Lev Raphael's Blog, page 67

My Three Favorite Excuses for Obama's Epic Failures

My lawn sported the first Obama sign in our mid-Michigan neighborhood, even before the local campaign office had them available. I did more to support him than I had ever done for any presidential candidate.



I was convinced he would be a better president than Hillary Clinton. I was dead wrong. Voting for him in the primary was one of the biggest mistakes of my political life. He has turned out to be one of the worst presidents of recent times -- not actively horrible as Bush was, but passively so. The debt ceiling debacle proves it to me, not that I needed any more proof of his incompetence.



But every time Obama gets criticized even by people like me who voted for him, the excuses roll out from diehard supporters.



Here are my favorites:



Give him time. I heard this a lot in the early days, hell, even after a year and a half, especially about gay issues and closing Gitmo. "Give him time, the country's in a state of economic crisis." What bothered me about it still bothers me: Obama isn't running the country single-handedly, because if he were, he'd be like Lucy Ricardo working on the line at that candy factory. He has a cabinet and advisers and government departments. Is he unable to delegate and multitask?



He's not a dictator. "Obama is only the president, he can't do whatever he likes, he has to compromise with Congress, this is a democracy, his powers are very limited." Really? Even when he had a democratic Congress he couldn't accomplish more? What about the way Bush rammed things through Congress? Did the Imperial Presidency disappear overnight when Obama was inaugurated? The dictator argument is a straw man. Nobody's expecting him to be Hitler. We do expect him to lead, to inspire, to act.



He's trapping the GOP. This is the saddest one: "All the compromises that have made progressives angry, what they've really been doing is showing the American people how crazy and intractable the GOP is." It's all apparently a canny strategy to destroy the GOP's credibility and Obama is a master strategist, a Svengali who's baiting a giant trap for the GOP. Wait till the election! Wait till his second term! That of course brings us back to excuse no. 1.



I dismissed Hillary Clinton's jibe that Obama wasn't much more than a good speech, but I realize to my profound regret that she was right. He can give a good speech now and then, though most of the time he drones. It's pretty clear that Obama is a prime example of the Peter Principle: he's risen to his level of incompetence. He is, as described by Jim Garrison back on The Huffington Post in February, truly Obama the Feckless.

Pride and Prejudice and Hebrews

I've published twenty books in genres from memoir to mystery but I never thought of doing an Austen mashup until I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies .



While I enjoyed Zombies at first because it was surprising and funny, eventually it started to feel like a one-note protest against all the decorous PBS Austen series and all the die-hard Austen fans around the world. Dude, forget carriages and bonnets, gimme brains!



Zombies reads like graffiti, which can be ugly or beautiful depending on your point of view. You see that split on amazon.com, where half the reviewers give it four or five stars, and half give it from one to three stars. Did the author even like Austen? I wasn't sure. But he sure had fun taking a bite out of her.



I'd been reading and enjoying Austen since college, and analyzing Zombies technically got me thinking: why not do a mashup the opposite way? Instead of imposing a whole elaborate system onto one of her novels that turned her characters into caricatures, why not weave changes into the fabric of the book? What if I could do a Pride and Prejudice mashup which didn't call attention to how crazily it veered off from the original, but read as if the changes were organic? An alternative novel as much as an altered one; an appreciation, not a parody.



Given my publishing history, my immediate inspiration was to make the Bennet family Anglo-Jews, or "Hebrews" as they were often called in Regency England. This opened up one door after another, raising questions about many of the characters and their actions which I found logical answers to, once I posited Lizzy as proudly Jewish but assimilated. Prejudice takes on a whole new meaning in this book, as does the entail of the Bennet estate, Mr. Collins' hopes for marriage, Mr. Darcy's contempt, Mrs. Bennet's exuberance, and even Lady Catherine de Bourgh's fulminating.



There are no monsters in my novel Pride and Prejudice: The Jewess and the Gentile , except of course for anti-Semitism, which still stalks the earth today like the Undead.

Wrangling With Copyeditors

Years ago a novelist friend told me that the only thing worse than not being published was being published. I liked the phrase so much I later made it the epigram of my second mystery, The Edith Wharton Murders . But at the time, I had no idea what he could mean. Once you got published, what could you have to worry about? Wouldn't life be perfect?



That was before I had my first wrangle with a copyeditor.



In my debut fiction collection, there were a number of stories about Holocaust survivors, and I was careful about having their dialogue reflect that English wasn't their native language. Like many immigrants, they "translated" from the language they knew best, giving their English a Yiddish-inflected twist.



The copyeditor didn't get it and relentlessly standardized every line of their dialogue in one story after another. An author friend I told this story to said he knew an author so enraged by rampant lack of imagination on the part of a copyeditor that he just wrote across page one, "Stet the whole goddamned thing." I could never do that, because copyeditors do catch real problems, but I've come to understand the sentiment.



On a recent project, I found the copyeditor aggressively changing everything -- my style, my syntax, my vocabulary--to some imagined idea of good prose. The effect was to make it sound as if it had been written by a computer program slavishly conforming to grammar and style rules without any room for originality.



This person even had the nerve to commend a word I used as "a good word," as if I were in elementary school. That was before telling me I wasn't using it strictly correctly. But after nineteen books, hundreds of reviews, essays and articles, I have my own ideas about what's correct for my book, and I said so.



The project wasn't spoiled, but I had to put far more work into restoring my prose, excavating the dull ruin it had been turned into. I was pissed off to have encountered such literalistic, tone-deaf copyediting.



And yes, I mean pissed off, not annoyed, vexed, steamed, put out, or irritated.

Your Foreign Language Skills Aren't Perfect? Lighten Up.

Preparing to go to Germany last fall on a book tour, I took an on-line grammar test from a language school. Big mistake. I've never been good at grammar even in English, and I bombed, despite having studied some basic German.



I told this to a friend who teaches German and he said, "Forgot it. Nobody's going to test you over there. The key thing is, can you communicate? If you make mistakes, so what? Don't let yourself be paralyzed by grammar. It'll stop you having fun."



It was terrific advice.



Despite the jet lag, I plunged in as soon as I got off the plane in Berlin and hailed a cab. I knew I was making mistakes, but the cab driver took me to the main train station anyway. We chatted about the weather and understood each other pretty well, though I found myself tongue-tied more than once. She helped me along, and whenever I couldn't follow, asking her "Wie Bitte?" (Excuse me?) was always effective, giving me time to process what we were talking about a little further. And time to relax.



At the train station, I managed to buy my ticket without fuss. But when I found a stand to buy a sandwich and some water, I asked for non-sparkling water incorrectly: "Haben Sie stille Mineralwasser?" All German nouns are either feminine, masculine, or neuter, and adjectives reflect that. I should have said "stilles Mineralwasser," since Wasser is neuter, not feminine.



But you know what? The clerk answered in German that of course they had it, what size did I want, and I bought the bottle with no problem. Only when I walked away did I realize my mistake. It was a good, practical lesson and proved my friend the German teacher was right.



This happened everywhere I went. Whether talking to waiters, cab drivers, ticket agents, new acquaintances, and even some old ones, I'm sure I made mistakes. But I never had trouble getting my point across.



And the more I spoke with people, the less self-conscious I got, the better my accent was, and the more I found myself using words and expressions I didn't know I knew. People appreciated my speaking to them in their own language: That much was clear from their expressions, their attitude, and the fact they sometimes came right out and said it.



A friend who's lived in Germany confessed that even now he still sometimes makes mistakes in his German. "But they love that anyone makes the effort," he says. "The important thing is to try."

Do You Still Read Fiction?

Philip Roth has written two dozen novels, yet fiction has lost its appeal for him personally.



In a recent interview he said , "I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did."



When asked why, he said he didn't know, and only offered a smart-aleck response: "I wised up."



Whatever you think of Roth -- and the outrage at his Booker Prize was pretty high here on the Huffington Post a while back -- he raised a point I've been discussing with writer friends for a long time. I don't read nearly as much fiction of any kind as I used to. That's a big switch because I started out as a short story writer before branching into novels and mysteries. Fiction was always the center of my reading universe.



And then I became a reviewer. I wrote a column for the Detroit Free Press for about a decade and read or sampled what seemed like thousands of mysteries and thrillers. I also reviewed for half a dozen other newspapers and magazines on an NPR station. Over time, I found my interest in fiction of all kinds waning, and like Roth, became more interested in history and biography.



One novelist friend said the same thing about her tastes and explained it this way, "We're middle-aged, we're contemplating the sweep of our own history, our own biographies." Another colleague argued, "When you've read so much fiction, you can see who they're indebted to, who they're echoing, and it's not as much fun as it used to be." A third writer who also teaches writing echoed that response: "Within a few pages, I think, 'I've read this before. It's not new.' "



I think there's a somewhat different reason for me, aside from burn-out. When I set out to be an author, I wanted to read as many other fiction writers as possible to learn what they did, how they saw. The majority of my library from college and graduate school and into my early 30s is American, English, French, Russian, German, South American and Israeli fiction. As a young man, I wanted to experience all those different lives.



But now I've lived my own lives, have traveled extensively, and feel more settled and centered. I haven't "wised up" as Roth says. I just feel the need for a bigger story, and history and biography seem to offer that more than contemporary fiction. I'm grateful that we live in a golden age of biographers and historians like Amanda Foreman, Lynn Olson, Antony Beevor, David McCullough, Joan DeJean, Stacy Schiff, Edmund Morris, Tom Reiss, Peter Ackroyd.



When I do read fiction now, I'm more likely to be taken by historical novels like Barry Unsworth's Land of Marvels and David Benioff's City of Thieves . And that's the genre I've moved into with my latest book Rosedale in Love , set in The Gilded Age.



As for Philip Roth? I admire his work, but I haven't enjoyed one of his novels in 11 years.

Minority Report

Lenny Bruce once riffed that "If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn't even matter if you're Catholic; if you live in New York, you're Jewish."



My parents were so secular I didn't have a bar mitzvah or ever go to synagogue, but all my schools were mostly Jewish, so I was, like, Jewish by association. Or by camouflage.



Then I went to a Catholic College, Fordham, because there was a writing professor I wanted to study with, and my cover was blown. Comedian Kate Clinton has said that Jews are co-Catholics and Catholics are co-Jews. Well, I didn't feel co-anything.



One fellow student assured me that the Mafia was actually Jewish-controlled and Italians had almost nothing to do with it. I guess she hadn't read Mario Puzo. I agreed with her, but I said that being Jewish hadn't helped me personally: "I can't get a summer internship with them because I'm just not connected enough. Go figure!"



Fordham was the first place I ever heard the phrase "Jew him down" aloud. I was sitting with some friends, all of them Irish-American or Italian-American, and one said it while describing something she'd bought. Then she looked at me and covered her mouth in embarrassment.



I assured her that Jews had a similar expression: "Goy him down." For a moment, she believed me. And why not? Christians know as much about Jews as Americans know about Canadians, to misquote a line from The Kids in the Hall. You think I'm kidding?



A few years later when I was living in a Jewish student's coop, someone called around Passover asking to find out if non-Jews were allowed to see the Paschal sacrifice of the lamb. She clearly thought that Judaism had not changed in two thousand years. I took the phone and explained, "Well, nowadays, it's only symbolic. We pour some red wine on a virgin wool sweater. But you're welcome to participate if you like."



Then there was the woman cleaning for us who pointed to the lavender-scented eye pillow by my bed and asked it it was a Jewish ritual object.



Jewish Friends are always telling me about people who can't believe they don't celebrate Christmas. "Not at all? Nothing? No tree? No wreath? No presents? Not even egg nog?"



I wonder what Lenny Bruce would have said about that.

Father's Day Latkes?

Even though Father's Day is about six months off from Hannukah, it always makes me think of my taciturn father's potato pancakes.



Made in a large, battered cast iron pan, his latkes were always perfect: crisp outside, juicy inside, delicious whether with sour cream, sugar, apple sauce, or just plain. My brother and I tried them every way.



I loved to watch my father cook, as patient as a scientist, as skilled as a musician playing a piece he's performed more times than he can remember. Sometimes he even made what he called a potato babka: pouring the batter into a large loaf pan and baking it. The word "babka" still makes my mouth water decades later, though my own kitchen will never be filled with that aroma.



I've used all kinds of pans, potatoes and onions over the years, but have never been able to duplicate his latkes, not even with his advice. I'm not just being nostalgic and romanticizing the past. Back then, my mother said her latkes were never as good as his, and she had learned to cook in Brussels.



Did he consult a cookbook or was he remembering a recipe he had learned at home in eastern Czechoslovakia before the Holocaust? No, he just worked instinctively with the onions and potatoes, the flour, eggs, salt and pepper.



Years later, in a college course where we read Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, I learned a wonderful Italian word: sprezzatura. It was the art that concealed all art, the ability to do things flawlessly without betraying any effort. While my father was no Renaissance man -- I don't remember him ever cooking much of anything else -- perhaps sprezzatura was a secret ingredient of those latkes.



Perhaps I tried too hard to equal him, longed too deeply to recreate a moment in time that looked like magic and felt like a feast. These days, I don't worry about equaling what he did, I just enjoy the memory of the love and dedication, the patience, and the sights and smells of my father loving his sons without words.

Father's Day Latkes

Even though Father's Day is about six months off from Hannukah, it always makes me think of my taciturn father's potato pancakes.



Made in a large, battered cast iron pan, his latkes were always perfect: crisp outside, juicy inside, delicious whether with sour cream, sugar, apple sauce, or just plain. My brother and I tried them every way.



I loved to watch my father cook, as patient as a scientist, as skilled as a musician playing a piece he's performed more times than he can remember. Sometimes he even made what he called a potato babka: pouring the batter into a large loaf pan and baking it. The word "babka" still makes my mouth water decades later, though my own kitchen will never be filled with that aroma.



I've used all kinds of pans, potatoes and onions over the years, but have never been able to duplicate his latkes, not even with his advice. I'm not just being nostalgic and romanticizing the past. Back then, my mother said her latkes were never as good as his, and she had learned to cook in Brussels.



Did he consult a cookbook or was he remembering a recipe he had learned at home in eastern Czechoslovakia before the Holocaust? No, he just worked instinctively with the onions and potatoes, the flour, eggs, salt and pepper.



Years later, in a college course where we read Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, I learned a wonderful Italian word: sprezzatura. It was the art that concealed all art, the ability to do things flawlessly without betraying any effort. While my father was no Renaissance man -- I don't remember him ever cooking much of anything else -- perhaps sprezzatura was a secret ingredient of those latkes.



Perhaps I tried too hard to equal him, longed too deeply to recreate a moment in time that looked like magic and felt like a feast. These days, I don't worry about equaling what he did, I just enjoy the memory of the love and dedication, the patience, and the sights and smells of my father loving his sons without words.

What Work Could Gilded Age Women Do?

Remember Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth? Remember how faded socialite Lily Bart drops down the social ladder, from unpaid secretary for her wealthy friends to untrained seamstress in a hat shop?



It's a steep, hopeless, miserable decline, and highly dramatic, but Wharton presented a false portrait of Lily's possibilities. There were dozens of options open to women like Lily in 1905 New York. I discovered them while researching my novel Rosedale in Love , which tells Wharton's story from a completely different angle.



Looking for Gilded Age books in varying genres, I found the eye-opening How Women May Earn a Living. It was published in 1900 by Helen Churchill Candee, a successful journalist, author, and interior decorator, who would later survive the Titanic and keep writing and traveling until she was 80.



Candee explained that the world of work in 1900 was expanding for women way beyond the menial labor Lily Bart ends up doing. She gave very specific advice in surveying the pluses and minuses of dozens of professions that included some you might expect like nursing, waitressing, and secretarial work. Others might surprise you: life insurance agent, realtor, and personal shopper. Yes, that was an actual profession over a hundred years ago! Candee called it "private shopping."



Candee didn't neglect careers that required more education like architecture, medicine and law. But no matter what the profession -- from florist to freelance journalist -- she closely examined the needed skills, the training involved, the expenses, the joys and burdens, and most importantly, the typical salaries. The New York Times Book Review praised her sensible and useful book, noting that it made no distinction whatsoever between men and women: "in the field of business there is no sex. Practical capacity is the keynote to success."



I wrote Rosedale in Love because I wanted to tell Wharton's story from the perspective of Jewish outsiders. One is the banker Simon Rosedale, a character in The House of Mirth whose inner life and background she completely ignores. The other main character is his cousin Florence, a woman I invented along with everything else about his family. Florence may seem privileged, but she's always aware of her outsider status as a "Jewess."



In my research, I learned a great deal about New York in 1905, but one of the most surprising discoveries was how many types of jobs were open to women who needed to support themselves or their families. Wharton ruthlessly narrowed Lily Bart's options in life to make her seem trapped. Reading Candee's book is a reminder that what novelists leave out of their work can be as significant as what they include, and that artistic vision can sometimes cloud the facts.

Gilded Age Women, Trapped? Maybe Not

Remember Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth? Remember how faded socialite Lily Bart drops down the social ladder, from unpaid secretary for her wealthy friends to untrained seamstress in a hat shop?



It's a steep, hopeless, miserable decline, and highly dramatic, but Wharton presented a false portrait of Lily's possibilities. There were dozens of options open to women like Lily in 1905 New York. I discovered them while researching my novel Rosedale in Love , which tells Wharton's story from a completely different angle.



Looking for Gilded Age books in varying genres, I found the eye-opening How Women May Earn a Living. It was published in 1900 by Helen Churchill Candee, a successful journalist, author, and interior decorator, who would later survive the Titanic and keep writing and traveling until she was 80.



Candee explained that the world of work in 1900 was expanding for women way beyond the menial labor Lily Bart ends up doing. She gave very specific advice in surveying the pluses and minuses of dozens of professions that included some you might expect like nursing, waitressing, and secretarial work. Others might surprise you: life insurance agent, realtor, and personal shopper. Yes, that was an actual profession over a hundred years ago! Candee called it "private shopping."



Candee didn't neglect careers that required more education like architecture, medicine and law. But no matter what the profession -- from florist to freelance journalist -- she closely examined the needed skills, the training involved, the expenses, the joys and burdens, and most importantly, the typical salaries. The New York Times Book Review praised her sensible and useful book, noting that it made no distinction whatsoever between men and women: "in the field of business there is no sex. Practical capacity is the keynote to success."



I wrote Rosedale in Love because I wanted to tell Wharton's story from the perspective of Jewish outsiders. One is the banker Simon Rosedale, a character in The House of Mirth whose inner life and background she completely ignores. The other main character is his cousin Florence, a woman I invented along with everything else about his family. Florence may seem privileged, but she's always aware of her outsider status as a "Jewess."



In my research, I learned a great deal about New York in 1905, but one of the most surprising discoveries was how many types of jobs were open to women who needed to support themselves or their families. Wharton ruthlessly narrowed Lily Bart's options in life to make her seem trapped. Reading Candee's book is a reminder that what novelists leave out of their work can be as significant as what they include, and that artistic vision can sometimes cloud the facts.