Richard Seltzer's Blog: Richard Seltzer, page 14

Mercy Otis Warren and Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne

The image on the eye on the cover of my novel Parallel Lives is Mercy Otis Warren, from the American Revolution, the main character. She could have become the first woman president. Even when women couldn't vote, there was never anything in the Constitution preventing them from being elected and serving.

She and General (Gentleman) Johnny Burgoyne appear in the book as historical figures and also as mirror selves in the present day.

I have posted free copies of their works at my website.

http://www.seltzerbooks.com/index.htm...

The original 3-volume work is 1317 pages long. Mercy wrote early drafts of this work near the time of the events described, and completed the work about four years before it appeared in 1805. Mercy wrote in the third person even when dealing with events involving her immediate family. James Otis (early advocate of the rights of the colonies) was her brother, James Warren (speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives) was her husband.

Also her plays.

For Burgoyne's plays --

http://www.seltzerbooks.com/index.htm...

(After losing the Battle of Saratoga and being captured, Burgoyne returned to London "on parole" and became a popular playwright.)

Creation Story for the 21st Century

(an excerpt from Lenses, a book-length collection of essays looking for a publisher)
(from an email to my granddaughter Adela)
Other people know physics and biology much better than I do. This is what I understand from what I've read and heard and figured out from trying to make sense of all the pieces. This is what I think about how the universe came to be and where we fit in the overall scheme of things.
Imagine you have a huge bubble ring and lots of soapy water and all the time imaginable to blow bubbles.
Most of your bubbles pop right away before they are fully formed. Lots come out small and pop soon. And a few get big and drift away and are beautiful.
You keep blowing bubbles for years, for billions of years and you can keep blowing them for billions of years in the future. You're an absolutely amazing bubble blower.
Now imagine that instead of bubbles of soap, you are making bubbles of space-time, the stuff that makes the existence of all stuff possible. And one of your bubbles is a grand-prize winner. It keeps getting bigger and bigger. All the conditions are right this time. When you blow billions and billions of bubbles even something ridiculously unlikely will happen sooner or later — in all of eternity a once-in-a-million shot will happen many times.
This bubble lasts for 14 billion years and keeps expanding and might continue for billions of years to come. That bubble becomes the whole universe.
On the surface of that bubble, there form galaxies and stars and planets, billions and billions of them. And on one of those planets, life forms and evolves over three and a half billion years, from one-cell creatures to dogs and cats and monkeys and people.
Imagine that everything and everyone in this universe is connected to everyone and everything else. We're all on that same ever-expanding bubble, and we're connected by forces like gravity, and we're connected by history as well.
When our big bubble started, all that existed were the simplest of atoms and molecules and particles. Over time, these little pieces of matter randomly came together by the push and pull of forces like electricity and gravity and formed stars. And the stars became so dense and so hot that new kinds of atoms and molecules formed inside them. And some of those stars got so big that they exploded as "super novas". And in those explosions new more complex atoms and molecules were created — kinds of matter that are essential to life as we know it were formed in the explosion of stars.
In other words, the matter that makes up your body was created in the explosion of stars.
You might say that stars died that life as we know it could exist.
Space and time are vast, and we seem small and insignificant next to all that vastness.
On the other hand, it took all that vastness of time and space for us to come into existence, for us to be who we are here and now.
In other words, the bigger the universe, the more important we are, because it took all of that to make us.
Then the question becomes — what should we do about it?
If we're all that important, what should we do with our lives, with our effort and our thinking and our working together and our caring for and about one another to make the creation and evolution of the universe worth the effort?

Getting Personal

(excerpt from Lenses, a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)

Getting Personal
Sometimes inspiration isn't a matter of stimulating new ideas, so much as confirming and clarifying thoughts considered earlier. In my eclectic reading, I sometimes stumble on a passage that feels right, not as a discovery of something new, but rather as a clear and cogent expression of what I believed before, and that stimulates me to take that thought in a new direction.
Such was the case with a passage from Boethius, who wrote in the sixth century. In prison, awaiting execution at the random whim of King Theodoric of Italy, Boethius tried to make sense of life. He concluded that infinity, eternity, and chance reduce everything we might do to insignificance.
The endeavor to try to understand the nature of everything is unending. That is just another aspect of infinity/eternity — no single breakthrough, no individual contribution matters in the long run, because the process of discovery never ends. There's never a moment when the answer is found. Every answer gives rise to new questions, which lead to new insights.
Yes, part of why we exist, presuming there is a why, must be to participate in trying to make the world a better place than we found it, in trying to advance knowledge, or in trying to help those who might some day do so.
But another important role, one which becomes all the more important the older we get, is striving to make personal sense of the world we live in and our role in it. I will never understand the absolute nature of anything, but I can arrive at a personal understanding — building context through reading and experience, making personal mind maps to help me recognize relationships and interconnections, arriving at personal answers to the big questions, answers that help me deal with day-to-day reality and to arrive at a sense of fulfillment, so that the ordinary tasks and challenges of life make sense to me in a self-built context.
From this personal perspective, infinity and eternity are positive, not negative. Every moment in time is in the middle of all time, just as every point in space is in the middle of all of space.
I, just like everyone who has ever lived, stand at the center of the universe. So I strive to find truth and meaning within the fabric and context of my life.
In practical terms, this means that I need not read and strive to understand everything written by great thinkers. Rather I read authors whose works resonate with me, whose thoughts stimulate follow-on thoughts of my own.
I'm on a personal quest to try to understand what matters to me as an individual, living here and now.

Introduction to Lenses

(excerpt from my book "Lenses" which is in search of a publisher)

The "lenses" in this book are essays that look at knotty questions from unusual angles. They are my way of trying to ponder imponderables.

I need to know who I am and why I am and how my life might matter in the context of those who came before and those who will come after. But the answers offered by religion feel insufficient, and scientific knowledge has advanced to the point that it is beyond the understanding of laymen. It would be wonderful to participate in the vast endeavor of scientific discovery and make a contribution, but the advancement of science will not end in my lifetime and will probably never end. I need answers that make sense here and now.

Many of these lenses derive from my belief that, as individuals and as a species, self-regulating mechanisms push us toward balance and reason and compassion. Our worst experiences and dreams can help nudge us in the right direction as if some force were trying to navigate a huge ship down a river, with the crudest of controls − a push this way, then a push that way. Toward what goal?

[If you'd like to see more excerpts from Lenses, please let me know).

My Match Profile

Would you buy this used car? This used car has high mileage but is a self-starter, with low maintenance. It has a little rust around the edges, but it's reliable. It will take you anywhere you want to go. And it's special. It comes with a personalized ignition system. You can turn it on easily, but no one else can. Take it for a test drive. It will make you smile. Friends reacted to that saying cars are mechanical and that this was a negative way to present myself. So I edited that out. Then I read in the latest in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, "an old car has a big soul." So it's back in :-)

I am attracted to women with natural beauty, who are intelligent, self-aware, and self-confident; who are comfortable with who they are, without pretense.

I enjoy books and movies -- stories that help sort out what life is about and provide a common bond with others. When asked as a child would I like to become a doctor since doctors save lives, I replied (spontaneously) that we all die; doctors postpone that; what matters is to have a reason for living. So I aspired to become a writer instead. I'm still heading in that direction, with books yet to be written that I feel I must write. Other activities could come and go according to who I am with and what experiences we enjoy sharing. Trying new things can be fun. But a love of "story" is an important part of my character. It's also an important part of my home-based business -- publishing ebook editions of great books.

I'm down-to-earth, very casual, and prefer to be with women who are the same. I keep in shape -- going to the gym. I prefer home-cooked food, and I'm used to cooking myself. I'm unselfconscious, direct and candid -- what you see is what you get. Spread your winks and fly :-

Recurring Themes

(from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)

Someone on Twitter asked "What is the one theme or question that you find yourself exploring over and over again in your stories?
Here's my answer (not one, but six):
1 - free will vs. determination
2 - meaning and nature of the soul?
3 - what are you before birth?
4 - what are you after death?
5 - what are you after that?
6 - what are the many ways by which all of us, through all of time are connected to one another?

Thoughts on publication of my novel Parallel Lives

I started writing stories in the second grade, 66 years ago, and reading them in show-and-tell. I've only been free to focus full-time on my fiction over the last two years, over which time I've finished six books. The books I write these days are largely fueled by a lifetime of experience. Events like the death of my wife and the last years of my mother and father come into play in unexpected and unintended ways. And the concept of "soul transfer" recurs in several of these novels -- the soul having the ability to move from one body to another and back again. This is related to the notion that ordinary life is magic – that we move from one body to another as we grow up and then age, that we take that for granted when it happens slowly, but would perceive it as fantastical if it happened quickly. In any case, adjustment to the new body is never easy. I'm also very interested in history and connections between past and present, like a palimpsest, where the present is written on the past and is influenced by it in ways we sometimes are unaware of.

I had fun working for DEC (the minicomputer company) in the early days of the Web. For an entire year, DEC let me write a book about their AltaVista search engine (predecessor of Google). The result was the first consumer book about search engines -- The AltaVista Search Revolution. Then the company sent me around the world delivering speeches to convince people that there was business opportunity on the Internet. Many people still didn't have a clue back then. My typical speech was based on a dozen slides, one for each major industry that was going to be impacted. I laid out in simple terms the likely results 10-20 years later. That's very much the way things turned out. It was great fun opening the eyes of business people to what should have been obvious to everyone. I spoke in such places as Bogota, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Zimbabwe, and all over the U.S. and Canada.

I did my own fiction writing on my own time; but with four kids, there wasn't much time at all. I began books then that I have finally now been able to finish.

The setting of Parallel Lives sets an uncanny mood. It's realistic but with a hint of unusual events to come.

"Here was a world apart, totally separate from the city-life he was used to. But he wasn't a young man, nor were the other residents. They hadn't come here to be cured. There was no cure for what they had, and they didn't delude themselves that they would ever move from here to another earthly dwelling. This was the end of the road. They were old and would only get older. They were here to enjoy what was left of life, ideally to figure out what life was about before it ended, and to do so in deliberate isolation from family and friends. That was the attraction of this remote location. They were on their own."

In their final years, my mother and father both lived in an assisted-living facility a mile away from me. I visited every day and came to understand that environment, the rhythm of life there. While there, my father had a stroke that left him unable to walk and unable to talk, very much the character Dick in the book. And my mother wound up in the Alzheimer's wing, very much like Dick's wife in the book. I've also always had a strong interest in history and, more recently, in Mercy Otis Warren and General Johnny Burgoyne. Having uncovered Mercy's history of the American Revolution and knowing that it was never reissued after its initial publication in 1805, I typed the entire 1300 page book and her plays by hand (the old type made scanning fruitless) and posted it on my website, and made them available as ebooks for a pittance just to get it a much-deserved audience. While I knew that Burgoyne had been a popular playwright on the London stage after he lost the Battle of Saratoga, his plays hadn't been in print for more than 200 years. I put those into an ebook. Since Mercy Warren and Burgoyne were both playwrights; and he had written The Blockade of Boston and she had replied with a satire The Blockheads I wrote a play that involved the two of them meeting Mercy for the bicentennial back in 1976. And in the novel Parallel Lives people at the assisted living facility have, present day characters have mirror selves in the past, such as Warren and Burgoyne, with whom they interact in unexpected ways.

I had scattered notes gathered over forty years, but the pieces didn't fit together, until I was finally able to devote full time to my fiction, here in my one-bedroom apartment (with 3000 books in what others would use as the living room) here in Milford, CT. Once I got the basic concept and the characters came alive (so I heard them in my sleep and writing was like taking dictation), the first draft took less than three months. I did the final draft in less than a month. The main challenge was making it plausible that a nursing home in New Hampshire had a cellar with winding corridors leading to other places in other times.

As I was writing, I got some feedback, chapter by chapter, from friends, in particular from Rochelle Cohen, widow of a close friend of mine, the artist and author Rex Sexton. Then I got general comments as feedback from Jennifer Barclay, a developmental editor who is also an author and and agent, before I did the final draft, which I submitted for comment by beta readers The Spun Yarn. .

Two more novels of mine (Nevermind and Beyond the Fourth Door) are under contract to the same publisher -- All Things that Matter Press. I've also submitted a fourth novel, Breeze, to them. (Fingers crossed.)

AndI just finished the first draft of another novel, All's Will That End's Will: The Shakespeare Twins, about the formative years of Shakespeare, the twin sister no one knew he had, and their passionate, tempestuous love for one another (with cameo appearances of characters from the plays). It's in the vein of the movie Shakespeare in Love, with a dash of Yentl (a woman struggling to get an education when it’s against the law.) That was lots of fun. I researched for a month (including rereading all of Shakespeare's plays). Then the book wrote itself in two months.

Literary Period and Man's Changing Image of Himself

(from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)

In the medieval period, in common belief, the seasons changed and people grew up and aged, but human nature and the nature of the universe were immutable. Man and heaven and earth were all connected to one another and to God. And every man derived meaning from that order. Dante, Chaucer, Aquinas.
In the Renaissance, as advances in science revealed mechanical laws governing the physical world, the spotlight shifted to man himself. God didn't go away. Rather He was put in parenthesis. Man's physical body and his reasoning ability became the focus of learned attention, the source of man's dignity and meaning. Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Descartes.
Greater attention led to greater knowledge and understanding of the workings of the human body and mind. The spotlight then shifted, in the Romantic period, to the realm of non-rational thinking -- intuition, emotion, poetic sensitivity to Nature. Wordsworth, Coleridge.
Advances in science then made Nature seem less mystical, less fraught with meaning, and the spotlight of great literature, philosophy, and science moved to the unconscious, the subconscious, the irrational. Dostoyevsky, Conrad.
As psychology revealed that the unconscious/subconscious of the individual was governed by mechanical rules, the focus shifted away from man as an individual, to entire cultures and to human consciousness as a whole. Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Frazer, Jung, Faulkner.
As science and philosophy came to the conclusion that the viewer is part of the physical system, that there are limits to what human consciousness can ever understand, the spotlight moved again. Literary works celebrated characters who willfully and heroically distorted their own perception of the world. Beckett, Sartre (Nausee), Camus (L'Etranger), Kesey (Cuckoo's Nest), Ginsberg (Sunflower Sutra).
That period abruptly came to an end as it became clear that drugs could mechanically produce the same effects.
Over the last sixty years, we have seen numerous serious works that hint at a realm of order and understanding lurking behind the everyday mechanical world. We see that in Pyncheon, Eco, Borges, Lem, Stoppard (Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern), Neal Stephenson. Sometimes that order echoes the order of the medieval period, suggesting that there really is a cosmic order that connects everyone and everything, but thay is beyond our understanding.
I suspect that a similar faith in an undefined cosmic order underlies many of these Lenses.

Reinterpreting Greek Myth

(from "Lenses" a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)

Freud gave the Oedipus story universal significance as a model for the Oepidus complex, a child's unconscious desire for the opposite-sex parent and hate for the same-sex parent. Jung similarly adopted the Electra story as the model for the Electra complex, a girl's with her mother for her father. So ancient Greek myths took on meaning in modern times that had nothing to do with their origin.
In stories about the kings of Mycenae and Sparta and about the kings of Thebes, tension arises between two principles of succession. These principles are never explicitly stated in the related works of literature -- the Iliad, the Oresteia, Electra, and the Oedipus plays -- but they can be extrapolated from the central conflicts.
Sometimes the throne passes from father to son on the death of the father. But often it passes instead to next husband of the queen on the death of the king or to whoever marries the eldest daughter of the king, immediately upon the marriage. Often a reigning king deliberately delays or tries to prevent the marriage of his oldest daughter.
For example, Oenomaus, king of Pisa, sets up a chariot race between himself and any suitor for the hand of his daughter Hippodamia, with death the penalty for defeat. He kills 18 suitors that way before being defeated by Pelops, who immediately succeeds to the throne. (That chariot race was the legendary origin of the Olympic Games.) In some variants of this story, Oenomaus wanted his daughter for himself, which by this rule of succession would have solidified his claim to the throne, (with no concern about incest, which was no issue for the gods as well.)
Similarly, many suitors gather to contend for the hand of Helen, daughter of Tyndareus, king of Sparta. Yes, she was reputed to be beautiful, but she also was the symbol of right to rule Sparta. When she marries Menelaus, Menelaus immediately becomes king, even though the previous king is still alive and well. And when Paris prince of Troy kidnaps/elopes with/runs off with Helen, the matter is treated not just as an instance of adultery. Rather it is a matter of state, precipitating war between Troy and all the Greek states ruled by Helen's former suitors. Apparently, if she is the symbol of power, loss of her puts at doubt the legitimacy of Menelaus' reign.
When Agamemnon assembles an army to help his brother Menelaus recover his wife and hence his authority, he has to first deal with the legitimacy of his own reign. He inherited the throne of Mycenae from his father Atreus. But now he has a marriageable daughter, Iphigenia, who could be considered the symbol of authority. If Iphigenia should marry, her husband would have a claim to the throne. So Agamemnon announces that his is giving her to Achilles, his most likely rival, which would be tantamount to abdicating. But instead he sacrifices her, eliminating that threat to his authority.
In variants of that story, Iphigenia is saved by the gods at the last minute and transported to the distant land of Tauris, where she serves as a virgin priestess. Either way, she is no longer marriageable, and Agamemnon's right to rule is not at question.
While Agamemnon is away, his wife, Clytemnestra, sister of Helen, takes Aegisthus, cousin of Agamemnon, as a lover. On Agamemnon's return, they murder him, and Aegisthus, marrying Clytemnestra becomes king. Years later, Orestes and Electra, children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra kill their mother and her lover. Eventually, after killing the son of Aegisthus, Orestes becomes king of Mycenae, which can be seen as him asserting his right of succession, as son of Agamemnon.
Orestes also marries his cousin Hermione, daughter of Menelaus and Helen and hence becomes king of Sparta, though Menelaus is still alive. That can be seen as succession by marriage to the king's daughter.
In Thebes, when King Laius dies, his widow Jocasta becomes the symbol of power. Oedipus, apparently an indigent stranger, wins her hand by solving the riddle of the Sphinx and hence become king. But, as it turns out, there is ambiguity in his right to rule, since he unwittingly killed the old king who was his father, and he is the heir to the throne by inheritance as well as by marriage (to his mother).
When Oedipus and Jocasta die, their sons, Polynices and Eteocles, share rule until war breaks out between them and they kill one another (Seven Against Thebes). Then Antigone, as the eldest daughter of Oedipus, becomes the key figure in determining legitimacy.
Creon, brother of Jocasta, seizes the throne, but by the marriage-based rule of succession, Antigone is a threat to him. She is engaged to Creon's son Haemon, and by the rule (but never explicitly stated in the play Antigone), Haemon would become king if and when he married her. Heamon and Creon come into conflict. Haemon nearly kills his father but instead kills himself. Antigone does not marry, leaving Creon to reign.
You would expect writers in the patrilinear Periclean age to distort the old stories to conform to patrilinear succession. Instead, they scrupulously preserved the tension between succession by the son and succession by marriage to the daughter or wife, which puts women and love and jealousy at center stage, together with greed and lust for power.
While these stories seem to have originated as examples of legal issues related to the right of succession, they were perpetuated because of their dramatic potential, rich with complex conflicts and ambivalent relationships. No wonder authors have returned to them for inspiration again and again for three thousand years. And no wonder Freud and Jung found them useful in describing what they concluded from their experience in dealing with 20th century psychiatric patients.

The Mothers of Fact

(from my fantasy The Lizard of Oz, in which an elementary school class on a field trip goes to the Underworld. You need to stand under the world to understand it. There are many levels of understanding.)
As soon as the class got ashore in the Underworld, Kathy said, "Why I've never seen such pretty clothes in all my life. Could you please teach me how to make clothes like that?"
One of the three old ladies who were spinning and sewing said, "As a mother of fact, that could be very difficult."
Mr. Carroll introduced them, "These are the Mothers of Fact: Miss Hap, Miss Fortune, and Miss Take."
Kathy said "I'd like to learn to sew like that?"
"Sew what?" asked Miss Fortune.
"Sew pretty clothes like you're making."
"Those are very special clothes. They're costumes for our spring fete."
"Fate? What's a fate?" asked Kathy.
"Oh, that's a party. The way we do it, it's a masquerade party, and everybody wears pretty costumes and acts out silly parts. Our job is to make the costumes."
"Can I help? Please? Pretty please?" Kathy pleaded.
"Well, I'm afraid it's probably beyond you; but if you want to try, here's a needle and thread."
"But what can I use for cloth?"
"Use the fabric of time," answered Miss Fortune. "That's what we use."
"But.."
"Once you get into it, it's really quite simple, nine times easier than regular sewing -- just a stitch in time."
Kathy felt silly sitting there with a needle and thread and no cloth; but she would have felt even sillier to ask again; so she just pretended she was sewing. The other kids gathered round her and stared.
"What are you doing, Kathy?" asked Mark.
"I'm sewing, silly. Can't you see?" she answered.
"But you don't have any cloth. How can you sew without any cloth?" he asked again.
"I'm just stitching time," she said.
Miss Fortune confirmed, "Yes, and she's doing a fine job of it. She'll soon have it all sewed up."
Miss Hap added, "Why that's lovely, perfectly lovely. Why that's finer than anything we've ever made. That's a very special costume. Fit for a king."
"For an emperor," said Miss Fortune. "That'll be the emperor's new clothes."
Kathy wasn't sure whether they were just being nice, or if they were making fun
of her, or if they meant something she didn't understand.
Donny said, "You mean emperors don't wear anything at all, not even underwear?"
Kathy giggled and whispered to Gaynell; and Gaynell giggled and whispered to Kathy.
But Miss Fortune said "There's a very special fiber for making it visible. Yes, moral fiber. The emperor has to supply that himself. It's really indecent for an emperor to go around with no moral fiber."
Mark asked, "What's moral fiber?"
"Cotton grows on some plants; wool grows on some animals; and moral fiber grows on some people. They're a rare breed."
"I'd like to buy some moral fiber," said Kathy.
"Well, you don't see plants buying cotton or animals buying wool, do you? They've got to grow it themselves. Well, people can't buy moral fiber either. They've got to grow it. It grows on you. Till you're all grown up."
Mark said, "Well, Miss Osborne's a grownup. She must have some."
Everybody looked at Miss Osborne, and she blushed.
Donny said, "I don't see anything."
Miss Osborne blushed some more.
But Miss Fortune explained, "Just give her time, and it'll show. Yes, matched with the right time, moral fiber can be quite beautiful -- bright red and blue and green. Really very becoming. Becoming even more beautiful."

(You can read the entire book at my website for free.
seltzerbooks.com/lizardilllustrated.html