Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 106

Mail Call 1968 – no e-mail or web access on the ships in those days

from the archives

While serving aboard an aircraft carrier on a nine-month cruise, I became as attuned to the comings and goings of our C-1A Trader carrier onboard delivery (COD) plane as a desert dweller is to a drop of rain. Long before Navy ships had e-mail service, the COD–as we called it–was our primary connection with home.

[image error]USS Ranger’s COD

When the plane arrived, the words “Mail Call” echoed throughout the ship via the 1-MC public address system. The ship’s post office would be mobbed in minutes as each department sent a guy to the small window on the 03 level just forward of the island.

Many of us would head toward the post office before “Mail Call” was announced because our TV sets were generally tuned into PLAT, our ship’s Pilot Landing Aid Television. It was always on during flight operations. The retrieval of the slow-moving COD really stuck out amongst the landings of the jets.

One had to lurk, though, because if you bugged the post office guys before the mail was ready, they tended to work a lot slower. For a few moments after the arrival of the COD, they owned the boat.

Large packages were sniffed and poked and prodded en route back to the shop, office or berthing area for the slightest evidence they contained cookies. One of the top rules of the sea is that cookies are shared with everyone. A guy would be lucky to get one cookie out of a box of 50, crumbled or whole, as the gods of the mail service decreed.

Envelopes reeking of cologne or perfume brought a sailor a string of profane jeers and suggestions by anyone else close enough to pick up the scent. Smart guys told their wives and/or lovers to stop spraying My Sin Perfume on letters filled with sweet nothings or the suggested sins within would soon become public.

More often than not, the mail contained the every-day news of the moment, roughly three weeks after it happened back home. It always amazed me how much of home could be contained within a small envelope.

I left the ship in the Gulf of Tonkin aboard the COD for a trip home via Danang and Manila and to this day that remains one of my favorite flights. Before I flew off the ship, the old salts warned me that a catapult takeoff was similar to getting a kick in the butt from something large and angry.

They were right. But for once, it was a welcome kick.

—Malcolm

Remembering May 4, 1970

The Kent State shootings occurred 50 years ago today when the Ohio National Guard fired 67 sounds into an unarmed crowd of anti-war protesters, killing four and wounding nine. Among other things, the “Massacre” is said to have helped end the Vietnam War, bring down the Nixon administration, and ask hard questions about just how police and national guard personnel are supposed to disperse protestors.

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At the time, the shooting led to a strike of some four million high school and college students and the closure of many schools. Nixon, of course, had been elected (among other things) on his stated objective of ending the war. The protest was sparked when the U.S. expanded the war by bombing Cambodia.

While I was still in the navy on May 4, 1970, I would leave the service as a conscientious objector four months later. I supported the protestors but disagreed strongly with protests that caused violence. Riot control police have become more dangerous to everyone since Kent State as the police become have more militarized. This isn’t helpful now and it wasn’t helpful then.

I took part in anti-war protests prior to joining the navy (to avoid being drafted into the army) and my sympathies were almost always with the students UNLESS they committed the kind of violence they were protesting.

I wonder if we have learned anything since Kent State. As I watch news stories which show police SWAT teams that look more like Army Rangers and Navy Seals than the police, I tend to doubt it.

–Malcolm

 

I should have been there

In the early 1960s, Tallahassee, Florida where I grew up was the site of multiple lunch counter sit-ins and movie theater protests. Many of these were organized by CORE and drew a fair amount of participation from students at the primarily black Florida A&M University. I was attending high school and college (FSU) in Tallahassee during these protests, but I wasn’t there.

[image error] Florida Memory Photo
[image error]Woolworth’s Lunch Counter – Florida Memory Photo

My excuses for not being there are many, including:

Tallahassee Police, who sided with the angry white on-lookers, we physically and verbally abusive.
Protesters’ eyes were damaged by the use of tear gas.
Protesters were fined and/or put in jail for violating a restraining order.
The KKK threatened not only the Blacks but the scattering of whites who joined the picketing and lunch counter sit-ins. Burning crosses appeared in people’s front yards.
Picketers were assaulted around town and once a person was identified, picketers were likely to have their yards filled with angry people.
I wasn’t ready to take on the backlash that I’d be subjected to from high school and college students who had been my friends.
I was sure I’d be fired from my jobs and that my participation would cause trouble for my father who was an FSU professor.

As FAMU student and CORE organizer Patricia Stephens Due–who was tear-gassed and ended up with permanent eye damage–said in her book Freedom in the Family–most Blacks weren’t there either even though the common perception is that they were a united front. Not so.

When I was working for Western Union across the street from the Florida Theater, it would have been easy to walk over there and join the pickets or sit at that lunch Woolworth’s lunch counter while on break. There’s an empty seat in the foreground of that lunch counter photo. Logically, it would have been easy to sit there, but when fear of the consequences takes over, it becomes emotionally impossible to sit there.

Looking back today, I’m embarrassed by my excuses and lack of courage.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell’s novel The Sun Singer is currently free on Kindle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Car Shopping for My Characters

Cars are often one indicator of a character in a novel. Black ops characters usually drive something with many tactical advantages in a fight; other characters are often described by their sports cars or family cars, most of which cost more than the readers of the novels make in a year.

In my novel Lena, (set in 1954) I introduced a new character to the Florida Folk Magic Series named Pollyanna. The name made her sound like a spoiled brat who lived at the estate of wealthy parents. In fact, she grew up at a fish camp and knew her way around the business and everything that went with it. She needed a practical vehicle:

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This is a 1949 Ford F-1, 1/2-ton Silvertone Grey pickup truck. It was the lowest of the line of Ford F-series trucks made between 1947 and 1952. Perfect for a fish camp, though Pollyanna would have gotten a 3/4-ton F-3 if she could have afforded it. Pollyanna always had a 1935 Smith & Wesson model 27 .357 magnum revolver in the glove box or in a thigh holster.

Since she lives near a small town, everyone recognizes her truck. This  isn’t helpful when she’s spying on bad guys. So, along with a blonde wig, different clothes, etc., she drives the family’s seldom used Blue 1949 Dodge Wayfarer coupe:

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[image error] oldcaradvetising photo

When I visualize a character, I try to see what kind of car fits who they are. The town storekeeper drives a 1949 2R clover green Studebaker pickup. The Sanctified Church uses a Buick Roadmaster hearse. The fuel hauling company drives an Autocar surplus tanker truck. The police drive Chevrolet Bel Air squads.

Finding the right car for each character is sometimes a thrilling treasure hunt and sometimes an exasperating search when years and models seem to be missing from the Internet.

For me, tracking down cars is a heck of a lot more fun than trying to figure out what kinds of clothes my female characters would be wearing years ago.

–Malcolm

[image error]The Kindle edition of Malcolm R. Campbell’s contemporary fantasy novel The Sun Singer is FREE on Amazon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘The Sun Singer’ – Free on Kindle

My contemporary fantasy set in the mountains of Glacier National Park Montana is free on Kindle May 2 through May 6, 2020.

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Description

Robert Adams is a normal teenager who raises tropical fish, makes money shoveling snow off his neighbors’ sidewalks, gets stuck washing the breakfast dishes, dreads trying to ask girls out on dates and enjoys listening to his grandfather’s tall tales about magic and the western mountains. Yet, Robert is cursed by a raw talent his parents refuse to talk to him about: his dreams show him what others cannot see.

When the family plans a vacation to the Montana high country, Grandfather Elliott tells Robert there’s more to the trip than his parents’ suspect. The mountains hide a hidden world where people the ailing old man no longer remembers need help and dangerous tasks remain unfinished. Thinking that he and his grandfather will visit that world together, Robert promises to help.

On the shore of a mountain lake, Robert steps alone through a doorway into a world at war where magic runs deeper than the glacier-fed rivers. Grandfather Elliott meant to return to this world before his health failed him and now Robert must resurrect a long-suppressed gift to fulfill his promises, uncover old secrets, undo the deeds of his grandfather’s foul betrayer, subdue brutal enemy soldiers in battle, and survive the trip home.

From My Favorite Reader Review

Mr. Campbell used his astute and unfettered imagination to weave this labyrinthine tale full of many different elements seamlessly. The landscape descriptions are dynamic and beautifully written. The matter of where Robert goes and the full-blown characters that he meets along the way are all realistically believable. Well, except for perhaps Garth, the wood elf. But he was pure magic and I enjoyed his character immensely. Robert finds himself on his own, learning to navigate this coinciding world, which is exactly like our own, a few hundred years earlier in time. To do that he has to learn to trust his dreams and to listen to his intuition on who to trust. This is a wildly spirited and intelligent adventure story where Robert has to learn to believe in the energies around him for them to flow through him. I enjoyed the messages of extended families and the way things came together at the end. All ages of readers who enjoy mystical adventures, alternate universes, or epic tales will love this story.

–Review by ?wazithinkin

I hope you enjoy the story.

–Malcolm

You may also like Sarabande, the sequel to The Sun Singer.

 

 

Creating Language Anew

“I am constantly finding ways to create language anew, or to represent spoken tongues.” – Bernardine Evaristo, in an April 2020 interview in The Writer’s Chronicle.”

[image error]In 2019, Evaristo was the first black woman to with the Man Booker Prize for her novel Girl, Woman, Other. Vanity Fair wrote last December that the novel was written in “a free-flowing, prose poetry style that she’s dubbed ‘fusion fiction.'”

Many writers struggle with the linear nature of language as we commonly use it, one thing after enough, rather like the way computers have been processing coded instructions prior to the coming age of quantum computing.

In “real life,” a person might be carrying on a conversation with his neighbor while they cook steaks in the back yard about last night’s football game. Meanwhile, each person is watching the steaks, hearing what the children are doing in the background, wondering about tomorrow’s projects at work, and feeling the pain of several fire ant bites. There’s a lot going on here that’s difficult to convey to the reader if what is shown on the page is a passage of dialogue about the ball game.

One might get around this by using impressionistic techniques (variously abstract and subjective),  intruding into the dialogue with multiple snippets of information in parentheses, by displaying the dialogue in the traditional way and then following it up with omniscient narrator passages that say (essentially) what each character was thinking and aware of while appearing to be devoting his focus completely on the back and forth conversation with his neighbor.

Dan Brown (and many others) have shown simultaneous–or nearly simultaenous events–by writing in a series of short chapters and/or short scenes. This is like saying such and such happened and then adding, “meanwhile back at the ranch.”

My feeling has always been that the closer a writer gets to portraying real events in the true complexity in which they occur, the more likely it is that s/he will end up with material that most readers find unreadable. It’s odd, I think, that while we accept our knowledge of simultaneous thoughts/events/feelings in our own lives without question, we don’t know how to handle that reality when it gets to the page.

When writers, such as Evaristo find new ways of creating language anew that end up being accepted by readers and critics, I very pleased/impressed/jealous. I really don’t like seeing these new ways labelled as “experimental” (as in the Washington Post review snippet below) because that implies that the writer swept up the scanned in the remnants of partial drafts, notes, and ideas from his or her desk, shoved them between covers, and called them a novel. I believe most readers consider something labelled that way believe that the work is not ready to be published yet.

A lot of people–many who’ve never read it–say Finnegans Wake is that kind of novel. It’s one of my favorites. Creating language anew may be–from the writer’s point of view–an experiment to see whether or not a new form and structure approach “works.” When the author decides that it does work, the book leaps out of the laboratory and into commerce and ceases to be an experiment.

I’m a bit biased in favor of “something new) because I’ve always fought editors and English teachers for years about many of my sentence and format constructions. I’ve abandoned tinkering with format because–for example–Kindle cannot handle the multiple columns I saw as one way of showing multiple things happening at once. I wrote an early novel in this format and reviewers called in “experimental” and readers said they couldn’t figure it out.

I probably didn’t help my case when people asked which column they were supposed to read first, and I answered: “it doesn’t matter.” The novel is out of print. And early edition of my contemporary fantasy The Sun Singer had several brief instances of side-by-side columns. They were very short. The print version looked fine. The e-books didn’t; so I displayed the material from the columns in the same old linear way I’ve always been trying to get around in my work.

I  think artists have a better chance of creating acceptable non-linear paintings that show the true nature of reality because the viewer can see and grok the entire painting at once. That’s really not possible with a 100,000-word novel or even a 10,00-word short story. But I want readers to be able to see the scenes in the way they would if each one were a painting. I keep working on it.

As for now: good for you Bernardine.

from the Washington Post

‘Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other…is a breathtaking symphony of black women’s voices, a clear-eyed survey of contemporary challenges that’s nevertheless wonderfully life-affirming… Together, all these women present a cross-section of Britain that feels godlike in its scope and insight…just as crucial to this novel’s triumph is Evaristo’s proprietary style, a long-breath, free-verse structure that sends her phrases cascading down the page. She’s formulated a literary mode somewhere between prose and poetry that enhances the rhythms of speech and narrative. It’s that rare experimental technique that sounds like a sophisticated affectation but in her hands feels instantly accommodating, entirely natural.

—Malcolm

 

A little more nostalgia

In the last post, I showed you pictures of the first car I wanted and the first car I ended up with. But, I finally got a Jeep.

[image error]Wikipedia Photo

Kaiser Jeep Corporation made a big mistake in 1970 when it sold itself to American Motors which ultimately got scooped up by Chrysler which merged with Fiat. When I was growing up, there were still a lot of Jeeps on the road with the original CJs (civilian jeep) carrying a Willys-Overland or a Willy’s Motors logo. A friend of mine had an early CJ-2A that we drove all over north Florida for years at its maximum speed of 45 mph and a four-wheel-drive that could only be engaged by manually changing the setting of the front hub caps (before you could shift into high or low range). The first thing you needed to remember was to turn on the ignition before stepping on the starter button.

[image error]My Jeep was much newer, a CJ-5 “Universal” built by Kaiser in 1970 before they sold out to the anger of Jeep purists everywhere. The top speed was about 80 though you really didn’t want to do that often. The four-wheel-drive still had to be locked in or out (before shifting) with the Free Lock or Warn hubs. This model had a Buick engine, removable doors and removable top. Fortunately, the manual starter button was gone. The manual choke was still there and you could blow off your muffler if you forgot to push it back in before shifting into second. I always had studded snow tires on mine during the winter months when I lived in Illinois.

On casual Friday, I still had to dress in clothes like those in this picture. The Jeep was fun to drive but noisy at highway speeds. Drove it from Northern Illinois to Glacier Park Montana once. At some point, I got flagged down by a trucker standing by his broken-down rig at the side of the road. Took him five miles to a gas station. He thanked me and said that he sure as hell preferred the relative quiet of his Mack truck to the “noisy contraption” I was driving.

I still had the Jeep when I moved to Georgia in 1975, though it was becoming nearly undrivable. Going up hills on the Interstates, my speed dropped to 40 mph. I picked up a hitchhiker in a rainstorm who had been standing beneath an overpass; he got out five miles down the road because of our slow progress and the fact we were showed with water through the falling-apart top every time a big rig passed. Sold it a year later. I was sad to see it go, but on a college teacher’s salary, I couldn’t afford to repair it. Traded with another college teacher, ending up with an Opel that tended to randomly catch fire on the I-285 connector around Atlanta (where everyone except me was driving at NASCAR speeds). They still do.

[image error]My wife and I ended up driving a Grand Cherokee once when we got upgraded by the rental car company from the Taurus we selected to this red barge. It was comfy. Had a radio. Had A/C. Bucket seats. But I really wasn’t a Jeep. Plus it cost a whole lot of money.

Now there’s a bunch of foreign stuff out there built to look like a Jeep. I won’t touch the stuff because I still remember, with more nostalgia than sense, the days when buying a real working Jeep meant something–as suggested by this old advertising poster.

—Malcolm

Never Let Your Parents Look at The Used Car You Want To Buy

When I was in high school, my parents agreed that the family chauffeuring, which included three paper routes, would go a lot more smoothly if I had a car. Used, of course, but no problem.

Two cars were in the running, both selling for $400:

The Car I Wanted
[image error]1959 Jag (Wikipedia Photo which looks a lot better than the used model I was looking at.)
The Car I Ended Up With
[image error]1954 Chevy (Wikipedia Photo)

The Jaguar was for sale by the owner; the Chevy was on the used car lot at a dealer. My parents thought the dealer option was a more reputable way to buy a car.
The Jaguar was a foreign car and we were basically a “General Motors Family.” Plus, the Jag had a manual transmission and the Chevy had an automatic transmission. (I learned to drive on cars with a manual transmission.) Automatic transmissions screamed middle class as opposed to screaming hot rod.
I never got a chance to tell the guy selling the Jaguar to drive like a grandma while showing us the car. No, he had to wind it all the way out in every gear. It was fast and loud and not the kind of sedate car my folks wanted me to be driving.
As it turned out, the Chevy had a lot of problems with it (used more oil than gas, wouldn’t always start (especially in North Florida’s “cold” weather), had one window that wouldn’t roll up, etc. We only kept the car several years before all of us were fed up with it. I’m sure the Jag was perfect and that I’d still be driving it today.
Using my experience: tell your folks you’ll go get something and for them not to worry about it. If they’re helping pay for it, agree upon a price and stick to it (to prove they can trust you).

My wife is amused that if this subject comes up, I’m still as ticked off about it now as I was at the time.

—Malcolm

P.S. I’ve used that Chevy as one of the “bad characters” in my stories, aptly named “The Green Smoker.”

 

 

 

 

SPAM remains alive and intrusive during Pandemic

Bloggers love visits and comments but are often discouraged when they see that some of those come from spammers.

[image error]At least the spammers aren’t here in my den and, insofar as I know, their messages don’t transmit COVID-19 even though some of them promise that they can provide the most accurate information on the planet about the pandemic. I see those people as just another example of folks with no qualifications who are disputing the statements being made by people with medical/research qualifications. Plus, they want me to pay for their opinions. I think not.

Fortunately, WordPress screens all that out and puts it in a special trash bin where I can glance at it to make sure it’s SPAM. 99.99% of the time, it has no value. So, gentle reader–as Dorothy Parker used to say in her columns–I screen all the schlock to you don’t have to see it and then figure out how to un-see it.

Basically, I think the Feds should round up all the spammers and put them in asylums where they will learn the errors of their ways or, if they can’t/won’t, are kept confined to they don’t harm innocent people.

Every once in awhile their comments are funny (or at least slightly creative):

Receive one hundred rolls of high-quality, gently used toilet paper per month in unmarked packages for less than the cost of a dinner for five at Antoine’s in New Orleans or a new Maserati (Levante). Not responsible for shipping delays.
Stay ahead of the Pandemic info by subscribing to our COVID newsletter which collects all the half-truths and spurious ideas together in one place, making it easy for you to compare right and wrong in the daily news.
Our six-foot poles made from oak will make it easy for you to maintain proper social distancing at grocery stores, pharmacies, and take-out lines at restaurants. No longer will you have to believe the drunk standing next to you who thinks four feet is okay. Our poles can be used as lances should the need arise. 

This is only the tip of the iceberg. I’ve spared you from everything beneath the surface. I’m sure you’re all grateful.

–Malcolm

[image error]“Widely Scattered Ghosts” is currently free on Smashwords.

 

Pandemic: Writers’ Resources

“This pandemic—from the Greek pandemos: pan (all) and demos (people)—is changing us, at every level: our antibodies, our economy, even the words that flit or stumble off our tongues.” – Anndee Hochman in Postcard From the Pandemic: The Language of the Virus

Here’s a link to recent writers’ resources from the website of Poets & Writers Magazine:

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Hope you find a few that help you.

–Malcolm

[image error]Free e-book in epub and mobi formats.