Clifford Browder's Blog, page 5

509. My Suicides

                 BROWDERBOOKS

                             WILD NEW YORK

 Good news!  Two items, actually.
1. My novel Forbidden Brownstones is featured on Reedsy Discovery.  I would appreciate anyone going there to give it an up vote.  This obligates you in no way; just click on Upvote.  And thanks.
2. My novel Lady of the Chameleons, the sixth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York, has been accepted for publication by E.L. Marker, an imprint of WiDo Publishing, the same outfit that published Forbidden Brownstones.  
I have a hybrid contract under which they provide the services that publishers give their authors, but I have control.  This means, for example, that only I can decide to stop publishing the book.  My previous small press chose not to renew my contract and stopped publishing my two books on their list.  That can't happen here; only I can decide such things.  This set-up costs me something, but this is not a vanity press, and the cost is worth it.
What is Lady of the Chameleons about? A famous French actress, patterned in part (but only in part) on Sarah Bernhardt, comes to tour in this country and takes a young American reporter as her guide and lover.  He tells the story, but she dominates.  She is imperious, demanding, and superbly self-confident, but in quiet moments sensitive and vulnerable.  He copes as best he can.
And now, on to my suicides...

                    My Suicides 
Just three.  At least, three that I remember.  The first one, and probably the most significant, took place far from New York, in the tranquil Chicago suburb of Evanston, where I grew up.  It was the year after my college graduation, when I was marking time hoping for a Fulbright scholarship that would get me to Europe, while reading and rereading the English poets and  taking beginning Greek with Professor Dorjahn at Northwestern.  Dorjahn, the head of the tiny Classics Department, was a crusty and demanding teacher who loved teaching this course, the gateway to Greek and the classics.  He had been known to reduce sensitive females to tears, so in the first semester was relieved to find only hardy males in this class of five.  A staunch Republican, he thought nothing of denouncing President Truman as a haberdasher out of his depth, but for all his crustiness and prejudices, we loved him.  Which, come to think of it, has nothing to do with suicides.

     As the months wore on, the gray vapors of depression began to infiltrate my being.  Reading poetry and taking Greek was fine, but it was hardly a  life in itself.  I was living at home after four years of college elsewhere, had lost contact with my Evanston friends, dated rarely, had little social life.  Not being used to introspection – at least, not the kind that probes deep into one’s own psyche – I found myself borne slowly on the current of my moods.  Attracted at this point to neither men nor women, I was in a strange limbo of indifference and abandonment, one that even today I have trouble understanding.  Excitement over something I was reading, or my progress in learning Greek, alternated with withdrawal, with alienation from everyone and everything around me.  And of all this, not a word to anyone.  Then I would snap out of it, read more, learn more; but sooner or later the gray mood crept back in.

     One evening that fall or winter, when that mood was upon me, without further reflection and almost like a sleepwalker I slipped out of the house unnoticed by my family, went to the garage, and in the darkness sat in the driver’s seat of my father’s car and, after a few moments of hesitation, turned the motor on.  The garage doors were shut, so monoxide poisoning was possible, even probable, and I knew it.  But the motor started with such a roar that it alarmed me and, fearing discovery, I quickly shut it off.  I then left the garage and slipped back into the house, still unnoticed by anyone.  Was I relieved, alarmed, amused by this fiasco?  I don’t recall.  Was it just a game that I intended to lose?  I doubt it.  The risk was real, and if the motor had come on with a gentle purr, I could well have seen the matter through.

     After that, sensing a need for change, I took a part-time afternoon job at a local insurance company, retrieving applications from the files when the staff had need of them: a menial job, but one that shook me free of those gray vapors.  If the Fulbright didn’t come through, I resolved to go to New York and find a job; I had to get free of family and a suburban life that depressed me.  But the Fulbright did finally come through, and from then on I was feverishly brushing up my French, with no time for either sex or depression.  So ends the account of my first suicide, hitherto untold to anyone.

A suicide prevention poster of the Department of Defense. 
Suicide is common among returning vets.
     Fast forward now to 1965.  I’m a college French teacher now in New York, unattached, a very unpublished poet, but with many friends, many interests, few of the latter related to teaching nineteen-year-olds French.  My friend Vernon Newton got a volume of poetry published, and I was invited to a celebration of the event given by some mutual acquaintances.  I went, found a friendly crowd imbibing wine, and there, prominently displayed on a bureau, the volume, of which I later received an autographed copy.  Toward the end of the party it was obvious that the poet and some of his friends were going out to a dinner to which I was not invited.  But another friend, John Anderson, was going out with some other guests for dinner and invited me to join them; for some reason I refused.  

     Instead, I went home, lapsed again into the gray mood of depression, and without reflection turned the oven on without lighting the gas, kneeled down, and stuck my head in, covering it with a towel so as to keep the gas from spreading and dissipating.  I remained in this awkward position for quite a while, breathing in deeply and hoping to gently pass out and shuffle off this mortal coil.  But I remained stubbornly alive and alert, and finally, deciding the whole business was ridiculous, got up, turned the gas off, and went to bed.

     Why had I done this?  Jealous of my published friend?  I don’t think so; I wished Vernon and his volume well.  Depressed because I was not invited to the dinner party?  Maybe, but neither was John Anderson, who invited me to join his friends for dinner.  More to the point, I suspect, was my dislike of teaching – a dislike whose growing intensity I dared not admit to myself – and my frustrated wish for a relationship, as opposed to occasional sex with strangers.  It was still the era of the Mafia-run gay bars, crowded on Saturday nights, smoke-filled, and guarded by a thug at the door: not my preferred habitat by a long shot.  And my frustration as an unpublished writer probably counted for something as well. Yet even today, with hindsight, I can’t explain the incident adequately; it simply happened.

     “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” Karl Marx famously observed.  So it was with me and suicide, if we grant the first two attempts the grandiose label of tragedy; the third was certainly farce.  It must have come a year or two after the second suicide.  I had contemplated various possibilities, albeit with a certain detachment.  Suicide by jumping out a window was no good; I lived in a third-story apartment.  Besides, the dizzying plunge would be terrifying, and my splat on the pavement below might injure some passerby with whom I had no quarrel; pedestrian safety must be considered.  Suicide by revolver would be quick, neat, and clean, and once you twitched the trigger, no chance for reappraisal; alas, I had no revolver.  Finally I settled on a novel method: suicide by aspirin.  Granted, I had never heard of it succeeding; in fact, I had never heard of it at all.  But it seemed worth trying, and maybe, just maybe, it might work.

[image error] Fine for headaches.  But suicide???
Ragesoss   So one evening when that gray mood was upon me, I emptied a whole bottle of aspirin, swallowing one tablet after another, then went to bed and fell asleep, wondering if I would ever wake up.  The next morning I did, unmistakably alive, but with a feeling of weakness, a foul taste of aspirin in my mouth, and a craving for ice cream, a craving like I had never known before, worthy of a pregnant woman, and specifically for vanilla.  Too weak to go out, I phoned my friend Gene, told him I was under the weather and asked him to bring me the ice cream; no word, of course, of the aspirin.  This he gladly did and, being a former ministerial student, he lingered a while and exhibited a most sympathetic bedside manner.  After Gene left, I devoured the ice cream, probably a whole pint at least.  It seemed to work wonders, since the aspirin taste diminished and I felt stronger by the minute.  But that awful taste, the faintest hint of it, hung on for days.  As did my sense of the ludicrous.  Suicide by monoxide has a certain minimal dignity, and suicide by the oven stops just this side of the ridiculous.  But let’s face it, suicide by aspirin plunges deep into the realm of absurdity.

     Such was my third suicide.  Often I escaped depression by simply going to bed and sleeping, a far better solution than alcohol or drugs. Then the gray vapors vanished, and with them the urge to suicide, owing to two changes: I quit teaching, I met my partner Bob.  These games then faded in memory, became definitively a thing of the past.

     Were these attempts simply a game, a toying with fate that I had no real intention of pushing through to completion?  It’s hard to say.  A game, perhaps, but always with risk.  There are better, less dangerous games to play.  But the games served a purpose; following each attempt came a long period of calm and equanimity totally free of depression.  As Nietzsche observed, “The thought of suicide is a great consolation; it gets one through many a bad night.”  

     None of my friends or family had any inkling of all this, not one.  And certainly not my students, since every Monday morning I showed up on the campus as well scrubbed as ever, ready to leaven the sodden weight of grammar with attempts at quicksilver wit.  

     Why do I now relate all this, having never revealed it before to anyone?  Two reasons: it’s an ancient story, and with distance I see the humor.  But what I don’t fully grasp to this day is the motivation, which I can only  surmise.  The young man of those years is in many ways a stranger to me, and a baffling one at that.  How complicated we humans are, what a tangle of motives and frustrations, a mystery even more to ourselves than to others!                ©  2021 Clifford Browder

508. Did they really say it? Famous false quotes.

                     BROWDERBOOKS

                                      Wild New York

The ebook of Forbidden Brownstones, the fifth in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York, now ranks #957 in Amazon's Kindle Store for ebooks, #11 in Coming of Age Fiction, and #1 in Black & African American Historical Fiction.  And it is currently free.  Yes, I said free.

Never before has a book of mine got such high ratings from Amazon.  (The ebook of my historical novel Dark Knowledge, for instance, is #18,285 in Historical Mysteries in the Kindle Store.)  The explanation: I listed Forbidden Brownstones in categories where there is little competition.  And if you want it, and want it cheap, now is the time to get it.  Go here.

And it would be super wonderful if ebook readers gave it a reader review.  Reviews can be three or two sentences long, or even one sentence or a few words.  The book has garnered excellent editorial (professional) reviews, but so far, only two reader reviews, albeit both of them five stars.  But the author would appreciate any honest review, regardless of the number of stars.

Did they really say it?  Famous false quotes.

Famous sayings are attributed to historical figures, but often falsely.  Of the quotes listed here, how many are authentic and how many are false?  See if you can tell.  Some knowledge of American and French history will help.

1. After me, the deluge.  Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, anticipating the French Revolution or other woes to come.

2. O liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!  Madame Roland, a Girondin (moderate), on her way to the guillotine, a victim of Robespierre and the Jacobins.

3. Lafayette, we are here!  General Pershing, commander of the American forces landing in France in 1917 to help the French fight the Germans in World War I.  Lafayette had helped us win our independence from Britain in the Revolution.

4. So you are the little lady who started this big war!  President Abraham Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, an international bestseller that exposed the evils of slavery. At a White House reception during the Civil War.

5. Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable!  Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a staunch defender of the Union, while debating a Southern senator in 1830.  The debate foreshadowed Southern secession years later and the outbreak of the Civil War.

6.  Let 'em eat cake!  Marie Antoinette, when told that the people were rioting because they had no bread.  Cited as an example of royal disdain, at the beginning of the French Revolution.

7.  I shall return!  General Douglas MacArthur, when ordered out of the Philippines in 1942, while the Japanese were invading the islands.  He returned in 1944, splashing heroically shoreward through the surf (in full view of photographers) as American forces invaded the Philippine island of Leyte.

8.  Law?  What do I care about the law?  I got the power, hain't I?  Robber baron Commodore Vanderbilt, when told that what he wanted to do was illegal.

9.  What this country needs is a splendid little war!  Teddy Roosevelt, who got just such a war, the Spanish-American War of 1898.  He charged up San Juan Hill in Cuba, became a national hero and, in time, President.

10.  This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in a speech to the American people in the 1930s, when the nation had to cope with the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe, followed by World War II.

Answers: Numbers 2, 5, 7, and 10 are authentic; all the others are false.  Roosevelt's statement (#10) concluded his acceptance speech, when the Democratic Party nominated him to run for re-election in 1936.

So how did you do, if you tried to separate the authentic quotes from the unauthentic?  Here are some comments on the unauthentic ones:

1.  No evidence she said it.

3.  Pershing didn't himself say it, but Colonel E. Stanton did, upon visiting Lafayette's tomb in France in 1917.

4.  This story surfaced long after Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe had died, therefore is highly suspect.

6.  Sometimes rephrased as "Why don't they eat cake?"  This version shows royal ignorance, not disdain, but is still suspect.

8.  Probably a distortion of an authentic remark by Vanderbilt indicating impatience with the law.

9.  Not said by Teddy, though he certainly agreed.  In a letter to President McKinley in 1898, Secretary of War John Hay referred to the war with Spain as "a splendid little war."  It was short (three months) and ended in total victory for the US.

©  2021  Clifford Browder

507. Death by Water in Central Park

 

                     BROWDERBOOKS

                                     Wild New York

In spite of white prejudice, Junius Fox, a young black man, acquires power as the gatekeeper of the city's most exclusive brothel.  But his obsessive need to possess a brownstone involves him in fantasies of arson and murder, and he must choose between the woman he loves and an obsession that has become who he is.  Love vs. self-identity.  What will he decide?

The fifth title in the Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.   
Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and WiDo Publishing.

            Death by Water in Central Park

There are so many ways to die in the city – death by fire, death by hit-and-run, death by old age and loneliness – but death by water would seem to be a rare one, especially in Central Park.  The park is one of the glories of New York City: right in the middle of noisy, congested Manhattan, a big, long strip of green where New Yorkers go to relax, have a picnic lunch, jog, watch migrating birds and nocturnal raccoons, walk their dogs, or introduce urban school kids to the wonders of nature.  But also, it seems, to die.  In 2017, for example, there were four deaths within three months, which is highly unusual, and three of them by water.  And three were discovered in the spring, which is when the Police Department says it is commonest.
         Around noon on Tuesday, May 9, a park worker spotted a man’s body, face down and naked, in the Jacqueline Kennedy Reservoir near East 86th Street in Central Park.  The Reservoir is a vast body of water about 37 feet deep, with a strong current.  I have often hiked along its rim, marveling at the shimmering sunlight on its rippled waters and observing ducks through binoculars, while joggers and speed-walkers brushed past me: a scene of quiet recreation and calm.  Informed, the police came, marked off the area with yellow caution tape announcing POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS, retrieved the body, and examined it.  Because it was badly decomposed, they were unable to get fingerprints, but said that the man was probably in his 20s or 30s and appeared to have been in the water at least one month.  His clothes had rotted away, but there was no sign of trauma on the body, suggesting that no crime was involved.

The Reservoir in June.  Joggers, speed walkers,
strollers, and occasionally a corpse.
Carsten Kessler


         Just one day later, at about 7:20 a.m. on Wednesday, May 10, a man’s body bobbed to the surface of the Pond, in the southeast corner of the park at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue.  The police again came, and medical examiner officials took photographs of the body, which was wearing only pants and shoes and had probably been in the lake’s seven-foot-deep water two weeks at the most.  An ID was recovered, identifying him as Anthony McAfee, a homeless man.  This on the heels of the first recovered body was highly unusual, and for the park’s joggers and tourists, unsettling, but again there was no sign of trauma on the body, except an eye nibbled by turtles or other wildlife.
         One month later, at about 8 a.m. on Sunday, June 11, a passerby spotted someone floating in the Conservatory Pond near Fifth Avenue and East 74th Street and jumped in to effect a rescue, only to find that he was rescuing a corpse.  The would-be rescuer then phoned 911, but by the time the police and fire department arrived, the fully clothed body had been fished out of the water and was lying on the ground.  It was a male African American who appeared to be in his 20s or 30s.  Once again, an unusual and unsettling incident in the most tranquil of settings, a pond where children float radio-controlled model boats, or climb over a nearby statue of Alice and various creatures from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  

         Finally – if one dare say “finally” – the body of a woman was discovered around 6:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 13, lying face down on a rock near the East Drive and East 62ndStreet.  Fully clothed and apparently in her late 20s or early 30s, she too showed no signs of violence, but a pill bottle was lying next to the body.  At last report she, like two of the others, remained unidentified.

         Four deaths in Central Park in a two-month period, three of them in water – unprecedented.  Or is it?  An article by Lauren Evans in the Village Voice of July 7, 2017, lists deaths in the park since 1884, when the body of a man was discovered in the Reservoir.  In 1889 a suicide was reported there of a fashionably dressed young man in patent leather dancing shoes who removed his topcoat and derby, climbed over the Reservoir railing, and walked into the waters to his death.  The reason?  Lack of funds. 

         The Evans article also recorded numerous other suicides in the Reservoir, usually motivated by failure in business or love, though in one case by failure as a writer, and in another, because of schizophrenia.  Reservoir deaths declined noticeably after a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire was installed around its rim in 1926, but even after that, suicide was still an option for those able to scale the barrier.  And there were always alternatives: the Conservatory Pond already mentioned, and the Harlem Meer in the northeast corner of the park.  If people want to die by water in the park, they will always find a way.  Meanwhile joggers and dog-walkers and birdwatchers and picnickers continue to flock to its grassy fields and woods, and people rent boats to go boating on the Lake, unmindful of the deaths that have occurred in its tranquil expanses. 

Source note:  This post was initially inspired by an article by Benjamin Mueller and Emily Palmer, "2 Bodies Found This Week in Central Park Waters," in the New York Times of May 11, 2017, supplemented thereafter by other newspaper articles, including the one by Lauren Evans in the Village Voice of July 7, 2017, cited above.
©  2021  Clifford Browder

506. Five Hot Scams to Avoid

                BROWDERBBOOKS

                                 Wild New York

WiDo Publishing, the publisher of my latest novel, Forbidden Brownstones, is eager to read the sixth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York: Lady of the Chameleons.  I want them have a crack at it, before I approach other small presses.

        I am also promoting my nonfiction title New Yorkers: A Feisty People, and preparing a new paperback edition of a work that is no longer being sold by its original publisher; more of that anon.  All of which keeps me pretty busy.

                 Five Hot Scams to Avoid

The AARP Bulletin, which addresses the needs and concerns of senior citizens, is good at warning seniors of scams that target them.  The issue of April 2021 features an article on frauds and presents a list of "hot" currents scams. Here are five that should concern not just seniors but everyone.

ZOOM phishing: You get an e-mail with the ZOOM logo telling you to click a link because your account is suspended. Doing so lets scammers download malicious software into your computer, access your personal information, or search for passwords to hack into your other accounts.  Defense: Never click on links in unsolicited e-mails.Covid-19 vaccine card cons: Many who get vaccinated post selfies on social media displaying their vaccination card. Scammers pounce on it, retrieve valuable data for identity theft, break into your bank accounts, get credit cards in your name, etc.  Defense: To inform friends of your vaccination, use a selfie with a generic vaccination sticker.Medicare card come-ons: You get an e-mail or phone call, or someone knocks on your door, claiming to be from Medicare and offering all sorts of pandemic services if you verify your Medicare ID number.  Defense: Delete the e-mail, hang up the phone, shut the door.  Medicare will never contact you to obtain your Medicare number without your permission.Cash-transfer app swindles: You transfer money using tools like PayPal, CashApp, and others. A scammer then asks you to return the money, explaining it was an accident.  But the transfer was made with a stolen debit card whose funds will be removed from your account.  Defense: Be diligent before hitting "accept," or even disable all incoming requests on your app and use it only to send money."Account problem" text: You get a text message saying there's a problem with your internet account, credit card, or bank account, and asking you to click on a link to provide personal information.  Defense: again, don't click on links in unsolicited e-mails and texts.  Contact your bank or credit card company to see if there is really a problem; there probably is not.These are only some of the current hot scams.  Always be diligent.  Always think twice and three times before clicking on an unsolicited link.

        That same April 2021 issue of the AARP Bulletin does an exposé of international phone scammers based in India and preying on Americans.  It tells how a tech-savvy Irishman became so angry at these scams that he used his techie skills to get into their computers, film them without their knowledge, and expose their scams.  What especially infuriated him was seeing them laugh when an elderly victim, unable to pay a huge fee for bogus services rendered, burst into tears.  In the end the Irishman exposed one notorious team of scammers and got the Indian authorities to arrest them and shut their operation down.  

        But that's only one team of scammers out of thousands, and only someone with the Irishman's technical skills and fierce determination would take the time to do anything about the problem.  Most of us can only absorb the urging to be constantly diligent and hope.  Recently I got word by e-mail of a serious problem with my bank account.  I didn't click on the link, contacted my bank online, discovered no problem, then went back and deleted the e-mail.  And a very convincing e-mail it was.  These people are clever.  Ruthless, but clever.  Beware.

©  2021  Clifford Browder

505. Killing

 BROWDERBOOKS

In the past week I held a contest online to create a logo for myself and my books; designers offered me 35 designs.  I consulted some friends, showing them two runners-up, but in the end I chose a different one entirely.   

I 
I have also found a tag line or slogan: 
BROWDERBOOKS: Wild New York

So now I have to figure out how to use them, the logo and the slogan.  Stay tuned.

                             KILLING

In this country executions have often been public.  As for lynchings, by their very nature they were public events, and even celebrations.  Postcards often showed the dangling hanged bodies of the victims, usually  black males, with a host of smiling white witnesses, including even women and children.  One wonders at the state of mind not only of those posing proudly near the dangling bodies, but also of those who sent the postcards by mail.  Who did they send them to, and with what scribbled message?  One appears online, on a postcard from Waco, Texas, dated 1916: “This is the barbecue we had last night.  My picture is to the left with a cross over it.  Your son, Joe.”

         The postcards were also kept as souvenirs and in time became collectors’ items.  It is worth noting that the Nazis never stooped to selling souvenirs of the death camps.  In the U.S., by 1908 the postcards had become so common, and to many so repugnant, that the U.S. Postmaster General banned them from the mails.  After that they continued to be sold in antique stores whose proprietors whispered to prospective buyers that they were available, though not on display.  These souvenirs so offend me that I cannot reproduce them here.  Nor would they be appreciated today by the residents of the communities involved, which were by no means all in the South.  These celebratory killings occurred also in Cairo, Illinois (1909), Anadarko, Oklahoma (1913), Duluth, Minnesota (1920), and Marion, Indiana (1930).  They are accessible online at Wikimedia Commons, for those who want to see them.  I have seen them once and received their message, and that is quite enough.

         I have told elsewhere, and more than once, how my father was a hunter and fisherman, and raised his two sons to be the same.  With me, it didn’t take.  Though he taught me to use a shotgun at age 16, I had no desire to kill the blackbirds that he hoped would appear overhead in autumn fields where we patiently waited, or the occasional rabbit that scurried away from us.  And I hated the pain in my shoulder from the recoil of the shotgun, when fired.  Though in his will he left his guns to me and my brother, we were quite happy to sell them.  Sad.  In this regard (and others), we were not the sons he had wanted.  The guns involved, by the way, were shotguns used for trap shooting and hunting.  He had no interest in handguns, much less automatic weapons (unheard of in his time), and would be dismayed by their availability today.

The legendary Annie Oakley shooting a shotgun before spectators
in Pinehurst, NC, date unknown.  What she's shooting at isn't clear.  
       So I am not a killer?  Wrong.  Under certain circumstances I can kill with gusto.  But only the roaches that at one time infested my apartment, in an old building whose cracks and crevices – too many to ever be filled – provide them with nesting spaces where they can rest up by day and prepare for their nocturnal forays.  When, heeding the bladder imperative, I went to the bathroom at night, I surprised gangs of them in the wash basin and tub and either chased  them into a waiting glue trap, or – BAM BAM BAM – pounded them with the smooth cap top of an empty medicine bottle.  Many escaped, but not all.  Still, I am not an indiscriminate killer.  Roaches, yes; spiders, no.  Spiders I always spare, though I may relocate them to a green plant or release them to the world outside.  Any bug that kills flies and mosquitos is a friend of mine.
© 2021 Clifford Browder

504. Kill

BROWDERBOOKS

My historical novel Forbidden Brownstones has received two more good reviews.

No matter what journey you’re looking to undertake, this author provides love, drama, mystery, action, death, prejudice, and unforgettable emotion. —  Editorial review for Reader Views by Amy Lignor.

A must read…. I could feel the movement, the jazz of the black culture where characters swayed with the rhythm of life after years of slavery facing adversity no white person in the book could ever understand or even thought to ask. — Five-star editorial review for Reedsy Discovery by Karina Holosko.

Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and WiDo Publishing

                                KILL

Kill: the word in English, a monosyllable, has a directness to it that no other language I know of can match.  It is blunt, keen, harsh.  Shakespeare is aware of this when, in Act 4, Scene 6, he has Lear say

And when I have stol'n upon these sons-in-law,
Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!

But we also use it more gently.

·      “He made a killing in the market.”

·      “We’re just killing time.”

·      Fred Trump to his son Donald: “Be a killer.”

·      “You kill me.”

In none of these is it a matter of depriving someone or something of life.  What the last one means depends on the context.  It is very twentieth-century, very American; I heard it in the movies.  It means “You’re overdoing it, but I’m not fooled.”

         Have I ever seen a killer?  Yes, but not a human.  At the Aquarium at Coney Island I have seen a shark swimming in a tank.  His supple, streamlined body, his eye, his jaw with jagged, inward-curved teeth – all these features suggest a living machine designed to hunt and kill.  And the more a victim struggles to escape, the more those teeth cut into him, rendering escape impossible.

Vahe Martirosyan
         Humans have tried to create machines for killing, so they don’t have the grim responsibility of hacking off a head, or firing a gun, or pulling a lever that sends the doomed man’s body plunging into space.  The electric chair, once so highly esteemed in progress-addicted America, has proven untrustworthy, as evidenced by gasps and twitchings of the victim.  
Man in an electric chair, 1908.
            But the French came up with a far more efficient device, evidently invented by a surgeon named Antoine Louis, but promoted by a deputy in the National Assembly, Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin.  A child of the Enlightenment, Guillotin was shocked by the thought of the condemned being broken on the wheel, or drawn and quartered, or burned at the stake, or drowned.  He hoped that a more humane method of execution would ultimately lead to abolition of the death penalty.  On October 10, 1789 – three months after the storming of the Bastille – he  addressed the reform-minded Assembly, declaring, “With my machine I take off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it.”  He and his machine were mocked at first, but on June 3, 1791, the Assembly made the guillotine the only means of legal criminal execution.  Workers shunned the job of making it, until a German harpsichord maker agreed, on condition of anonymity, to manufacture it.  It was tested on animals and human corpses, perfected, and then busily employed in killing the Revolution’s innumerable victims, the king and queen among them, followed by the fanatical Robespierre.

Showing Louis XVI's head to the crowd.  A German engraving, 1793.
         Legend has it that Dr. Guillotin not only gave his name to the machine, but died by it as well.  No, he died in 1814 of natural causes at age 75.  Embarrassed by their connection to it, his family asked the government to change the machine’s name, and when the government refused, they changed their name instead.  But the guillotine was the standard form of execution in France until the death penalty was abolished in 1981.  And Hitler loved it; during his rule, thousands died by it.

         If the guillotine is so painless and efficient, why hasn’t it been adopted here?  Because, I think, it’s messy.  Heads roll, blood flows, the body is mutilated.  With hanging, at least the corpse is intact.  We like neat, bloodless executions, even if the victim gasps and twitches.  A nasty business, no matter how you look at it.  

         Dr. Guillotin wanted executions to be private, but the Revolution made them public, so the populace could cheer when the executioner showed them the severed head of the king or some other victim of significance.  The tricoteuses of the executions, those fiercely knitting Madame Defarges, have themselves become legendary.

        Today, in America, killing by the state is as controversial as ever.  Some states have banished the death penalty; others, like Texas, glory in it.  And just as controversial is abortion: some states ban it, some do not.  That these issues are fiercely debated is understandable: human life is at stake.  And for me, they aren't easy.  I marvel at those who come down on one side or the other without hesitation.  In any discussion of the death penalty or abortion, I am haunted by the thought of kill. 
©  2021 Clifford Browder

503. You Pay Taxes; They Don't. Corporations that pay no federal income tax.

        YOU  PAY  TAXES; THEY  DON'T

Corporations  that pay no federal income tax

April brings Easter and thoughts of rebirth and growth, but it also brings the dreaded fifteenth, when federal and state income taxes are due.  Most of us grumble, sweat, and pay.  Or hire an accountant who grumbles for us, sweats and (with our money) pays.  But that's not everyone, far from it.  People with low income don't pay; no problem.  Genuine nonprofit organizations, if they don't engage in lobbying, don't pay; no problem.   But how about corporations -- those monster entities that are out to make a profit for shareholders and their richly compensated executives?  How about them?  Some of them, including some of the biggest in the world, quite legally pay nothing, not one skinny cent.  Who are they, and what gives?

Here are the top ten, in terms of their US income (in millions), as of 2018, the last year for which information is available.
CompanyU.S. Income
1. Amazon.com
$10,835

2.  Delta Air Lines$5,073

3.  Chevron$4,547

4.  General Motors$4,320

5.  EOG Resources$4,067

6.  Occidental Petroleum$3,379

7.  Honeywell International$2,830

8.  Deere$2,152

9.  American Electric Power$1,943

10.  Principal Financial

Some of these are new to me, but others are not.  That Amazon -- that giant of the Internet, the inescapable tyrant monopoly of our time -- should head the list is simply amazing.  That Delta, Chevron, and GM should be there likewise astonishes.  

Mention of John Deere, the manufacturer of agricultural machinery, is of special interest to me, since it has survived and flourished, whereas its no. 1 competitor of many years, the International Harvester Company, the huge blue-chip maker of agricultural machinery, construction equipment, and trucks, did not.  But what is, or was, that to me?  Everything, since my father, an attorney specializing in the complexities of railroad law, worked all his life for Harvester.  In the form of his salary, Harvester money saw my family through the Depression; I was raised on it.  But this massive corporation, dating back to when Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper and made a fortune from it, did not evolve with the times.  By the 1980s a combination of problems brought about its collapse and it ceased to exist under the venerable name "International Harvester."  But Deere, its savvy smaller competitor, is still alive and kicking, as its avoidance of taxes would seem to indicate.  

(Forgive the above digression.  My Midwestern roots incline me to insert Chicagoland stories whenever possible.  The McCormicks of Chicago far surpass the Astors and Vanderbilts of New York in providing juicy scandals to the gossip mills, as I have mentioned at times in the past.  But that, and how my father was the secretary of a railroad that no one outside of Chicago ever heard of, and how and why I, a nerdy bookworm, learned to shoot a shotgun at age 16, are stories for another time.)

So let's return to my subject, giant corporations that quite legally don't pay the federal income tax.  How can this be?  First of all, the Trump tax bill of December 2017 lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, which was more in line with tax rates in other developed countries.  Beyond that, it usually involves clever manipulation of deductions and tax credits, to the point where the corporation can claim a rebate to be applied against taxes in future years.  Not that they care to discuss the matter.  Questioned about its tax immunity, for instance, Deere declined to answer.  But the US is notorious for allowing corporations to take advantage of its tax laws.  And corporations have teams of lawyers and accountants who know how to play the game.

"Only little people pay taxes," said Leona Helmsley, the hotel magnate known also as the Queen of Mean.  This remark, cited in her court case, helped get her convicted of income tax evasion and reduced her to tears in pleading for leniency -- to no avail; she ended up in federal prison.  The feds simply could not let her get away with such a comment, undermining as it did the whole federal system of taxation.  But given the immunity of many corporations to the federal income tax, one has to ask: was Leona wrong?  At the very least, she was a fool to say, before witnesses, a truth that others knew to keep to themselves.

Source note: This post was inspired in part by Kathryn Kranhold's article, "You Paid Taxes. These Corporations Don't," published online on April 19, 2019, by The Center for Public Integrity.  The facts cited by the post come from this article.

© 2021 Clifford Browder

502. Is Poetry Dead?

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I am now publishing two of my nonfiction titles as ebooks, with the help of an aggregator named Draft2Digital.  More of this anon.  

Does the term aggregator puzzle you?  Here is my favorite definition.   Aggregator: one that aggregates.  Does that clear it up?  If not, stay tuned.

                      IS  POETRY  DEAD?

"Poetry is dead.   It's an obsolete art form, just as much as cave paintings or silent movies.   It must have died around the year 1960, because that was when the last good poems were published."

This spurt of wisdom came to me online from Quora, a purveyor of cultural and other information that flashes regularly on my computer screen, I don't quite know why.  The author is a German pontificator, Roland Bartetzko by name, whose photo shows a faintly smiling man of middle years, far beyond the stage of youthful exuberance and joyous but ill-informed folly.

Herr Bartetzko, you're full of you know what.  You are uninformed, smart but stupid, misguided, ill-advised, presumptuous, and shockingly ignorant of literary history.

He goes on to question whether poetry can even exist in the wake of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.  "There's only bad poetry left and only bad poets.  Too lazy to write more than few lines at once and unable to say anything substantial."  

Granted, he may be addressing the poetry scene in Germany, not here, but I suspect that he's totally misguided there as well.  

Fortunately, he observes, poetry isn't selling anymore.  Poets publish their "pathetic scribblings" in private and give them away as free handouts.  Poetry is now "a pastime of wannabe enlightened senior citizens.  If you have something to say, write prose."

So ends the spiel of this oracle, as translated and communicated online.  I never imagined myself a defender of poesy, but Herr Bartetzko's mouthings prompt me to assume this role.  I will confine myself to only a few trenchant remarks.

The death of poetry -- like that of opera and diverse other art forms -- has been proclaimed before and always proven wrong. Poetry has survived the collapse of the Roman Empire; the Black Death, which killed half of Europe; the French Revolution; the Industrial Revolution; the rise of the middle class; radio, television, and the Internet; 9/11; and the plague now in progress.  And it will survive Herr Bartetzko, too.Calamities don't kill poetry; they inspire it.
©  2021  Clifford Browder

501. Plastics: They Kill

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The Alliance for Independent Authors advises self-publishing authors to go WIDE in distribution.  This means making your book available on Amazon, IngramSpark (the other publisher of self-published books), Apple Books (only possible for those with Mac computers), Kobo, and other distributors that most Americans have never heard of.  

Then you should also hire an outfit called an aggregator to market your e-book -- a seeming duplication of your efforts that will get you distribution in places you could never access on your own.  Having done all this, you will have worldwide distribution of 97%, meaning that you have made use of almost all the distributors available.  To reach readers outside the US, this is necessary.  Kobo, for instance, is the prime distributor in Canada.  There is a market for English-language books not just in Britain, Ireland, and the Dominions, but also in India and Japan.  I'm hoping that a book about New York and New Yorkers will have appeal there.  The front cover is a big help.

My first step: Apple Books.  I have a Mac computer, so that's no problem.  But pray for me; their website is not user-friendly -- not to me, at least.  So far, I've just gone in circles there, but maybe I can finally figure it out.  And this is just distribution.  It is meaningless, unless marketing lets people worldwide know that you and your book exist.  

                 PLASTICS:  THEY KILL

In the 1967 film The Graduate, the young protagonist (played by Dustin Hoffman) is taken aside at a cocktail party by an older friend of his parents who has a single word of advice to give him.  “Are you listening?” the older man asks.  “Yes, sir,” says Hoffman.  And the oracle speaks: “Plastics!”

In the film it is a superbly humorous moment, but in the years since then plastics have turned into a lamentable fact of life — of all our lives — and have come to signify the artificial and superficial, the non-genuine, something oppressive and inescapable.  

Of course there are rare exceptions among us.  Andy Warhol, the Prince of Pop, called himself a “deeply superficial person” and embraced Hollywood because there “everything’s plastic, but I love plastic.  I want to be plastic.”  (See my book Fascinating New Yorkers, chapter 24, on Warhol.)

But “plastic” is now far more than a common concept and fact of life. It has become a threat of phenomenal proportions.  It is filling our landfills, choking our rivers, and polluting the world’s oceans.  And it will continue to do so for years to come, because it degrades slowly; like diamonds and true love, plastics are forever.  And tiny bits of plastic — microplastics — are everywhere, even in the food we eat and the air we breathe.

Yes, we’re recycling it.  Here in New York rigid plastics are recycled — those almond milk cartons, yogurt cups, pill bottles, and Ajax detergent containers that I put out with glass and metal objects, in hopes of improving the planet.  But what do I discard them in?  Old grocery bags: non-rigid plastic!  Try as you will, you can’t escape the stuff.

But at least those bags are getting reused.  The real villain of the story is what’s called single-use plastic: plastic items that are used once and then thrown away.  Some 80% of the plastic in the oceans comes from land-based sources, and most of it is single-use items.  

Well, I’m trying.  When I go to the supermarket, I take my purchases home in my shoulder bag, or in a cloth bag that is decidedly not plastic.  But gooey garbage soaks through paper bags, so in the kitchen I use plastic grocery bags instead.  I recycle paper and cardboard items — the bulky ones torn neatly into smaller pieces — but what did I used to put them in?  Those damn plastic grocery bags!  But now, being more environmentally aware, I put the stuff in paper bags.  

I survey the foods I buy.  That box of raisins — cardboard, therefore  recyclable.  But what about the wrapping of the raisins inside the box?  I check: paper, not plastic — well and good.  

My olive oil comes in a glass container — bravo! — but my bread, including even the organic bread I get in the greenmarket, comes, alas, in plastic wrapping.  Try as I do, some of what is in my kitchen is going to end up in the world’s oceans, where it will persist for a good five hundred years.

One consolation: my books — both those that I acquire and read, and those that I write and get published — are paper.  Yes, paperbacks, which means that they will in time deteriorate.  By way of contrast, the old hardcover books in my bookcases, their wounded bindings reinforced with tape, persist and endure.  Now there is quality.  But how about the sticky tape I’ve used to repair their wounded bindings?  Plastic!  Yes, inescapable.  I give up.

© 2021 Clifford Browder

500. Intelligentsia: Brains and Books or Diddled Dupes?

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For anyone who missed my ZOOM interview, here is a link to it on YouTube:   https://youtu.be/Esx0YYYQw8I

Another excellent review of Forbidden Brownstones, this one from Sublime Book Review.  The conclusion: “Forbidden Brownstones is an addictive novel that will charm, entertain, and mesmerize you; five stars for this wonderful, compelling read.”  The novel is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

INTELLIGENTSIA:  BRAINS  AND  BOOKS

                 OR  DIDDLED  DUPES?

I inherited a subscription to the New York Review of Books from my deceased partner Bob and now subscribe to it on my own.   Compared to its thorough reviews, those in the New York Times look flimsy.  But often it's the Classifieds section, next to the last page of the publication, that grabs me.   It's a perfect example of targeted marketing, when advertisers want to each a very specific and limited audience.  In this case, the intelligentsia, by which I mean people who read, write, and edit books, and ponder and debate their content.  In other words, intellectuals, a suspect group whose existence annoys both the hoi polloi and the politicians who covet their votes.  But these ads tell us a lot about who and what the intelligentsia are, their moods and needs and desires.  So let's find out who we are.  

"We?"  Yes, we.  Because readers of this blog, like the writer, fall into that class.  Like it or not, this is about us.  We'll look at the issue of NYRB of January 14, 2021.

First, there are the personals, usually older people seeking companionship: a "single gentleman, 71, good-looking and active," seeks a liaison with an "attractive unattached lady under 50."  Or an "MWM ERROR THEORIST" (yes, all in caps) wants to meet a "compatible F."  Common enough, let's wish them (us) all well. But how about these?

TATTOOED, PIERCED, undercut-having, leather jacket-clad pansexual East Asian femme seeks whiskey-drinking, artifice-touting, anti-authoritarian aesthete to while the hours away with.  Accepting applications for both virtue & sin."WIDOWED MARGRAVE SEEKS RESPITE from coterie of sycophants.  Enclose your most prurient poem.
The first is eye-catching, but the second tops it.  And her e-mail address is lasciviousmargrave@xxxxx.  But maybe this one isn't us. She's allegedly a margrave; we are not.
Under PERSONAL SERVICES I find "EXCECELLENT MASSAGE BY EVA," prompting me to wonder just how "personal" it is.  (Honni soit qui mal y pense.)
And there is much more:a vacation rental for Yellowstone in winter;a full-floor condo in Paris;someone unnamed offering the "unfiltered truth" about your relationships; someone offering to buy "mid-century design furniture"; someone looking for philanthropic funding to save the planet;a "charismatic, aging French rock star" who will write an original song for you, your mom, your lover, or your pet in French, English, or Franglais;a ghost writer eager to help you write your book;PROUST-INK, a website selling an online course in Proust, and mugs and T-shirts bearing the master's image.The biggest ad is for AIRBRUSH, the World's Finest Eye Cream, reg $68 but now only $54.40, though we can also have La Mer Eye Balm for $200.   
The most mysterious ad is for Athena Pheromones, a fragrance guaranteed to increase your attractiveness.  Discovered in 1986 by a Ph.D. in biology, it is not sold in stores, but has been proven 74% effective in two 8-week studies, and 68% effective in a 3rd 8-week study, $99.50 for men and $98.50 for women, free shipping in the US.
So what is one to make of all this?  The American intelligentsia (i.e., us)craves companionship, maybe with a massage (hmm) thrown in;likes to travel and live abroad;needs to know the truth about its relationships;wants to save the planet;wants design furniture;will pay for a song, even in a bastard French corrupted by English,  for its lover, mom, or pet;needs help in writing its book;has eyes in need of a cream or a balm (maybe from squinting too much at the fine print of academic publications);will pay almost a hundred dollars to boost its attractiveness.

But there is also another possibility: we are grievously insecure, and our insecurity makes us a prime target for every con, dodge, diddle, rip-off, and hoax conceivable.  So which one are we?  Your choice.  Probe hard, think, dig deep. 

©  2021 Clifford Browder