Tom Glenn's Blog, page 160

Three National Emergencies (2)

Yesterday, I talked about the first of the three emergencies that I am alarmed about, climate change. Today, I’ll speak of the second emergency, nationalism.

Charles de Gaulle put it succinctly: “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”

I do love my own people, my fellow Americans, and I love my country. My willingness to risk my life repeatedly during the Vietnam war testifies to that love in a way that no other actions could have. And I have long understood that American patriotism encompasses, among other things, a profound concern for the well being of our allied countries. It is unmistakably clear to me that peace in Europe, following the two world wars that killed millions, is based on the mutual concern that nations, including the U.S., have for one another. To put American first and neglect the welfare of our allies—all in the name of nationalism—invites the end of peace and a return to world war.

And yet President Trump has declared himself to be a nationalist. His motto of “America First” dominates his foreign policy. He insults our historic allies—who worked with us to establish and maintain peace after World War II—and compliments blood-thirsty dictators. He is leading us on a path to destruction.

We all must strive to elect patriots, those who want to work with the rest of the civilized world, to lead us. We must oppose nationalism wherever it raises its ugly head. We must support those among our elected officials who seek a peace shared with the rest of the world. And we must strenuously oppose Trump and his nationalism. Our survival depends on it.

To be continued next Monday.

Three National Emergencies

I am deeply concerned about three emergencies that our country is facing: climate change, the threat of nationalism, and our handling of the Khashoggi murder. Over the next few days, I’ll address my sense of alarm about each.

On 23 November, the U.S. Global Research Program issued a report on climate change and the threat that it poses for the U.S. and the rest of the world. According to the Washington Post, the report says that

“The effects of climate change, including deadly wildfires, increasingly debilitating hurricanes and heat waves, are already battering the United States, and the danger of more such catastrophes is worsening.

“The report’s authors, who represent numerous federal agencies, say they are more certain than ever that climate change poses a severe threat to Americans’ health and pocketbooks, as well as to the country’s infrastructure and natural resources. And while it avoids policy recommendations, the report’s sense of urgency and alarm stands in stark contrast to the lack of any apparent plan from President Trump to tackle the problems, which, according to the government he runs, are increasingly dire.”

The point is that the effects of climate change, caused by human activity, are upon us now. We can escape the worst disasters if we move immediately to alter our behavior. But the Trump administration and the Republicans who control Congress not only have done nothing to counter the effects of climate change, they even deny its existence. I am persuaded that, for our own survival, we must urge the Democrats who will assume control of the House in January to move immediately to change the way we do business so as to protect the planet we live on.

My Three Addictions (6)

Further about my addiction to writing: I’m not systematic or disciplined in my writing. When I’m deep into a story, I may spend as much as fourteen hours a day writing. Other days, I don’t write at all. I let my muse—my inner voice—dictate my writing schedule.

The revision system that works best for me is to read the text first on the screen of the computer, then in printed form. For reasons I’ve never been able to divine, the two methods point up different problems. I let the text “cool” between revisions so I can come back to it with fresh perspective.

I cut everything that doesn’t do the job. That can mean a sentence, paragraph, or even a chapter. Whenever possible, I tell the story through action or dialogue, sometimes both at the same time. I have tried many different points of view (POV). The one(s) I choose for a given story or novel depends on the nature of the story. The POV I have used least often is the so-called “God’s-eye” POV, where the reader hears the story from perspective of an unseen observer who has access to the internal thinking of all the characters.

When I am satisfied with the text, I read it aloud, first from the computer screen, then from the printed page. Or sometimes I record myself reading and listen to the way the text sounds. Or occasionally, when I can find someone willing to spend the time, I have someone else read the text to me.

Hearing the words read aloud offers a unique insight into the how well the text works. It helps me find clumsy wording, unnecessarily formal structures, repeated use of vocabulary, awkward paragraphing, long sentences. I hear nuances and implications I would otherwise miss.

Most of all, reading aloud brings out the poetry—or lack of it—in the phrasing. It underlines the emotional sense of the words. It highlights the subtle shifts in feeling as the story progresses.

And it lets me hear the ebb and flow, the rise and fall, the tension, passion, and peacefulness of the words. Once again, it is the sound that matters. It is what the reader is hearing in his inner ear.

So all three of my addictions—music, languages, and writing—reside in sound. That is where my soul is. And if I become completely deaf, I’ll still hear with my inner ear.

My Three Addictions (5)

By learning the very different linguistic logics that are the bases for different languages, my ability to think was greatly expanded. By studying eastern languages, I came to understand the Asian way of looking at life, as reflected in the eastern religions and philosophies, in a way that no other means could have taught me. Most important, my understanding of English and how it works was illuminated.

That proved to be an immense help in writing. It allowed me to discover new ways to phrase an idea, to becomes sensitive to subtle differences in expression, and to use syntax and word order to convey poetic variation. For the first time I understood the emotional difference between “It is always with me” and “It is with me always.”

That brings me to my third addiction, writing.

I write because I have to. Not to write would be damnation. I don’t mean that in a religious sense. I mean that I was put on earth to write. Failure to write would mean betraying my purpose for being alive.

Writing fiction is the most difficult work I have ever done save writing poetry. But it is also the work I find most fulfilling. Nothing surpasses that moment when I finally get a sentence, a paragraph, a story, or a book right. And nothing pleases me more than when a reader responds to my writing.

I’m a slow writer. One of my books went through ten drafts and took fourteen years to complete. Something like 10 percent of my writing time is taken up with drafting new text; 90 percent is spent revising. I need to let written material “cool”—that is, putting it aside for some period of time before coming back to it to look at it with new eyes. For a story that means a month or so. For a novel that can mean as much as a year.

More tomorrow.

My Three Addictions (4)

My study of first Vietnamese and later Chinese revealed to me a totally different linguistic logic, quite alien to both Germanic and romantic languages. In these two tongues, there is no grammar as we westerners think of it—no nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, or other parts of speech. No conjugations or declensions. And tense is rarely expressed because the context makes clear what is intended.

One example of Asian language reasoning came to me when I was studying classical Chinese. In the text I was trying to translate were three characters, those for “he,” “mountain,” and “treasure. I couldn’t figure out what was meant. My teacher reminded me that in Chinese a word can function as any part of speech, and I was approaching that passage as if the second two characters were both nouns. The second of the three, “mountain,” here was used as an action word. What the text means was “He mountained the treasure,” that is, he piled it up so high it made a mountain.

These languages convey meaning by word order and context. For example, the word là in Vietnamese is usually defined as the verb, “to be” in English. But it really functions as an equals sign—what comes before equals what comes after. For pronouns like “I’ and “you” in English, the Vietnamese use words that indicate the relationship between the speakers. The most common formal term for “I” is “tôi,” which means “servant” or “slave.” The formal “you” in Vietnamese is “ông” (grandfather, a revered figure) for a man and either “cô” (aunt, for an unmarried woman) or “bà” (grandmother, for a married woman).

It gets more complicated. For less formal relationships, “I” and “you” are expressed by a word that designates a family member. If I’m talking to an older man, I use anh (older brother) for “you” and em (younger brother or sister) for “I.” If I am talking to a younger man or woman, the words are reversed. A younger Vietnamese woman I know addresses me as chú (paternal uncle), so I must use chú for “I” and cháu (nephew or niece) for “you” with her. Misuse of the proper word can be insulting to a Vietnamese.

It gets worse yet. Both Vietnamese and Chinese are tonal and monosyllabic languages. For instance, the syllable “ma” in Vietnamese has six different meanings determined by the intonation. A hilarious story about Robert McNamara tells how he tried to cheer the Vietnamese during one of his trips to Vietnam by shouting “Viêt Nam muôn năm,” which means “Vietnam for ten thousand years.” But he got the tones wrong and ended up saying “The little duck, he wants to lie down.” The crowd dissolved in mirth.

More tomorrow.

My Three Addictions (3)

Between 1962 and 1975, I was in Vietnam at least four months every year. I had two complete tours there and so many shorter trips that I lost count. I had long since learned to think in the three languages of the country—Vietnamese, Chinese, and French—and I spoke them constantly.

I was intrigued to come across well-to-do Vietnamese who spoke only French. They had grown up during the period of French domination and considered the Vietnamese language to be crude and coarse. And the native French still living in Vietnam had never bothered to learn Vietnamese. The many Chinese in Vietnam, I was disappointed to discover, spoke the Cantonese dialect as their native tongue—and different dialects in Chinese are not mutually intelligible. I had studied the Beijing dialect, known as 國 語 (guo yu—national language). But almost all of the Chinese in Vietnam had also learned the Beijing dialect, although they spoke it with an accent and mispronounced some of the words.

As readers of this blog know all too well, I escaped under fire as Saigon fell. I returned to the U.S. and went on working for NSA until I retired as early as I could and became a full-time writer. During my early years of retirement, it dawned on me that I had never learned the most commonly spoken foreign language in the U.S., namely Spanish. So I enrolled in classes at Howard Community College to study Spanish, my seventh foreign language.

As my hearing has declined over the years, I speak languages other than English less frequently. I discovered early on that I can lip-read English, but I can’t do the same in other languages.

One of the many benefits of knowing languages other than English is to learn the underlying logic inherent in each. The linguistic systems that undergird English and German are closely related. And French, Italian, and Spanish share a systematic basis not too distant from that of the Germanic languages. But Asian languages are based on a way of thinking unrelated to that of western languages.

More tomorrow.

My Three Addictions (2)

Continuing the discussion of my passion for languages: As a child, I was fascinated with music. When I ventured into opera, I realized that most of it was not in English. So I proceeded to teach myself French and Italian (German would come later). In high school, I had four years of Latin, and when I got to college, I finally got around to German. I grew up in the San Francisco bay area and was surrounded by Chinese restaurants and stores. I spent many happy hours in San Francisco’s Chinatown wandering through shops and byways and listening to people speaking Chinese.

I became determined to learn the language, but I knew it was too difficult for me to teach it to myself. I’d have to go to a language school. The best in the world then (and probably still now) was the Army Language School (ALS) at Monterey, California, now called the Defense Language Institute. Since I was going to be drafted anyway, I enlisted in the army to go to ALS to study Chinese. I looked forward to six hours a day in class, two hours a night of private study, five days a week for a full year. But when I got to ALS, the army informed me that I was not to study Chinese but something called Vietnamese, a language I had never heard of. This was 1959, and we didn’t call the country Vietnam back then; we referred to it as French Indochina. But I had to do what the army commanded. So I spent a year in intensive study of Vietnamese.

When I graduated from ALS, I asked the army to send me to Vietnam. The answer was no for two reasons: first, the army had almost nothing going on in Vietnam in 1960; and, second, soldiers who graduated first in their ALS class, as I had, were always sent to the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland. Once in Maryland, I discovered that Georgetown University in nearby Washington, D.C. offered a master’s degree in Chinese. So I enrolled.

By the time I had finished my army enlistment in 1961, I was comfortable in the three languages of Vietnam—Vietnamese, Chinese, and French—so NSA hired me and sent me to Vietnam for the first time in 1962. I spent the next thirteen years trundling between Vietnam and the U.S., immersed in the three languages of the country.

More next time.

My Three Addictions

Over the past week or so, I’ve talked at length about one of my addictions, music. I described how my daughter, Susan, helped slake it by buying me the most beautiful piano I had ever played. Now I want to talk about my other two obsessions, languages and writing.

My three compulsions are related: they all incorporate sound as a vital factor. The irony is that my hearing is failing. It was severely damaged by the artillery shelling during the fall of Saigon, and the older I get, the more it declines. I use hearing aids, without much success, but I always remove them when I’m listening to music or playing the piano because they distort the sound by increasing the volume of the higher frequencies where my hearing is most deficient. They make music sound tinny or screechy. I want it to sound balanced.

How and why sound is an essential ingredient in writing I’ll address when I get to it. But let me start today with my preoccupation with languages.

My favorite language is English because it is far and away the richest language I know of. According to the Dictionary web site, “The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of exclamations, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. And these figures don’t take account of entries with senses for different word classes (such as noun and adjective).

“This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.”

Number of words is only one aspect of the richness of the English language. Suffice it to say that syntax, grammar, and shades of meaning, among many other linguistic features, make English a magnificent tool for writers.

More tomorrow.

The Steinway (3)

I had the piano appraised. It’s price, new, was $85,000.

I learned later where Susan got the money to buy that piano. It came from her share of her mother’s estate. The house I had bought for our family in Crofton, Maryland, was the only thing of value my ex-wife still had at the time of her death—she had long since gone through my savings she acquired during the divorce. It was a lovely large home at the end of a cul-de-sac on an oversized wooded lot that backed onto the Crofton golf course. The big yard gave the children plenty of safe space to play in. During our years in that house, I had worked hard to improve it. The result was an increase of its value.

As I learned later, after I left the marriage, my ex-wife neglected the house. When the time came for the children to sell it, its value had declined due to disrepair. They sold it as-is because none of the four of them had the time or money to restore it.

Susan used the money she inherited from her mother, from the sale of the house, to buy me the Steinway. She’s never told me why, but I think I’ve figured it out.

At the time of the divorce, one of my four children sided with her mother. The others, Susan included, were either neutral or sided with me. I speculate that when Susan found out that her mother had arranged for her sister to be brought into the courtroom just as I took the witness stand and I refused to testify against her mother, she was angry. My conclusion is that Susan used her share of her mother’s estate to buy me the Steinway as a way of evening the imbalance.

The end result is that I own the most beautiful grand piano I have ever played.

 

 

The Steinway (2)

More years passed. One day, my daughter’s husband called me and asked me to come to their house right away. I explained that I was in jeans and a tee-shirt and would have to bathe and dress. No, he said, come as you are. He gave no explanation.

Alarmed, I hurried to their place. As soon as I arrived, they told me to get in their car. We were going somewhere. No explanation of where.

We drove into Washington, D.C., and I remarked that we were getting close to the Kennedy Center. Once there, my daughter and her husband escorted me through the stage entrance to the Eisenhower Theater. The theater’s stage was filled with Steinway grand pianos. I learned that the Kennedy Center was replacing its pianos and was selling off the old ones.

My daughter urged me to try the pianos and decide which one I liked best. The prospect of playing all those pianos excited me, and I set to work. I found one that thrilled me with the beauty of its sound. I tried others but kept coming back to that one. I realized that this was the instrument I had played in the lounge and fallen in love with.

That piano now sits in my living room. Susan had brought me there to select my favorite which she then proceeded to buy for me.

More tomorrow.