John Walters's Blog, page 75

Book Review: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

Recently I came across a nonfiction book, “Travels” by Michael Crichton at a book sale.  The book itself was so-so due to the fact that only about a third of it was actually about traveling, but the author’s writing style impressed me so much I sought out one of his novels.  The novel, I must say, did not disappoint.

“Jurassic Park” is a fascinating read, more so because it does not parallel the famous film.  It was written before the film, and includes much more detail, in scientific explanations, characters, and adventures.  Crichton knows how to craft a thriller.  If there had been no film it would be a great read on its own, but because the film is so familiar to me I found myself inevitably comparing film and book – not critically, but in admiration to each as excellent examples of their respective media.  The film is a trimmed-down version of the story, as it had to be as a primarily visual experience.

I don’t know what process the filmmakers went through to choose their material.  One important section of the book that was completely left out of the film is the pterodactyl scene, when giant bird-like creatures attack Grant and the kids.  It later appears in “Jurassic Park III”, in which different characters stumble upon the aviary.  It doesn’t show the island being destroyed in the movie; Spielberg may have felt that would have been anticlimactic.  And in the film Hammond is presented as a benevolent grandfather figure; I wonder if that was adapted when they signed Richard Attenborough for the part.  It’s hard to imagine Attenborough as the deceitful, deluded, self-serving, egotistical character in the book.

The differences, as I say, do not detract from the reading experience.  In fact, the opposite is true.  The fact that the book had such a profoundly different structure contributed to my enjoyment, as part of the reason I read on was to find out Crichton’s take as a novelist on the material.  He’s a good writer.  He’s not a poet, to be sure; the language is rudimentary.  But he knows how to craft a story, how to weave a tense tale.  It makes me open to reading more of his books.  In fact, after I finished “Jurassic Park” I ordered its sequel, “The Lost World”, as I am interested to see how the continuing story differs from the second Jurassic Park film in the next book.

Anyway, everyone knows that dinosaurs are cool, and Crichton is good at using them to great effect to produce fascination, thrills, and terror.  This book made him a very rich man, and it’s easy to see why.  The fear of great beasts like dinosaurs strikes a primal nerve; we feel repelled and attracted at the same time.  I used to play with dinosaur toys when I was a kid, and I never missed a chance to watch anything on TV in which dinosaurs figured prominently.

So pick up a copy of “Jurassic Park” sometime and enjoy the ride.  It’s not something that would be considered great literature, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Outsiders

I have been pondering what I wrote about rejection.  In that essay I made the implication that everyone around me was part of a whole which for some inexplicable reason had rejected me.  After I wrote it, however, I took a close look around and I realized that I was wrong.  It was not that I was an outsider surrounded by insiders.  We are all outsiders.  All of us.

There exists some sort of artificial construct that we have deemed a nation, and as far as it goes we are all a part of it.  But what does that mean?  Who really feels that they are perfectly content, that they have found their place?  Who does not strive for more?  Who does not feel inadequate, imperfect, unfulfilled?  I won’t deny that there may be a few such creatures in this country, in the world – those who have somehow overcome the need to strive for something better.  But they are not you and I.

Let’s take politicians, for example, since this is an election year and the warriors are casting epithets back and forth.  Are politicians more noble, more truthful, more patriotic than the rest of us?  The idea is laughable, now that information has become more easily available and more and more of the seemingly irreproachable have bit the dust.  Politicians are not better or worse than the rest of us; they are just more exposed.  They have set themselves up to be taken down.  And the problem is not that they are imperfect.  The problem is that for so long they tried to pretend that they were not, that they were somehow the knights in burnished armor who would rescue us from chaos, insecurity, poverty, internal enemies, and the foreign horde.  There is nobility and courage and virtue to be found even in those who would take up the reins of power, but we must not deceive ourselves that they are anything but flawed.  They too, are outsiders.  Perhaps they were ridiculed by the school bully.  Perhaps they got so horny they committed sexual indiscretions.  Perhaps in their pursuit for power they ignored and alienated their children.  Then they begin to become successful in their chosen profession, their vocation, and all the dirt gets dug up.  It’s inevitable in this day and age.  And all the hard work, all the sacrifices, all the cover-ups to attain to the center of the circle are in vain.  But oh the horror when a public figure is exposed as an outsider!  The problem lies in thinking that there is ever any alternative.

A nation, however, is a highly abstract concept compared to other constructions of which we feel ourselves, or long to feel, a part.  One of the most basic units, of course, is the family.  Most people have such an entity to which to belong, and they strive to keep that connection throughout their lives with varying degrees of success.  Some, such as those abandoned or put up for adoption at birth, never seem to have a chance; but even these often create tightly-knit bonds, because it must be understood that a family is as much a psychic or spiritual concept as a physical one.  Then there are schools.  What pits they are of desperate, agonizing struggles for recognition, for acceptance, for places in this or that circle that one might not be left out in the cold!  And work.  Do they speak to you or hush up and shy away at the water cooler?  And places of religious worship.  Are you considered one of the virtuous or one of the pitied fallen ones?  These are just the crassest of examples.  So many aspects of life alienate one human being from another it is impossible to list them all:  gender, age, race, financial status – the list could go on and on.

So I look around me and I see outsiders.  A nation, a whole world of outsiders.  Nobody is inside and has found peace.  Nobody has arrived.  So when I complained in my last essay on rejection that I was a lone outsider in what sense did I mean it?  In the most relative.  I can’t find a job.  Many people, however, can’t find jobs in this country.  In that sense I am not alone; I am a part of a community – the community of the unemployed.  I am poor.  Statistically, most of the people in the world are poor.  In other words, we are all aggregates of continuing struggles to belong in disparate social constructs, some of stronger cohesion than others.

I’m getting too technical here, trying to explain that which is inexplicable.  The main thing I want to say is that I have spent an inordinate amount of time comparing myself unfavorably with others who in fact are no better off, and in many cases are probably worse off, than I am.  Nobody has attained the American Dream – whatever that is, or whatever people think of when they use the phrase.  The American Dream is, in fact, a delusion.  Henry Miller called it the air-conditioned nightmare in the book of the same name, though I have to admit that that book was a disappointment, and he delved much deeper into an analysis of what he meant in his earlier works, in which he grapples with the reasons he left America in the first place.

I too left America long ago.  Did I imagine that in the decades I have been gone it would somehow heal itself of all its ills and present itself as that which our forefathers dreamed of, that which it should have been all along?  Did I not expect to become aware of the decay, the despair, the cobwebs in the corner?  And not just cobwebs, no.  Venomous spiders wait in the wings to spring upon the unwary, the trapped, the helpless.  This is true in other parts of the world as well, but as I have said before, where there is great good, there is also great evil.  The freedom that Americans prize so highly has enabled wickedness to prosper as well as virtue.

But I have wandered far from my theme, far from where I began this essay.  We are all outsiders.  That is the human condition.  It’s just that when things go well we are anesthetized to the fact, whereas when things are tough the point is driven home to us.

Yes, we are all outsiders.  In this, at least, we are united.

Book Review: Travels by Michael Crichton

It so happened on the 4th of July 2012 I was temporarily sojourning on Coronado Island in San Diego.  When I wandered to the main street of the town to get some air and exercise, lo and behold a parade was in progress.  The streets were packed with people hawking all sorts of wares.  Being the inveterate bookworm that I am, I searched for a used book stall.  I had almost given up when I found one far up the street outside the public library.  All the volumes were laid out fairly neatly in boxes which I scoured meticulously.

I came across this volume by Michael Crichton.  I have always been content to watch the movie versions of his works and never really felt the urge to read his books – a feeling I also had about Stephen King, until a few of his books had such compelling subject matter that I just had to give them a try, in particular “On Writing” and “11/22/63″.  Anyway, as far as the Crichton tome was concerned, I picked it up for two reasons.  First of all, I didn’t want to leave the book stall with nothing and I hadn’t found anything else of interest.  Secondly, I like well-written travel books.  So I decided to give it a try.

Having completed it, I have several observations.  First of all, it is not a travel book in the strict sense of the word.  The main subject is not travel.  There are some essays on travel, several of which are fascinating, but almost a third of the book, the beginning, is about his experiences in medical school; these were all right but nothing special, and if it were not for the fact that I am always loathe to cast a book aside once I have begun it, I might have stopped reading.  Another third or more of the book deals with his experiences investigating paranormal phenomena.  I wouldn’t have minded a chapter or two on the subject, but he goes on and on and it gets a bit boring.  The last chapter is a formal defense of paranormal phenomena, and this truly was boring, and I almost tossed the book aside with only ten or twenty pages to go – but I didn’t.  I have no problem with Crichton including disparate essays in his book – it is his book, after all, but I think he should have named it something else.

As I said, some of the articles were fascinating.  One of the best deals with a difficult trek to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa.  Another is about the time he directed the film “The Great Train Robbery” in Ireland, and he includes a lot of interesting anecdotes about working with the actor Sean Connery.

One other point about the travel essays, though, that annoyed me was that Crichton approaches his travel from the standpoint of a wealthy man.  He achieved success at an early age; his books became best-sellers and several were turned into popular films.  He had the money to throw around to stay at the best hotels and secure the safest, most reliable transportation, so that his travels rarely come across as adventures but rather expensive, carefully orchestrated holidays.  How different from myself; when I wanted to travel I had to stick out my thumb and hitchhike, as I had no money for transportation.  Starting out like that I managed to stay on the road for years and circle the globe twice.  Still, his style is very readable and I wish he would have filled the book with his travel experiences and not diverted into other subjects.

I also wish he would have written more about his writing and filmmaking and how it all fit in with his traveling.  I would have loved to have read details about his writing habits and techniques, as well as more anecdotes about the famous people he has worked with.  Alas, the book I wish he had written is not the one he wrote.  For this reason, I cannot recommend this book in toto, but only certain sections of it.

However, though for me this book was a disappointment, I recognized a clean, clear writing style which could be put to good effect in fiction, and it caused me to go out and find one of his books, “Jurassic Park”, to read when I get a chance and find out if my hunch is correct.  Thus I have paid him the greatest complement you can pay a writer: to desire to read more of his work.

Rejection

Why the disquiet?  What is wrong?  In order to get to the root of the malaise the problem must be analyzed.

I have returned to the United States of America with some of my sons.  We have fled west to escape the quagmire of the Greek economy.  Now here we are in the new world, and my boys prosper, the ones that were already here as well as the ones I brought with me.  In Greece they were becalmed in a sea of torpor.  Here they are active, exuberant, hopeful.  In Greece their future was a sea of fog behind which was a blank impenetrable wall; here the future, for them, is blue skies and a clear horizon.  I am happy for them.  I rejoice with them.  Their new country has welcomed them with open arms, as long-lost relatives, and they are in the honeymoon stage of the relationship.  There will be problems down the road, of course; there always are even in the best of relationships.  But for now, everything is okay.  They have found jobs; they have income.  The younger one has a good school which will start soon, and has begun football practice.  The U.S.A. has taken in and accepted the innocents from abroad.

But it has not been so with me.  I do not feel the peace that they feel.  I do not feel accepted, as they have been accepted.  I stand apart, and I wonder why.  Try as I might I have not been able to find work.  Sometimes I wish I had never left Greece, but the feeling does not last long.  After all, I did not leave for me but for them.  There was no alternative.  Yet they have the simple joy of discovery of a new land, and I have…  What?  I don’t know what I have.

Thirty-five years ago I left my homeland.  I wasn’t happy here, but then again, at the time I wasn’t happy anywhere.  I wanted to live life, seek adventure, find myself as a writer.  But there was more to it than that.  I didn’t like what America had become.  I didn’t like the greed, the selfishness, the violence.  I didn’t seem to fit in anywhere, so I went abroad to search for a place where I fit in, where I could call home.  I didn’t realize at the time I wasn’t searching for an actual physical place.  I was searching for an ideal, a philosophy, a state of mind, a condition of inner peace.  I roamed from this land to that, and as I roamed life went on:  I married; we had one child after another, we settled here and there for various periods of time.  Never, however, did I feel that I had found home, at least as far as it refers to a physical place.  My family is home, yes, and I still consider it so, though we are scattered around in diverse parts of the globe.  But a house or a plot of land where I could kick back and say yes, I have arrived, this is the homestead?  No, never.  We moved here and there as circumstance and necessity dictated; we acquired housing as opportunities presented themselves.

We ended up in Greece for many years.  Somehow I conceived the idea that that might be the end of the road.  Why?  Simply because I was aging and it seemed that I didn’t have so many more journeys left in me.  But then I saw the need for another move, for the sake of my sons, and that it would require starting from scratch yet again.  Not only that, it would entail going back to the homeland I had left so many years before, and coming to grips with it.

Now here I am.  We have just begun in the new land, but my boys thrive and with that I am pleased.  However, I myself do not thrive and about that I am puzzled.  It is as if the land that I rejected many years ago continues to reject me.  What overtures must I offer that I might once again be accepted, as I was accepted when I was born here, and as my sons have been accepted having come here for the first time?

I want to clarify something.  I speak anthropomorphically, as if the United States were a person and had the capacity to accept or reject.  It has no separate existence, of course, except that which its people have given it.  It is the same with any country.  A country exists as a conglomeration of souls, that is, the bodies, minds, and spirits of those who live there.  Humans have put up artificial constructions to codify and limit and define the boundaries of which souls belong where, such as politics, economics, religions, genealogies, and so on.  But these are, as I said, imposed limitations.  Nevertheless, they exist, and they have, over millennia, become so strongly fixed in the minds of those who dwell on this Earth that they have taken on spirits of their own.  For example:  the United States.  Every man, woman and child who lives here or considers himself or herself attached to the country is a part of the spirit of America.  Despite the fact that these constructs are artificial they are powerful, as they have been lodged in the collective psyche for so long.  In addition, they have acquired the nature of a belief.  People believe that their countries exist, and therefore they do.  And they then build an elaborate physical network to support the belief.

I digress, perhaps, but I want to make my point.  I myself am creating psychic illusions so you can grasp what I have been experiencing.  My boys have entered into whatever psychic entity comprises the United States, but I myself feel confronted with some sort of obstacle, membrane, hindrance, doorkeeper, whatever you want to call it or imagine it as, which will not let me in.  Now before you think I have gone round the bend and become delusional, let me emphasize that the concept of a newcomer being an outsider in alien territory is time-honored in the creative arts.  And I have lived more of my life outside of the United States than in.  I feel myself as a stranger in a strange land, a land I thought I might never return to live in, and somehow I must reconcile the fact that I have returned, and that I find it inhospitable and difficult to get a foothold in.

What overtures must I make?  That is the question I ask myself.  Or…  How must I adjust to harmonize with the rhythm or pulse of this land?  Or…  What must I do to survive in this seemingly hostile environment?  In a previous post I mentioned writers I know of who adjusted much more easily than I have.  Why?  Because they didn’t have to start from scratch.  They were well-established; they had incomes; they simply transplanted a fully-functioning social entity (a family) from one location to another.  My transfer has been more elemental.  I am groping in the dark, so to speak, taking one step at a time.

America has changed, and I have changed.  We are like two people who knew one another long ago and have brought that past knowledge to the reunion.  What I need to understand is that it is not a reunion, not for me at least.  It is a totally new experience.  It is as if I am coming to this land for the first time.  I must learn to cope as any immigrant must.  I cannot claim privilege of birth; I have been gone too long.  It is a unique situation for which I myself have no precedent.  That’s why I flounder; that’s why I feel like I’m drowning.  I have to learn to swim all over again.  Not only that, but land is a long way away, as far as I can see at least; there is no end to the struggle in sight so I must pace myself in order to survive.  I long for terra firma under my feet once again; I long for the chance to establish routines.  Until then, I face the battle afresh every day, not knowing what unexpected obstacles may arise like monsters, or at least windmills that look like monsters, in my path.

The Second Stratum

I have lately been concerned, nearly obsessed, with the homeless I see around me on the streets of San Diego.  Why?  Because it’s easy to empathize with them.  I am jobless at the moment and it is not easy to find work.  My writing doesn’t come near to supporting my dependents and I.  I can picture myself falling through the cracks and becoming destitute.  Not all those derelict individuals you see walking the streets, begging at street corners, sleeping in doorways or side-alleys are idiots or alcoholics or drug addicts.  Many are, sure.  But many have just become overwhelmed my economic misfortune.  Like a tourist in a coastal town who doesn’t see it coming, an economic tidal wave has surged in, scooped them up, and swept them out to sea.  Now they are floundering in water way over their heads, trying to keep afloat, trying to survive.

But now I have begun to ruminate about a different stratum of society.

Two days ago after an intensely strenuous morning during which I had been trying to take care of some important business for one of my sons, I decided to take a short nap.  I had just drifted off to sleep when my phone rang.  Thick-headed with drowsiness, the edges of my concentration fuzzy, I tried to make sense of what the man on the other end of the line was saying.  It turned out he was the manager of a certain national chain store and wanted to ask me if I was interested in a position he had open.  In the past few weeks, realizing my need for quick cash, I’d been throwing out job applications on the internet right and left, anyplace I could think of that might have an employment opportunities page on their website, hoping that something would get through.  And here it was; I had cast my line into the waters and I had a nibble.  I thanked him for calling, asked him a few questions about the job, but balked when he informed me of the hours and salary.  Basically, it was a part-time job at minimum wage, which is eight dollars an hour.

I knew that when I had uprooted from Greece and moved to the States I would have to start again, but I felt humiliated.  Not just because I am almost sixty, near the age when I should be retiring (though writers never retire; I speak here of day labor, which is anything else a writer does to pay bills) and I should be at the peak of an illustrious career, or in the twilight of one, not starting from such abject scratch; not just because I was making more than twice as much per hour as a teacher in Greece; not just because I’d be working mostly with young kids just starting out who would deem eight bucks an hour a reasonable wage.  No, what humiliated me was the fact that I was forced to take it seriously, to consider it at all.  It was so inadequate for my needs it was laughable – but I didn’t laugh.  The fact was, it was something – and something was better than nothing.  So far in my job search I had come up with zilch, zero, nada.  The schools wouldn’t touch me because I didn’t have a degree.  The internet companies wouldn’t touch me because I wasn’t fast enough at the keyboard.  Some other companies wouldn’t touch me because – hell, I don’t know, but they wouldn’t.  My sons had found jobs quick enough in the minimum wage customer service sector, but that’s all they were looking for and so they were happy.  I needed something more, something fulltime, something with a decent salary, something that would help me meet my multitudes of obligations.

But when I thought about it I went ahead to the interview.  All things considered, something is better than nothing.  I could always take this position if offered it, and keep looking for something better.

The manager was affable enough – courteous, friendly.  He was surprised, when he met me, that I had responded.  He said that most of the applicants he received were in their twenties, as I said, people just starting out and willing to get their foot in the door by starting at the bottom.  He apologized for the salary and the fact that it would be part time, and explained to me that the company saved money that way; by hiring workers at part time positions instead of fulltime they could avoid giving benefits.  I was already aware of this situation, but I had never had it explained to me by someone actually involved in the process.

Then I got to thinking about all the customer service personnel I see every day in supermarkets, pharmacies, office supply stores, cafes, restaurants, fast food joints, and a multitude of other occupations.  They too work for minimum wage.  They are caught in this company greed, this concern for the bottom line rather than for the workers who make it possible.  They cope with this injustice in various ways to balance their budgets, I’m sure; it’s possible many of them can’t find a balance and go deeper and deeper into debt.  But for the most part they do their best day after day, try to cope, keep up a cheery smile in front of the customers.  I think of one supermarket in particular, a place I go to frequently to pick up supplies.  They have all sorts of employees, and unlike most of the tech and office supply shops many of this supermarket’s staff are middle-aged or even elderly.  They look, some of them, on their last legs.  They should be home resting, kicking back and being served by others.  Instead they come in day after day and work the cash register, bag groceries, clean up messes, and always, despite everything, smile at the customers, wish them a good day.  They make an art form out of it, in fact.  I have watched some of them in awe, and wondered how they could keep up such a cheerful disposition in such working conditions.  True heroes, I tell you.  The big shots in the board rooms should be required to take off their fancy ties and expensive tailored suits and get down there and help out their employees from time to time.

Something is wrong here.  It’s exploitation, that’s what it is.  I’ll bet the company CEO makes more than eight bucks an hour.  Undoubtedly many multiples more.  Some of them probably make more than all their workers put together.

And I digress; I rant.  I have no solutions to these problems.  I am merely observing and reporting.

And this is all brought on by my own misfortune.  Although for the most part, I must admit, I do not consider myself unfortunate.  So it might be also for those I see working so hard for so little.  They might be so happy to have some work, any work, that they find it easy to look on the bright side, keep up the cheery face, and so on.

But the United States of America, land of the free, home of the brave, has these various strata of society below the glamour and the glitter.  Everyone here has been an aspiring millionaire, I think.  Nobody considered themselves a working person, at first.  For most a minimum wage job was a temporary condition on the way up.  That’s the American dream.  But a point is reached when you realize it’s too late, it’s not going to happen.  You’ve made too many mistakes; you’ve waited too long; you’ve missed too many opportunities.  Now you merely want to survive, and even survival itself isn’t a done deal.  You have to scrabble with a lot of others for a limited amount of crumbs.  The manager at the company where I applied for the minimum wage job told me, in fact, that he had many applicants and was conducting many interviews for the few positions he had open.  The power was in his hands, not mine.  There’s no guarantee that if all else fails you can even find a job shoveling shit.  You’d probably have to stand in line for an interview and produce a resume and references for that too.  They’d ask you if you had a degree in manure disposal, if any of your relatives were already standing in the cesspool, if you had any experience in putting on nose-clips properly.

Something’s wrong with this picture, and I’m not really sure what it is.  Maybe I haven’t been here long enough to figure it out.  But one thing is sure, one comparative point that is without doubt.  Here in the United States there might be twenty, or thirty, or maybe even fifty people competing for the shit-shoveling job.  In Greece, where we just came from, with the economic situation the way it is, they’d be lining up by the thousands.

Book Review: Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

I may as well plunge right in by saying that I consider “Speaker for the Dead” a far superior book to “Ender’s Game”, though it is its sequel.  “Ender’s Game” is, for the most part, standard science fiction.  It is good, even great, science fiction, but only in the last few pages does it really open up and reveal the depth that runs through and through “Speaker for the Dead”.

“Speaker for the Dead” begins 3,000 years after “Ender’s Game”.  Ender, the hero who saved humanity from the alien race called the buggers, has been hopping from world to world and, due to the relativity of time, has kept his youth.  In the intervening years humanity’s opinion of him has changed; whereas once he was hero now he is villain, responsible for the extinction of the bugger species.  Now a new alien species has been discovered which has been dubbed the piggies, and they have apparently begun to murder humans.  Ender, since his military days, has become a Speaker for the Dead, someone quasi-religious but universally respected, called to witness the truth about a person after death.  Ender is called to the piggy world, and a complex chain of events unfolds as Ender and those who called him seek to understand the piggies’ bizarrely different xenology and culture to prevent a misunderstanding similar to that which happened with the buggers.  At the same time Ender is carrying the last bugger queen, which he found at the end of “Ender’s Game”, searching for a world on which she can give birth to the eggs she carries.

At no time does this descend into maudlin adventure.  Card does not go for the quick entertainment fix.  Instead, he explores the spiritual, philosophical, and emotional ramifications of alien encounter in an intelligent, thought-provoking way.  That’s the wonder and triumph of this book.  In a lesser writer’s hands it would have been a much different story:  more action, perhaps, but less heart.  But as I plunged into the heart of this story what I really felt was the heart of Orson Scott Card, and that’s what I appreciated as I read on and on.  Each time I picked it up it was more and more difficult to put it down.  It is extremely well told.  More than that, it is not too long but just long enough to explore its subject matter thoroughly.  The tendency these days seems to be to create huge rambling door-stopper sized epics, but a story should be just the right size to tell its tale well, and that’s what this one does.

There is, in fact, a cliff-hanger of an ending; however, it’s not necessary to read on into the next volume if you don’t want to.  The story as it stands resolves all of the intellectual and emotional plot-points satisfactorily, and if you want to read the sequel it would be to learn more about the universe Card created in this series rather than because he does not complete what he has begun.  I suppose it would be possible to read this tale without having first read “Ender’s Game”, but personally I would not advise it.  “Speaker for the Dead” takes for granted Ender’s past and the character development that has led him to become the person he is in order to make the decisions he does, decisions he would not have been able to make, or would have made differently, as a younger man.

Completing “Ender’s Game” and “Speaker for the Dead” was my goal, and having done so I don’t know whether I will continue on and read more of the Ender series, which runs into six volumes.  I have so much I want to read I know I will not get to any of the other books soon.  But these two books I highly recommend.  They are science fiction at its best, science fiction as it was meant to be:  intelligent, empathetic, emotional, exciting, thought-provoking, well-written.

Job Search, or, The Hunter Lost in the Forest

Things went wrong today – so wrong that I have to write about it.  This is a writer’s only recourse.  Otherwise it will bubble up inside like lava in a volcano and consume me.

I started the day with the best of intentions.  I was going to search online for jobs, and then write an essay.  Instead I started by trying to check the billing information of our internet account, as it was the end of the month and I wanted to know whether I had to do something manually or it was automatic.  There I ran into the first obstacle.  The cable company wouldn’t recognize my log-in name, or my password, or even my e-mail address, though they had already sent notices to that address.  So I go to their site and try to work out the problem and get into a chat with a technician.  She tells me I need to register, which I thought I already had.  Since I have somebody’s ear I decide to ask why our modem sometimes works slowly and sometimes loses the connection entirely.  She sends me to another technician, who runs me through a series of tests, and in the end solves nothing.  By this time most of the morning is gone.  I try to register my account only to discover that there’s a glitch in my e-mail account and I can’t sign in.  I re-start the computer a few times to try to solve the problem.  Then one of my sons informs me that I was supposed to meet the manager where he works today to ask about some insurance issues.  I only have about fifteen minutes and the place is almost a mile away.  I rush out and arrive four minutes late, only to find out that I was supposed to meet her tomorrow, not today.

And all of this is not really the reason I am despondent today, though I hate to waste a morning.  I could have been writing, after all, instead of running about here and there, both in cyberspace and the real world, trying vainly to solve problems.  I am despondent because I don’t yet have a job.

In a perfect world my writing would support me, and even in an imperfect world I would try to make it so, possibly even to the point of descending into abject poverty, but there is one consideration that makes such an option impossible.  I am not alone.  I have come here for my sons, to give them a fresh start, a chance at opportunities they wouldn’t have had had they stayed in Greece.  They are not yet ready to strike out and make it on their own.  I am here to help them, and help them I must.  The money I borrowed to make the trip here is almost gone, and I must have employment to replenish it and pay back those from whom I have borrowed.

I’d actually planned to write about job hunting after I had found a job, when I could write from a position of victory.  But perhaps it is better this way.  For me job hunting is demeaning, humiliating, frustrating, discouraging, disheartening.  Perhaps it is not so for everyone.  My sons, for instance, arrived in the US and hit the ground running.  They had been so frustrated and rudderless and without options in Greece that it was like a holiday in a theme park for them to be able to go from business to business and fill out applications for employment.  They kept it up for days, and it didn’t take long for them to find jobs.  One now works in a bagel place preparing sandwiches, and the other works as a cashier at a burger joint.  They are both happy with the work they have found, though they get minimum wage.

It has not been so easy for me.  I too have applied for all sorts of jobs, mostly online.  Minimum wage will not do for me, though; I will not be able to meet my obligations.  In addition, I want to use my talents in some way.  First and foremost, I am a writer, and I have applied for various writing-related jobs, mostly having to do with providing online content.  Whenever I have had to submit a writing sample I have got a callback for an interview, but so far nothing definite has come of it.  I also taught English as a second language in Greece for sixteen years.  I have experience preparing students for all sorts of language tests, and excellent recommendation letters.  But here no school will even consider me because I don’t have a college diploma.  It is the epitome of ridiculous bureaucratic letter-of-the-law nitpicking, but there is nothing I can do about it.  No school will try me out, or even let me do a sample lesson.  I have applied for other types of jobs too:  warehouse work, call center customer service information provider at various companies, private tutoring, even barista or shift supervisor at a certain well-known coffee chain.  I have searched ads daily, have received e-mails, have had phone interviews and gone in for personal interviews.  But so far, nothing.  Sometimes I have come very close.  Once a company’s personnel director told me they would hire me and then they changed their minds.  That was a crushing blow.

I have tried so hard and it has come to nothing.  It is, as the cliché goes, like beating my head against a wall.  I was paging through a book by Thomas Merton at the library yesterday; he was writing about suffering, about how it is part of the human condition.  He said that your attitude and how you react to suffering is vital.  One aspect of suffering he uses as an example is being dependent on others.  I don’t know if I ever consciously considered that as suffering, but I can see now that it is true, and it is a significant aspect of my present despondency.  I don’t want to be a burden to my sons and my other immediate family.  I want to be in a position to help them, not the other way around.  If I realized I was dragging my sons down, draining their resources, diminishing their quality of life, I would feel like slipping out the door one day and not returning, joining the growing army of homeless I see outside everywhere.  I am almost obsessed with them; they seem more real to me than those in the proper rank and file of society, of the system.  But then I realize it is not a viable option.  My family would worry about me.  In addition, I have been homeless.  I have wandered the world with duffle bag on my shoulder and nothing more, and sometimes it was glorious, but other times it was rough, exhausting, lonely, even terrifying.

So I search even harder for work, and I hit that proverbial brick wall again.  I know there are opportunities here; I know I will eventually find something.  But in the meantime the money drains away, the doubts assail me, the circumstances pummel my self-esteem, and I feel lost and lonely and vulnerable.  In a way I knew this would happen when I decided to abandon my safe, secure job and well-furnished home in Greece to come here and help my boys build a new future.  But anywhere and anytime and for whatever reason it strikes, pain is pain and it hurts.  I am hurting now.  Perhaps I will not be hurting tomorrow, or even in an hour.  Storms pass on and the sun shines again, eventually – it always happens.  But when you are in the midst of the storm you cannot always see the sunny skies.  That’s why I write about it.  It helps me catch at least a faint glimpse.

Exceptions to Affluence: The Underclass

Though in general I have been impressed with the way the United States has changed since I last lived here in the 1970s, my thoughts turn again and again to the homeless I see everywhere on the streets of the city.  They sit on benches beside the boardwalks near the beaches with their belongings in wheelchairs or shopping carts; they sleep in little nooks and crannies of pavement shrouded from streetlights by bushes; they use the internet and the restrooms in the public libraries; they beg at traffic lights and in front of supermarkets and 7-11s.  Their attitudes to their plight vary widely.  One of my favorites was a man with a big broad grin who stood at a street corner with a sign that said, “Bet you can’t hit me with a quarter.”  Some nod and smile and say good day; others are sultry and morose and downright malevolent-looking.  Some are fogged-over and nigh incoherent with drugs and/or alcohol, while others are bright and chipper and jovial in spite of their misfortune.

But no matter who these people are and how they act, the fact remains:  in American society they are the underclass, those for whom for one reason or another the American dream has turned into a nightmare.  I speak of the homeless but they of course are not the only underprivileged, deprived people in the US.  There are of course the rural poor, and the poor in ethnic and racial ghettos in the big cities.  But the homeless here, of mixed races and gender, are who I see, and so it is they that have caught my attention.  And I wonder what has happened.  How is it that these people have fallen through the cracks of the most affluent society on earth?  How is it that all around there are veritable palaces of the rich, and at the same time filth-encrusted poor sleep in the nearby gutters?  I can’t reconcile the two visions in my mind.  It reminds me of India, where I would find such stark contrasts as huge slums put together with materials scavenged from rubbish heaps, open sewers running through the middle of the dirt paths, and behind the slums the heavily-guarded towers of the rich.  It reminds me that there is no ideal society on this Earth today, and if we think differently we are only in the midst of delusion.

I have been homeless.  I have wandered the United States, Europe, and even parts of the Middle East and Central Asia without a place to stay, without money in my pocket, dependent upon the largess of strangers, taking whatever odd jobs I could find, sometimes begging, seeking out abandoned buildings or fields or alleyways or gravel patches near railroad tracks or whatever safe patch of ground at night I could find to lay down and rest.  It’s not easy.  Even when you are doing it, as I was, in the spirit of adventure, to have unique experiences that I might afterwards write about, still it was often lonely and discouraging and frightening.  Think how much more it must be so for someone who has no such vision of literary ambition to give them hope, for someone who has fallen through the cracks and sees no way out.

This is what I see of America:  there is great affluence, there is great opportunity, but there is also great despair, great hopelessness, great evil.

And there is not only physical poverty but spiritual poverty.  Only a short time ago a nutcase burst into a movie theater and started shooting those in the seats who had come to watch the film.  Random acts of mass violence are far too common here.  Why do these things happen?  What paucity of honor and integrity could bring on such a deed?  The mind recoils from even attempting to enter such a horrible black pit of spiritual dearth.

No, America is not perfect.  It is not even close.  There is indeed great evil here.  But there is great good as well.  Good and evil exist side-by-side in stark contrast.  What America has that many other nations do not is the ability to choose.  There are opportunities here for those willing to seek them out.  I do not know what brought the homeless people I see to such a state, and I certainly do not feel superior to them, or condemn them, or imply that their sins have caused them to arrive at such an impasse or that the rich are in any way morally superior.  The situation is exceedingly complex and such problems cannot be solved in such simplistic ways.  I have no answers.  I arrived here myself with very little, though, and I find it easy to empathize with those who have even less.  Just a bit of bad luck, a wrong turn or some bad choices here and there, and I could end up on the street too.  Many of those there now do not wish to be.  Some don’t give a damn, but most of them do.  They were all sons and daughters of their parents; most of them had families as they grew up; they went through childhood and adolescence just as we did.  We all have the same standard equipment of bodies, minds, and spirits.

This morning while contemplating writing this I wondered why I had to be so intense, so serious about things.  I recalled other writers who have written about returning to the States after years abroad, and how they were so lighthearted and jovial and flippant about it.  Why is my approach so different?  Because those writers of whom I speak returned in a state of affluence, whereas I am returning in a state of want.  I feel I have more in common with the homeless in the street than the rich living in the hills in mansions overlooking the ocean.  I feel it would be much easier for me to slip and fall to the lowest level than somehow attain the highest.  It’s a form of paranoia, I know, and I have to fight it every day, to stay positive, to stay encouraged, to keep my focus on the upward struggle.

Book Review: The Fifties by David Halberstam

This is a terrific book by a terrific writer.  When I came across it in a used bookstore in Pacific Beach, San Diego, I was first put off by its size.  In its hardcover edition it’s a real doorstopper of a book.  I left it on the shelf, came back to it another day, and finally figured, “Why not?”  I’m glad I did.

David Halberstam was a journalist who died in a car accident in 2007 at the age of 73.  He won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism for his coverage of the Vietnam War, and his book “The Best and the Brightest” is considered by many one of the best books on the politicians, military men, and events of the Vietnam War.  It was the first book of Halberstam’s that I tackled, and I have to admit that at first it was slow going.  Halberstam doesn’t just tell you what happened; he shows you why it happened by going into the background not only of the event itself but the important players in it – sometimes all the way back to the childhoods and even ancestors of the people involved.  His style takes some getting used to, but when you do realize what he is up to, it is irresistible and addicting.  The next book of his I read was “War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals”, which is about America’s foreign policy makers after the Vietnam War, and how America became involved in such places as the Persian Gulf, Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans.  It was a fascinating read.

“The Fifties” reads like a novel – or perhaps like a series of long short stories.  It goes into many of the events that shaped the decade in all sorts of fields.  It was particularly fascinating for me because I have read much about historical events of the sixties and seventies, the era in which I grew up, and not so much about the fifties, the decade in which I was born.  He writes of the politics of the era, of course, of Truman, and Eisenhower, and of other powerful political figures such as Thomas Dewey and Adlai Stevenson.  He writes of the McCarthy communist witch hunts; of the Korean War and General MacArthur’s pomposity and subsequent demotion and humiliation; of Oppenheimer and the development of the hydrogen bomb; of racial inequalities in the South and the birth of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr. as its leader; of the business success of General Motors and Holiday Inn and McDonald’s and of the people behind them; of the scientific research and sociological turmoil leading up to the development of the birth control pill; of the shaping of American cinema by outstanding figures such as Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe; of the influence of Elvis Presley on modern rock music; of the rise of the beat generation as embodied by such iconoclasts as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs; of the shaping of American popular literature by Mickey Spillane, the novel “Peyton Place”, and cheap paperbacks; of the rise of television as a force in American society and advertising, epitomized by “I Love Lucy”, “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet”, and “The $64,000 Question”.  The list could go on and on, and each story is as fascinating as the last.  The juxtaposition of so many such diverse but enthralling stories gives an amazing mosaic of a crucial formative decade in American history.

I cannot praise this book enough.  I greatly enjoy reading good modern history books, but even amongst my favorites this books shines as not only absorbing and entertaining, but illuminating as well.  I looked forward to reading this book every day as much as I would a fast-paced novel.  I couldn’t put it down, and despite its length I enjoyed it so much that I was disappointed when it was over.

The Myth of the Perfect Person

I notice it in every medium, every aspect of society:  advertising touts it, of course, on TV, on the internet, on posters and placards, in brochures and pamphlets and magazines; films and books present it in the subtleties of the hero/adversary/secondary characters interactions; when you apply for a job or try to rent a house or take out a loan you are expected to be it; formal education constantly pounds it into you.  What is it?  The perfect person, the perfect citizen.  When you walk out your door and encounter any formal aspect of society there is something expected of you, something that you are being molded, consciously or unconsciously, to become.

What is this perfect person?  How do I become it? countless millions ask.  Ah, but there’s the rub.  If you seek for a simple solution, a 1 2 3 step to success you can’t find it.  There are only hints, like on a treasure map.  First you go here and do this.  If all goes well you next go there and do that.  If something goes wrong you must backtrack and start the level again, but face penalties.  On and on it goes, complicated as a maze.  Some people, such as politicians and preachers and celebrities, claim to have found the answer and try to guide others into a mold they have devised from their own imagination.  Inevitably it ends in disillusionment.  There are always hidden secrets, bugs under the rug, maggots in the pantry.  No perfect citizen exists, and if someone says that they are the example which must be followed, they are most likely more tarnished than most.

What to do then?  We seek answers.  We want to do right, be right.  Our role models collapse one by one; we cannot trust them.

A similar situation exists with the young.  They want to be cool, be hip, be whatever the current slang says you should be.  So they dress a certain way, walk a certain way, talk a certain way, hang out at the right places with the right people.  Does it do the trick?  Temporarily, perhaps.  But what happens when youth passes, when all the illusions fade away, when health and strength and looks begin to fail?

To find the answer I invite you to join me in the Pacific Beach branch of the San Diego Public Library.  Thence I have gone day after day recently, as we have not had internet yet at our new house.  Urgent business, including job hunting, has dictated that I check my mail and do a lot of other work online.  So I have walked a mile there and a mile back each day to plug in my machine and get my work done.

I have found that there I am never alone.  Thither go the homeless of the area with their laptops and cell phones and   I-Pads.  Those who don’t have computers use the complementary ones.  I don’t know what they do there for hour after hour, but they are intent at the task:  they mumble to themselves, gesture at the screen, type like pros, occasionally give each other advice.  It would seem little different than a batch of white-collar workers on the job at their cubicles, if it were not for the fact that they are dressed in filthy clothes, they look like they haven’t bathed in a long time, and they smell really rank.  They use the computers and the free internet and also the bathrooms; when I go to take a piss the commode is almost always busy with someone sitting and dropping a load.

These are our fellow citizens.  How they came to such a predicament I wouldn’t venture to guess.  I would imagine that there are as many reasons as there are people.  But there are many, many homeless here in the USA.  You see them almost everywhere, especially in a place like Pacific Beach where there are a lot of travelers going to and fro.  But the homeless too have entered the age of technology.  They know how to use computers; they send e-mail.  I don’t know what else they do as they sit at the library, but they are as connected as we all are.  I like that.  I like the fact that they can plug in and communicate on the Web, just as we can.

But the point is that there are no perfect people, no perfect citizens.  It is all a farce.  People are idiosyncratic.  Molds and cookie-cutters don’t work with people.  You have to take each one where they are at.  That’s why I have been so pleased that the librarians have treated the homeless who come to use the facilities with kindness, with courtesy, as they would any other library patrons.  They do insist everyone wear shirts and shoes, though, which seems a reasonable enough request.

So whatever society is trying to make of us, I think it should back off.  Nobody is perfect or ever will be.  We are all just folks.  The sooner we realize this the sooner we can just get on with living.