PART ONE
Should a person that has never set foot on the soil of southeast Asia tackle a topic like this? Should the Kardashians be allowed to have children? Probably not, but that's what reality television and blogs are all about.
Predictably, the first wave of authors to write of the war and its effect on the national psyche were Vietnam vets, who wrote first person accounts, even when labeled as fiction. Tim O'brien wrote an eloquent collection of stories based on his time (1968 to 1971) as an infantryman in A Company. The Things They Carried, a standard of the genre, was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1990.
As a counter-intelligence agent for the Army, Robert Olen Butler saw the war from a different perspective all together. His most lauded work, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, is not based in Vietnam but in Louisiana, and explores the experience of a group of southeast-asia refugees who immigrate to the United States. It did win the Pulitzer in 1993, but in reading the work one does not get the sense that this is the quintessential volume on the war. Indeed, On Distant Ground, one of his earlier novels about an intelligence office stationed in Saigon, is more accessible and gives the reader a better sense of that awful conflict. Is it the 'final word'? The book that once absorbed makes further reading on the subject superfluous? The savagery and the moral dissonance are there, but perhaps on too small a scale.
'The final word': perhaps the moniker shouldn't be used at all. But it was, by another reviewer after reading Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. More need not be written, so it was said. I can imagine more than one reason why one might say that about a novel:
1) the reviewer truly believes the work to be the ultimate expression of whatever passed for truth in Vietnam.
2) the story, which is complex, non-linear, and follows a number of unrelated characters to a final endpoint, may have frustrated the reader to the point of 'enough already!'
3) the reviewer was fed up not just with Tree of Smoke, but with everything about the war, and wanted the bibliography, the hand-wringing, the discussion on Vietnam closed.
I slogged through the novel. It asks a lot of the reader. Whether, in the end, the author adequately rewards those tough enough to the final word, I'll leave to each to decide. I finished the book 3 years ago and at the time I agreed with the aforementioned reviewer, placing myself in categories #2 and #3.
Imagine my surprise when, a few months ago, my finger clicked the download button to purchase yet another Vietnam novel. Why did I do it? Because in so many ways, the war defined my generation. Because, as a member of the class of '73, I was lucky. I signed up for the draft, but never had to serve. Because I didn't want it to end that way, frustrated by a book written about a frustrating war. Because when I ask vets what was it like -- dragging through mud and buffalo shit to their elbows, slashing through rain forest as dense and forgiving as a wire brush, the leeches sucking blood from flesh already dehydrated by heat and humidity -- they are not so strangely silent. Because I wanted a 'final word' of my own.
Enter Matterhorn.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
The Natural Right Brain Enhancement System, Post-script
A number of Fiction in the Forge followers have asked:
Oh Lord of the NRBES is there an easier way? I too want a fully functional right hemisphere, but I can't afford to flay my face with a razor one day and butcher the petunias the next. What can I do?
I read your question, dear blogger, and the first voice I hear is that of my father. He, the king of obscure aphorisms, has always said, "tighter than a bull's ass at fly time."
Apropos of nothing I know, but he always says it. Now, regarding your predicament, there is hope. I admit that even a pliant, adaptable program like the NBRES has it's limits. Sick of watching the knife sweep butter off the toast, across your wrist, and up your arm? Tired of stumbling across intra-office emails that make fun of your personal grooming/appearance? The NBRES is not for everyone. And still, you long for a right brain that serves as more than a counterweight to keep you from veering always to the left.
The solution is simple, but not easy: learn to play a musical instrument.
Oh Lord of the NRBES is there an easier way? I too want a fully functional right hemisphere, but I can't afford to flay my face with a razor one day and butcher the petunias the next. What can I do?
I read your question, dear blogger, and the first voice I hear is that of my father. He, the king of obscure aphorisms, has always said, "tighter than a bull's ass at fly time."
Apropos of nothing I know, but he always says it. Now, regarding your predicament, there is hope. I admit that even a pliant, adaptable program like the NBRES has it's limits. Sick of watching the knife sweep butter off the toast, across your wrist, and up your arm? Tired of stumbling across intra-office emails that make fun of your personal grooming/appearance? The NBRES is not for everyone. And still, you long for a right brain that serves as more than a counterweight to keep you from veering always to the left.
The solution is simple, but not easy: learn to play a musical instrument.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
The Natural Right Brain Enhancement System, Part Three
So, how's it going, all you NRBES mavens? By now, squeezing toothpaste onto the brush should be second nature. Brushing competence takes longer, so don't be surprised if you hear a "tsk, tsk" the next time your oral hygenist looks in your mouth. And ladies, take care with the mascara. Too much in the wrong place can cause pink eye by Maybelline, or worse, give you the post-apocolyptic Alice Cooper look.
We move now into the yard and garden. Now, more than ever, the warnings are well heeded. If you've a mind to grab a weed whacker and do it left-handed -- DON'T! The grips supplied by most manufacturers assume right-handedness. I don't want a set of bloody ankles on my conscience. Start with hedge trimmers and shovels, rakes and hand spades.
You may note at this point that your cerebral cortex is not the only whithered, deconditioned part of your anatomy. In addition to poor co-ordination and strength, your left side has zero endurance. Use the hand clippers for just five minutes and you'll know what I mean. When the muscles in your forearm start to burn and your hand contracts into a claw, switch to the right and move on to the next evergreen. The bush just finished probably looks like it was clipped by a blind barber, but the next won't look so bad.
When planting annuals or bulbs, watch your spacing. Somehow your left hadn doesn't have the same sense of balance and proportion that your right takes for granted. Concentrate. Do a corner of the flower bed right handed and use it as a template. Pause frequently, take a step back and look at your work--with both eyes.
Weeding the yard and garden is best done by hand. Pulling stubborn tap roots from unyielding earth is a good work out for the grip. If the use of herbicides cannot be avoided be warned: the novice NRBES disciple should use Round-Up with extreme caution. Better to go with Weed-B-Gone (or a similar grass-friendly herbicide) until your eye-to-hand co-ordination on the left is at least seventy-five percent of what it is on the right. How can you tell when you're ready? If you can't snatch a flying mosquito with your left hand, then don't grab the Round-up with it either. Less than that and your neighbors will wonder if your lawn got scent-marked by a pack of wild dogs with toxic urine.
We move now into the yard and garden. Now, more than ever, the warnings are well heeded. If you've a mind to grab a weed whacker and do it left-handed -- DON'T! The grips supplied by most manufacturers assume right-handedness. I don't want a set of bloody ankles on my conscience. Start with hedge trimmers and shovels, rakes and hand spades.
You may note at this point that your cerebral cortex is not the only whithered, deconditioned part of your anatomy. In addition to poor co-ordination and strength, your left side has zero endurance. Use the hand clippers for just five minutes and you'll know what I mean. When the muscles in your forearm start to burn and your hand contracts into a claw, switch to the right and move on to the next evergreen. The bush just finished probably looks like it was clipped by a blind barber, but the next won't look so bad.
When planting annuals or bulbs, watch your spacing. Somehow your left hadn doesn't have the same sense of balance and proportion that your right takes for granted. Concentrate. Do a corner of the flower bed right handed and use it as a template. Pause frequently, take a step back and look at your work--with both eyes.
Weeding the yard and garden is best done by hand. Pulling stubborn tap roots from unyielding earth is a good work out for the grip. If the use of herbicides cannot be avoided be warned: the novice NRBES disciple should use Round-Up with extreme caution. Better to go with Weed-B-Gone (or a similar grass-friendly herbicide) until your eye-to-hand co-ordination on the left is at least seventy-five percent of what it is on the right. How can you tell when you're ready? If you can't snatch a flying mosquito with your left hand, then don't grab the Round-up with it either. Less than that and your neighbors will wonder if your lawn got scent-marked by a pack of wild dogs with toxic urine.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
The Natural Right Brain Enhancement System, Part Two
Remember, every famous folly begins with a nidus of truth, and so too the NRBES. My quest for a functional right brain began with one of the oldest cliques in the book: "either use it or loose it." Accept this as your mantra and come along with me.
Frosted fecalith #2: The disclaimer. The NRBES requires lifestyle changes that may lead to unwanted attention from strangers, minor cuts and abrasions, and suspicious glances from your significant other.
First of all, bear in mind our goal: revival of the remnant that was once your fully-functional right brain. While success may take from you all sense of time and an above average credit rating, the rewards are worth it. Writers, find the final path to the climax of your story. Artists, the beauty in every-day things that were once a blur will come into sharp relief. Musicians, let the melody soar through every cleft without making a deal with the devil. Enough already. This is how I did it. The concepts are universal. Adjust them to your life.
Step One-the day begins. I walk into the bathroom and grab the vitamin bottle not with my right hand but my left. Then it's the shave cream followed by the razor, the comb through my hair: all left handed.
I'm dressing now, but when I grab the belt I circle the waist not counter clockwise, but the other way, pulling tight and centering the prong in the hole with my left hand. It will feel weird, but do it 24 times in a row and it becomes habit.
I tie my shoes left-handed, but only on days when i have a good half hour to spare. Not even I, lord of the NRBES, have mastered this step. I keep trying. When I succeed it can lead to one thing - a NY Times best seller.
Step Two-breakfast. My right hand recovers from the shock. Laced by a left uppercut in the bath, it springs off the mat and reclaims its rightful (no pun) place. My right hand reaches for the cereal bowl, the milk, the blueberries, and I stop. Nothing short of sweaty, grunting effort puts the dominant hand back at my side. I take a breath, and force the frail opposite to sort, grasp, carry everything to the table. By this time I am twenty minutes into the day and thirty minutes behind; but the quest continues. Cereal and milk pour into the bowl, I drink my o.j. and use the spoon, all left handed.
I must admit, in the first days doing the NRBES the mornings were ugly. By the time I got out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, there were half a dozen facial knicks dripping blood into my Frosted Mini-Wheats. Milk dribbled off my chin and my left hand wielded the spoon with all the grace of a lobster holding chopsticks.
Frosted fecalith #3: Don't let Gillette fool you, in an untrained hand even the Mach3 Turbo is a dangerous weapon.
For those with the temerity to slog through the initial shock of what can only be described as a self-induced palsy, the payoff is huge. Within days of starting the NRBES my writing took on a sheen it had never had before. Point-of-view was consistent; character development seemed to be in the hands of Philip Roth. And though I still struggle with passive verb intrusions, dialogue rolls and snaps and conjugation has been a revelation.
Now faithful blogger, enough for today. By now your right brain is exhausted and your left in open rebellion. In my next post we leave the friendly confines of hearth and home and take on garden tools.
Frosted fecalith #2: The disclaimer. The NRBES requires lifestyle changes that may lead to unwanted attention from strangers, minor cuts and abrasions, and suspicious glances from your significant other.
First of all, bear in mind our goal: revival of the remnant that was once your fully-functional right brain. While success may take from you all sense of time and an above average credit rating, the rewards are worth it. Writers, find the final path to the climax of your story. Artists, the beauty in every-day things that were once a blur will come into sharp relief. Musicians, let the melody soar through every cleft without making a deal with the devil. Enough already. This is how I did it. The concepts are universal. Adjust them to your life.
Step One-the day begins. I walk into the bathroom and grab the vitamin bottle not with my right hand but my left. Then it's the shave cream followed by the razor, the comb through my hair: all left handed.
I'm dressing now, but when I grab the belt I circle the waist not counter clockwise, but the other way, pulling tight and centering the prong in the hole with my left hand. It will feel weird, but do it 24 times in a row and it becomes habit.
I tie my shoes left-handed, but only on days when i have a good half hour to spare. Not even I, lord of the NRBES, have mastered this step. I keep trying. When I succeed it can lead to one thing - a NY Times best seller.
Step Two-breakfast. My right hand recovers from the shock. Laced by a left uppercut in the bath, it springs off the mat and reclaims its rightful (no pun) place. My right hand reaches for the cereal bowl, the milk, the blueberries, and I stop. Nothing short of sweaty, grunting effort puts the dominant hand back at my side. I take a breath, and force the frail opposite to sort, grasp, carry everything to the table. By this time I am twenty minutes into the day and thirty minutes behind; but the quest continues. Cereal and milk pour into the bowl, I drink my o.j. and use the spoon, all left handed.
I must admit, in the first days doing the NRBES the mornings were ugly. By the time I got out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, there were half a dozen facial knicks dripping blood into my Frosted Mini-Wheats. Milk dribbled off my chin and my left hand wielded the spoon with all the grace of a lobster holding chopsticks.
Frosted fecalith #3: Don't let Gillette fool you, in an untrained hand even the Mach3 Turbo is a dangerous weapon.
For those with the temerity to slog through the initial shock of what can only be described as a self-induced palsy, the payoff is huge. Within days of starting the NRBES my writing took on a sheen it had never had before. Point-of-view was consistent; character development seemed to be in the hands of Philip Roth. And though I still struggle with passive verb intrusions, dialogue rolls and snaps and conjugation has been a revelation.
Now faithful blogger, enough for today. By now your right brain is exhausted and your left in open rebellion. In my next post we leave the friendly confines of hearth and home and take on garden tools.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
The Natural Right-Brain Enhancement System, Part One
Hello and welcome from Wisconsin all authors, artists, and insomniacs. I am a writer still dangling from the long and winding learning curve that is the path to a published book. Dangling: yes, and precariously so. Like Quasimodo hanging from a gargoyle, my feet paw the air looking for an edge. The hope is always the same, that the next leg up will elevate me to the flat part of the curve, to the world of agents and, dare I say it, a publishing contract.
Not a unique ambition. If you see yourself, read on.
An opening frosted fecalith (Google that one oh word-focused, logic-bound night ranger, and see what you get): Polishing your pitch, perfecting the outline, writing a killer query letter – I'll leave that to the speakers you can find at hundreds of conferences. I want to talk about something else, something we all have but, to our detriment, choose to ignore. I speak of the right brain.
I'm talking now, to the right-handers . The left-handers, you other 10%, no one knows what the hell is going on with you. But if you feel compelled to read on, feel free. I promise, there will be no attempt to infuse you with any of the organizational skills you so sorely need but so absolutely abhor.
Right-handers are left-brained. We are organized, analytical, on time, and listen to what is being said. All worthy and useful you might say, and rightly (no pun intended) so. But when it comes to simultaneous processing, free association, and lateral connections we're in muck butt high to a blue heron. Let's face it. In their place, this last little bit of brain salad is valuable, especially to an author stuck halfway through a manuscript, looking at a dead-end character, and finding the dreaded "hole in the plot" all at the same time. This situation calls for a new strategy. Throw away the writer's manual and grab some intuition.
And were to find it? The right brain.
Of course its not as easy as all that. As a life-long right hander you are probably like the rest of us. The parietal lobe, the frontal cortex of your right brain, they've been ignored, nay starved and abused for too long. To paraphrase Seinfeld, you've been going right so long, you couldn't go left to save your manuscript. Where there ought to be healthy folds of gray matter, in your right hemi-cranium there is nothing but a desiccated blob of grape jelly. It's taken years for this to happen, fixing it will take some time.
What you need is blogart1109's Natural Right Brain Enhancement System! This has been laboratory tested and clinically proven by a grand total of one person – me. NRBES exacts no extra time on your part, does not require the purchase of proprietary tools, books, or DVDs, and because it is on the internet, you know it has to work. The risks to life and limb, while they may prompt an unplanned visit to the urgent care center, will rarely send one to the Emergency Room or lead the dreaded reverse trans-handedness disorder.
So, all of you right-brain cripples, get out your pen and paper and start taking notes (pardon, I forgot who I'm talking to. You already have them out and at the ready). In my next post I will show how you too can have a functioning right brain, almost as good as the one possessed by your scatter-brained left-handed brother.
Not a unique ambition. If you see yourself, read on.
An opening frosted fecalith (Google that one oh word-focused, logic-bound night ranger, and see what you get): Polishing your pitch, perfecting the outline, writing a killer query letter – I'll leave that to the speakers you can find at hundreds of conferences. I want to talk about something else, something we all have but, to our detriment, choose to ignore. I speak of the right brain.
I'm talking now, to the right-handers . The left-handers, you other 10%, no one knows what the hell is going on with you. But if you feel compelled to read on, feel free. I promise, there will be no attempt to infuse you with any of the organizational skills you so sorely need but so absolutely abhor.
Right-handers are left-brained. We are organized, analytical, on time, and listen to what is being said. All worthy and useful you might say, and rightly (no pun intended) so. But when it comes to simultaneous processing, free association, and lateral connections we're in muck butt high to a blue heron. Let's face it. In their place, this last little bit of brain salad is valuable, especially to an author stuck halfway through a manuscript, looking at a dead-end character, and finding the dreaded "hole in the plot" all at the same time. This situation calls for a new strategy. Throw away the writer's manual and grab some intuition.
And were to find it? The right brain.
Of course its not as easy as all that. As a life-long right hander you are probably like the rest of us. The parietal lobe, the frontal cortex of your right brain, they've been ignored, nay starved and abused for too long. To paraphrase Seinfeld, you've been going right so long, you couldn't go left to save your manuscript. Where there ought to be healthy folds of gray matter, in your right hemi-cranium there is nothing but a desiccated blob of grape jelly. It's taken years for this to happen, fixing it will take some time.
What you need is blogart1109's Natural Right Brain Enhancement System! This has been laboratory tested and clinically proven by a grand total of one person – me. NRBES exacts no extra time on your part, does not require the purchase of proprietary tools, books, or DVDs, and because it is on the internet, you know it has to work. The risks to life and limb, while they may prompt an unplanned visit to the urgent care center, will rarely send one to the Emergency Room or lead the dreaded reverse trans-handedness disorder.
So, all of you right-brain cripples, get out your pen and paper and start taking notes (pardon, I forgot who I'm talking to. You already have them out and at the ready). In my next post I will show how you too can have a functioning right brain, almost as good as the one possessed by your scatter-brained left-handed brother.
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