most of which seem to only publish US-centric, “woe is me” or “OMG look at THIS” sensationalist drivel) I thought that at least I could share it here…

The essay is “En” (縁), a topic that Asians (particularly those in Confucian-influenced societies) know a lot about. I first encountered the concept as a teaching assistant in Gojo High School, Nara, about 15 years ago. Almost like a previous life. Maybe it was…

Check it out here.

Notes from the Nineties: Upstate is…where, exactly?

This is the fifth and final preview of my upcoming collection of short stories and poems, Notes from the Nineties. In the first part, I explained the background behind the first story and poem pair, Cois Fharriage and Ag an gCrosaire. In the second part, I took a look at some of my experiences in Japan that informed Asian Dreams and Training the Mountain Warrior. In the third part, I delved into the “true story” of The Lost Bunny Shrine of Annandale. The fourth and penultimate part, I talked  about my brief experience with occultism and the wisdom of teeth that led to The Four Teeth of the Apocrypha.

I’m from New York. No, not New York City. No, not Niagara Falls (the Canadian horseshoe looks better, anyhow). Yes, there is something in between. An awful lot of something, actually. In fact, the oldest and still largest state park in the US comprises most of Upstate New York.

Yes, I’m from the Adirondacks. But it’s more complicated.

Four of the stories in Notes from the Nineties are unashamedly set in Upstate New York.

No, not Yonkers or White Plains. To those of us in the real Upstate, those places are suburbs of NYC and therefore ineligible to be called Upstate. See “The Firebrand” to see how someone from Upstate views that area of the state (hint: incredibly attractive, overwhelmingly confusing, and best limited to brief trips to retain one’s sanity). Whereas the novel takes place all over the Upstate area, from Batavia to Glens Falls, the stories here take place in the Route 9 “corridor” that runs from the tip of Manhattan (where it is called Broadway) through the state of Albany to Montreal. (This follows an old Native American trail, by the way, for history buffs.)

“Father Knows Least” was my attempt to link this book of stories to my “literary baseball” novel, Approaching Twi-Night. Readers of the novel may recognize some character names, particularly once they figure out who the narrator is. (The new ebook version of the novel includes an excerpt from the short story…). The narrator and some of the characters reappear in “The Firebrand,” which is set in a car (basically). In this story, the narrator is home for the winter break from college in Albany, and finds out that all is not well. ’80s and ’90s cultural references abound, in between family struggles.

“Boys Will be Boys” is likewise set in Upstate, primarily in a camp site area in a rural county. This was the most difficult of the stories to write; much of it is based on personal experiences, much of it fiction, and the more I wrote, the harder it became to separate the two. Memories are triggered by smells as well as sounds; I tried to include specific olfactory and audio details to counter the emotional impact of a traumatic experience for the young protagonist. The story may trigger similar memories for some readers; it triggered me.

“Pockets” and “The Green and the Grey” were both originally in my undergraduate thesis and, unlike other stories from that time period (’93-’94) have survived largely intact. “Pockets” quite clearly takes place on a college campus (essentially the same college as “The Lost Bunny Shrine of Annandale,” although the story doesn’t specifically say so). I deliberately used third-person rather than first-person, which allowed me to insert a bizarre paragraph in italics to create a dreamlike sequence. My beta readers were confused by this section and complained that they weren’t sure whether what had happened was real or not. To which my response was, That’s kind of the point.

They also expressed some confusion at the abrupt end of “The Green and the Grey,” which is a first-person story about a conversation about war and religion on a bus ride through the lower Hudson Valley. After hearing about various conflicts in the ’90s (Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Somalia), why does the narrator react by looking out the window at snow? Does his “bag” have something to do with it? Why does he greet unnamed and undescribed friends waiting for him in a restaurant with the words…?

Ah, but that would be telling.

 

Hope you have enjoyed this series of previews. The ebook is now available online at several Kindle stores, and the paperback is already available at several non-Amazon stores (see the Notes from the Nineties page for all links). Don’t forget the Goodreads Giveaway! Ends May 1, 2016. Enter for a chance to win 1 of 10 signed paperback copies (sorry, I can’t sign an ebook…yes, I have been asked, facetiously…).

Notes from the Nineties: The Four Teeth of the Apocrypha

This is the fourth preview of my upcoming collection of short stories and poems, Notes from the Nineties. In the first part, I explained the background behind the first story and poem pair, Cois Fharriage and Ag an gCrosaire. In the second part, I took a look at some of my experiences in Japan that informed Asian Dreams and Training the Mountain Warrior. In the third part, I delved into the “true story” of The Lost Bunny Shrine of Annandale.

Today marks the first day of spring, as well as the start of the Easter Week. And while it is the end of Spring Break for some schools in North America, it’s still spring break for others…and it was, in fact, around this time of year back in 1996 that the seeds of “The Four Teeth of the Apocrypha” were planted. Like teeth.

That remark alone should let you know that this is not a typical story (if the title hadn’t already tipped you off by now).

Like the story “Pockets” (which will be touched upon in a future post), the “Four Teeth…” and its paired poem “Asleep Came the Vision of I” feature religious / mystical imagery. As a former Catholic (some say “lapsed,” as if you can never stop being Catholic; having lived in Japan for some 17 years now as a registered Zen monk, I beg to differ)…who had sought out various forms of religious experiences in undergraduate school, I was attracted by the occult in my early to mid-20s. A peak period of interest came while I was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a single year between undergraduate and graduate studies in creative writing.

I still remember my apprehension at buying a copy of Aleister Crowley‘s Magick in Theory and Practice, trepiditiously opening the cover only to find that the first few pages were more like an academic text exhorting readers to peruse most of the essays and works I had already read as an undergrad. I bought or borrowed works by and about SL MacGregor Mathers, W B Yeats, and Madame Blavatky; learned everything I could about the Rider-Waite Tarot, the Qabbalah, and Rosencrucianism; read the Nag Hammadi and various apocrypha (books not included in the New Testament).

In the end, I ultimately concluded the same thing I had already concluded about organized religion: it was all a bunch of hooey. My experiences since that time have softened my opinions to some degree — as a self-professed agnostic, I can’t say that it’s all BS, but many people do have conflicting and contradictory beliefs, and these ideas are certainly not for me — but in the meantime, I was provided with tons of symbolic representations and concepts for writing.

The poem “Asleep Came the Vision of I” was directly inspired by my first viewing of Michaelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but several concepts from the Tarot and Norse mythology appear. The story “The Four Teeth of the Apocrypha” uses some of the same symbols, but includes a main character based on a friend and former supervisor of mine (who will no doubt recognize himself should he read the story!) and stems directly from my own experiences in the dentist’s chair, having my wisdom teeth removed.

The idea for combining a dentist’s office visit with apocryphal, mystical imagery no doubt is the result of what happened after my real office visit ended. The codeine-derived Tylenol-3 pain killers given me, along with my then-addiction to caffeine, led me to spend the first three days of Spring Break 1996 without any sleep. Memories are now hazy, but I distinctly recall a surreal few hours in the early morning sitting in front of a 3DO “Myst” game. Not for the faint of heart…but the soil had been tilled and the seeds had been planted. Like the serpent’s teeth.

Unsurprisingly, this story is followed by an “Ode to Shelley”…

 

Goodreads giveaway for Notes from the Nineties

Announcing a book giveaway!

Enter to win one of 10 signed copies of Notes from the Nineties (paperback, $6.98 value).

Begins March 25, 2016 and lasts until May 1, 2016.

Tell your friends! Tell your family! Oh, tell it on the mountain! And dangle your friend off of it…

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Notes from the Nineties
by M. Thomas Apple

Giveaway ends May 01, 2016.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

 

Notes from the Nineties: The Lost Bunny Shrine of Annandale

This is the third preview of my upcoming collection of short stories and poems, Notes from the Nineties. In the first part, I explained the background behind the first story and poem pair, Cois Fharriage and Ag an gCrosaire. In the second part, I took a look at some of my experiences in Japan that informed Asian Dreams and Training the Mountain Warrior.

Oh, it’s just a harmless little bunny, isn’t it?

The first story in the anthology takes place in Ireland; the last, in Japan. But I’m from Upstate New York (NOT White Plains and Yonkers; those are downstate for the rest of us), so many of the stories in the middle of the book take place there. Most such stories were originally written for my undergrad or graduate thesis, from ’93 to ’96 (hence, the name of the book, actually…).

“The Lost Bunny Shrine of Annandale” was not written back then. However, the events do take place in the mid-’90s, and the style (I hope) is similar to those stories.

The main event — finding a post dedicated to a bunny rabbit in the middle of the woods — actually occurred. The details are fuzzy (most of the night was…) and of course I’ve changed around the names of the conspirators, as well as combined two or three people into a single character with some exaggerated personality quirks. But there is, in reality, a bunny shrine in Annandale. And we did find it. Among other things.

Yes, there was very little to do at times while at college. It’s probably hard to imagine a world without the Internet now, but that’s the way things were in the early ’90s. Think of a small college campus of a thousand acres or so, in the middle of a rural county with the nearest town about 3 miles away…with no car…no cell phone, no email, no FaceBook, no Twitter, no Instagram (thank GOD), no Pinterest or Tumblr, no…nothing.

(One roommate of mine had a Sega Genesis, to put things in their proper time frame…)

Now add beer and creative, bored, horny teenagers.

Voilá.

What are you waiting for? The Lost Bunny Shrine awaits…

Single, hyphenated, or double?

During the final proofreading of Notes from the Nineties, I’m finding small amusements in MS Word…which seems to be contradicting previous versions of spellcheckers.

Or is that spell-checkers? Spell checkers?
I’ve always had a habit of using single words where others prefer double or hyphenated words. To me, reproducing spoken language makes dialog in particular (of course) and prose sound more natural. Now that the automated spellchecker (spell-…spell…) is suggesting single words over other options, I’m finding a number of inconsistencies.

For example, the program suggests “flowerbed” (OK…) but “death bed” (um…why?). Gravestone is one word, but grave marker is two…but they mean the same thing (don’t they?). Rune stone is two words (but it’s only one object, like a gravestone…). Huh?

Which would you prefer? Single word? Double? Hyphens?

Below I’ve written the original form of 2-word nouns and adjectives in my stories (most dating from, you guessed it, the ‘90s) in the order in which they appear. Try to guess which ones were flagged by Word as “misspelled.” (Note: I changed many to single words…which ones would you change?)

camp fire
deathbed
flower bed
roommate
stop light
firebrand
southbound
off season
ear-splitting
firepit
stone walls
newly-graveled
eighteen wheeler
dimly-lit
sidepocket
cut-outs
cubby-hole
wrist watch
name tag
gumline
militia men
apple sauce
sing-song
toll booth
fast forward
day-long
door frame
head-first