Tom Glenn's Blog, page 71

Fun Words

As a writer, I am always fascinated by words, how people use them, how they change meaning over time, and how synonyms differ from one another enough that they all stay in the language. One class of words that particularly intrigues me is invented slang with a humorous undertone, words like gobbledygook, flimflam, shebang, and balderdash. What these words have in common is that they are all, without exception, based on the Anglo-Saxon roots of English—none of them is derived from French, Latin, or Greek. And while I can’t prove it, my sense is that all of them were deliberately invented by individual speakers or writers to express an idea that made them laugh.

Among my favorites in this category are flibbertigibbet, monkeyshine, and taradiddle. The mere sound of these words makes me smile.

I found forty words of this genre in a list of interesting words prepared by Kathy Temean on her website. Each word is unique and stays in the language because no other word has the same precise meaning.

So I invite readers to enjoy a boondoggle and lollygag with this non-highfalutin poppycock set of words. You’ll be boffo at it.

An Artist in Search of Beauty

I admit it. I’m an artist. Through and through. I knew at age six I was born to write, but I tried other arts to see if I could escape my fate. I trained to be a dancer. I studied to be an actor—my major during my first year of college was theater. I worked hard to become a musician and composer. I took a BA in music at the University of California, Berkeley; wrote and performed reams of church music; and taught myself how to play the piano and guitar. I even took a course in conducting and led groups of musicians.

For a number of years, I put art aside altogether and became a linguist and spy—I had a family and needed to support my wife and children, and art doesn’t pay. I was helped by an inborn flare for languages. Then, as I moved up in rank and was assigned subordinates, I led them rather than managing them. I had learned the difference while working with the military on the battlefield during the thirteen years I spent mostly in Vietnam. I was so good at helping my followers be the best they could be that I kept getting promoted until I reached the highest executive ranks in the government.

But in the end, my fate was sealed. The written word wouldn’t leave me in peace. I had to write. And since I was a born artist, I had to write fiction. So I retired as early as I could from the government and devoted myself fulltime to writing. I now have six books and seventeen short stories in print.

Even so, I cheated. Instead of making up stories to tell, I wrote about things that had actually happened. I turned the tales into fiction by attributing things that had happened to me to fictional characters. The critics caught on. They accused me of writing fiction in name only. I plead guilty.

All that said, I haven’t given the reader an accurate picture of what it is like for me to write. I choose to make writing an art. The challenge is to make beauty with words. My sense is that I have succeeded. But that is not for me to judge. Only my readers can decide if I have accomplished my mission. From what they tell me, I conclude that they have forgiven me for writing fiction in name only and enjoy my work. I couldn’t ask for anything better.

Freud: Love and Work

I have written in this blog several times about my agnosticism—my uncertainty about the existence of God—and my unquestioning belief in the reality of the noncorporeal, that which has no physical form.

One philosophical strain avers that only the somatic is real. Anything lacking physical substance is imaginary. It is obvious to me that that way of thinking is unquestionably wrong. The nonmaterial is not only real but more important by far than the material. Creativity and love, for example, motivate us and elevate us above and beyond that which is merely physical.

So I am caught in an apparent contradiction in my own thinking. If I accept the existence of the nonmaterial, what logical arguments do I have to question the existence of God? The answer is that I’m stuck with a lack of strong evidence of the existence of God. But here I sit with my inability to forswear belief.

In this context, I have struggled all my life with the writings of Sigmund Freud, whose name, ironically, means “joy” in German. Sex was at the center of his psychological construct, but he famously said, “Love and work (lieben und arbeiten) are the cornerstones of our humanness.” While both love and work have physical manifestations, both are mental concepts, lacking a material foundation. So my struggle with Freudian psychology as I matured was related to my assessment of the reality of the nonphysical. Modern-day psychologists nowadays largely reject Freud, as I always did. So I can put aside his thinking.

That’s only one example of the philosophies I’ve delved into trying to answer my own questions about the reality of the deity. So here I am baffled by my own inability to come to terms with my understanding of reality. It feels like a permanent dilemma.

Presenting Live (2)

One trick I’ve learned over the years of speaking to an audience is to introduce a moment of silence. I simply stop talking and listen. If I hear occasional coughs and shuffling about, if I see eyes wandering, I know that I have not captured my audience’s undivided attention. But if I hear nothing, see every eye focused on me, detect no motion in the people gathered before me, I know that they are spellbound. The story I have been telling, my words, and my emotions have captivated them.

I often get the spellbound reaction. That’s largely because the material I’m presenting is in and of itself mesmerizing. So much of my story is about life-and-death situations on the battlefield. My most popular presentation is on the fall of Saigon from which I escaped under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. Audiences react to the terror I felt and convey.

So I look forward to speaking to live audiences again. I enjoy watching them react to my story. I cherish the interchanges with them. I take pleasure in watching the emotions I’m feeling reflected in their faces. And I’ll have an opportunity to do just that at 11:00 a.m. today when I do a reading from my books at the Ellicott City 50+ Center. The center is located directly behind the Miller Branch Library at 9421 Frederick Road, Ellicott City.

I’m astonished at the transformation an audience and a microphone can create in me. And I can’t wait to be at it again.

Presenting Live

During the fifteen months of the pandemic lockdown, I have given no presentations or readings before a live audience. Thanks to a faithful friend, I have a working webcam, so I was able to manage a few remote appearances. I have missed the face-to-face contact.

But now, with the vaccine being administered widely, I’m being invited again to do in-person readings and presentations. I’m delighted. I have missed greatly being able to see, hear, and touch the human beings I want to communicate with.

I’ve written here before about a peculiarity that affects me. I am normally introverted, shy, and quiet. In groups, I have little to say but listen carefully. All that changes when you put me behind a microphone in front of an audience. The hidden extrovert suddenly takes over. I can’t wait to slake my thirst for interaction.

The process of communication between a speaker and an audience is little observed and commented on because the subject of the exchange gets all the attention. But it is the process that I crave and most enjoy. Watching audience members who speak is a lesson in human behavior. Some are quiet and self-effacing; others bold and even brash.

But what I enjoy and learn from most is the reaction of the audience members to what I say and how I say it. I watch their faces (if I can see them). I listen carefully to whatever noise they make. I try to sense the atmosphere that they and I have created together.

More next time.

Glenn Reading Time

My apologies to all. I forgot to include the time of my reading on Monday. It’s 11:00 a.m.

Glenn Reading

FYI: On Monday, July 12, 2021, Dr. Tom Glenn will be reading from his books at the Ellicott City 50+ Center, located at 9401 Frederick Road, Ellicott City, Maryland 21042. Glenn will focus on his two most recent books, Secretocracy, a novel about the Trump administration’s attack on an intelligence budgeteer, and Coming to Terms, a collection of short stories about coping with life’s reverses.

Glenn’s writing derives from his eleven years of providing signals intelligence support to combat forces on the battlefield in Vietnam, his escape under fire when Saigon fell, his work in the upper levels of the U.S. intelligence community, and his twelve years of working with the dying, starting with the AIDS epidemic. A much sought-after speaker and reader, Glenn now has six books of fiction and seventeen short stories in print.

The Ellicott City 50+ Center is directly behind the Miller Branch Library at 9421 Frederick Road, Ellicott City.

Profit-Driven Health Care

I have written before and will probably write again about the practice in the U.S. of making health care a profit-making business instead of a human right. That makes us the only major country in the world not to offer universal health care to its citizens. All the countries of Europe as well as all those that make up the U.K., including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, provide health care to their people. In fact, 116 nations world-wide do so. But we do not.

Why do we persist in making medicine a profit-driven proposition? I believe we Americans are inclined to see life in general in terms of profit and loss. We honor rugged individualism rather than cooperation. We condemn socialism, especially socialized medicine.

Defenders of for-profit medicine point out that most Americans have health insurance which covers the cost of medical care. But health insurance is a money-making business and therefore more expensive than government-provided health care. And, according to one source, about 44 million Americans have no health insurance. Another 38 million have inadequate health insurance that doesn’t cover the cost of their medical care.

Probably related is that life expectancy for Americans is lower than that in other modern democracies. The U.S. ranks 26th of 35 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries for life expectancy, with an average life expectancy of 79 years. Hong Kong, Japan, Macao, and Switzerland, for example, all have life expectancies over 84.

When will we Americans wake up and realize that universal health care provided by the government is vastly preferable to for-profit medicine? It is time for the U.S. to join the modern democracies of the world and start taking care of our citizens.

The Four Guys

Several days ago, I invited three friends to visit me for snacks and conversation to celebrate the end of the pandemic lockdown. We spent the afternoon on my deck talking about every subject that occurred to us. Two of us are progressives, two conservatives. But I, about as progressive as you can get, listened carefully to my two conservative friends explain their positions. They are intelligent, articulate, and honest. I always learn from them.

During the more than a year of the pandemic, I stayed isolated. Given my age and history of lung cancer, I was an obvious target for the coronavirus. So I saw no one. Once every week to ten days, I went grocery shopping, masked and keeping a six-foot distance from all others. I was one of the first to be vaccinated. Insulation kept me alive.

The Men’s Forum at a local senior center is about to resume its weekly meetings. My American Legion post has started meeting again once a month. So soon I’ll again have regular contact with others. What a blessing that will be. And I suspect that us four guys will continue to meet regularly.

The pandemic lockdown is ending. Hurray.

The Murderous Dr. Cream

I have just finished reading and reviewing Dean Jobb’s The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2021), due out later this month. As soon as the review is published on the internet, I’ll post the URL here.

Set in the late nineteenth century, Cream’s story is remarkable because he was a respectable and educated man—a physician—who nevertheless committed as many as ten murders in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. before he was caught, tried, and executed.

The book, unfortunately, is of a genre I’m not partial to: researched in depth and complete down to the minutest detail. But if I am to be fair, my personal taste cannot dictate the judgment expressed in the review. So I took a deep breath and buried myself in the particulars of Cream’s life and morbid career. The description of his execution by hanging was as detailed and specific as the rest of the text. Given my opposition to the death penalty, that section of the book was especially difficult for me.

The end result was, I hope, a fair description and judgment of a very good book of a type I don’t like. I believe that I gave readers an impartial description of a Victorian murder story. It’s up to them to decide if they want to expend the hours necessary to absorb it.

That’s what happens when one agrees to review books written by others: some are to this particular reader’s taste, others not. Personal likes and dislikes cannot shape the outcome.