ELDORADO WRITING

The Night I Met Valerie Plame and Ambassador Joseph Wilson

2008-01-13T13:29:00.000-08:00

One night I attended a lecture by Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA agent “outed” by the Bush administration, for her husband’s (Ambassador Joe Wilson) finding no uranium sales in Niger to Iraq--to get back at the Ambassador for destroying Bush’s rationale for war in Iraq. After her 40-minute speech, there was a moderated discussion with her and her husband on stage.

Dr. Bill Moore and I arrived about 20 minutes early and immediately encountered Joe Wilson greeting friends in the audience. Seeing me in a wheelchair, he quickly came over to help Bill get me positioned in the second row. He introduced himself (as if I didn’t know), and I introduced myself. I said two things that caught his notice. “You and your wife are my heroes for standing up to Bush”; also I told him I had taught for 14 years at Penn State, Valerie’s alma mater. Thereafter he kept bringing his friends over to introduce me to them (they called him “Joe,” I called him “Mr. Ambassador”). This went on for about four rounds until the lights dimmed, and he insisted on shaking my hand every time, each time claiming he was not a hero but “an ordinary citizen doing his civic duty.” He was dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, western shirt, and string tie.

Valerie was then introduced to huge applause. She is very beautiful, but also quite thin—little bosom and small hips. This was emphasized by her long black tight-fitting dress without any decoration. She is a well-spoken and charming lady, 44, who recounted the last 4 ½ years of the trials Bush and his toady, Scooter Libby, put her and her family through. No self-pity at all, just happiness to be out of Washington and living in Santa Fe with her husband and 7-year-old twins who were visible in the wings. She got much applause when she mentioned her lawsuit against Bush, Cheney (bigger applause), Rove, Armitage, and Libby and nine other “John Doe’s” whom they expected to surface. (“Outing” a CIA agent is a federal offense.) She was very likable, and the packed house of 800+ was entirely on her side. (As we entered the theater, people outside were offering hundreds of dollars for scalped tickets.)

Following the lecture, the panel discussion started. Valerie, who would never utter a four-letter word, has a husband who was really angry and uttered many. Each time Valerie cringed and at one point mentioned that she was trying to clean up his language for the sake of the kids. He had many lines that got laughs and wild applause, but I thought his best was on Bob Novak, the reporter who outed her in print. “Bob Novak is a Hollywood tabloid writer who trolls the sewers of Washington for any lump of filth he can find and then shapes it into his column.” The imagery was totally visual! The only thing Valerie said that was “dangerous” is “President Bush is a traitor and has committed treason.” Never “Bush,” always “President Bush.”

Then came the book-signing in the lobby of her recently published Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House. Lines were out the door, but Bill Moore used my wheelchair to plow people out of the way, eventually getting me next to her behind the table. Trying to look official, I started to take books from the next person in line, tuck the flap of the jacket into the title page so she could open it and sign it quickly. Finally after about six of these, she looked at me quizzically and asked me if I wanted a book signed. Bill Moore said to her, “Yes, he’s the Penn State professor.” She seemed to recognize the concept and signed it “For Jack, Valerie Plame Wilson.”

We then bulldozed our way out. It was a thrilling evening to be in the room with so many angry people who finally found somebody heroic and on their side.

Neologisms

2007-12-06T17:26:00.000-08:00

NEW WORDS FOR 2007: Essential vocabulary additions for the workplace (and elsewhere) provided by a friend.

1. BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missedor a project failed, and who was responsible.

2. SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

3. ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard .

4. SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

5. CUBE FARM: An office filled with cubicles.

6. PRAIRIE DOGGING: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

7. MOUSE POTATO: The on-line, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

8. SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What Yuppies get into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

9. STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

10. SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

11. XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.

12. IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them.

13. PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

14. ADMINISPHERE: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

15. 404: Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error Message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested site could not be located.

16. GENERICA: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.

17. OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by mistake).

18. WOOFS: Well-Off Older Folks.

19. CROP DUSTING: Surreptitiously passing gas while passing through a Cube Farm.

From John Coyne Babbles

2007-08-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

Let me recommend a book for you to read. The Last Great Superpower by John Kenny Crane. The novel just came out from Cornerstone Press of St. Louis. Crane is an academic who can write. Years ago he wrote a wonderful novel entitled, The Legacy of Ladysmith published by Simon and Schuster. It won the McNaughton Foundation Award, and also was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. He's back with this novel that is set in Mexico where he lives part of the year. Crane's last job was as Dean of the College of Humanities and the Arts at San Jose State University, the largest college in the universtiy system, and now he edits manuscripts [if you are working on one; he has been a great help to me.] Jack can be reached at bajajack1@yahoo.com
This novel is set in Punta Santo Tomas and is a serious piece of fiction. It is the story of a Mexican teenager who meets a violent end and involves the expat Americans who live in retirement there. Check out www.eldoradowriting.com and look for the novel. More later about the book.

The History of Some Common Cliches

2007-06-24T16:07:00.000-07:00

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and still smelled pretty good by June . However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children, Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip off the roof. Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway. Hence the saying a "thresh hold."

In those days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme, "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old. "

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper crust."

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait to see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a "wake."

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "dead ringer."

Fictional License

2007-06-06T14:47:00.000-07:00

Fiction writers require real-life events and people to trigger their imaginations to create plots and characters. If they are imaginative enough, as Hemingway once said, “any writer worth his salt can create better people than God can.” So writers project all kinds of conflicts for their characters to endure and all kinds of means for them to handle or mishandle them. Generally, writers agree that it takes five real people to create one good fictional character. A one-to-one relationship between real person and events and character and his or her situation is called nonfiction. However, there is a type of novel called a roman a cléf in which the author reduces the distinction between real person and literary character and is generally used for satiric purposes. Philip Roth’s Our Gang, about the pre-Watergate Nixon administration, is a case in point. Even then Roth had to rename the president, Trick E. Dixon, and have him wind up in a conflict with the Boy Scouts of America. Roth is a novelist who does not have to abide by known facts. Bob Woodward, on the other hand, is a nonfiction writer, indeed historian, who cannot, indeed must not, tamper with facts. He can speculate on what he does not know for sure, but he must label them as such. Fiction is creative; nonfiction is factual.

Current Cliches to Avoid

2007-05-21T13:22:00.000-07:00

Clichés are words and phrases that were clever the first time, maybe the second, but overuse labels a writer as a lazy hack.

Happy camper

Snail mail

In any way, shape, or form

The whole enchilada

Stay the course

Bring ‘em on

Been there, done that

Stay on message

The bottom line is

Keep your eye on the ball

Sort out

The smoking gun becomes a mushroom cloud

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Skyrocketing prices

With us or against us

A lot of BS

Kill or be killed

Head Honcho

The richest one percent

Average American

The little guy

Trophy wife

Toy boy

Two Ways to Write a Book

2007-05-01T16:06:00.000-07:00

DUNKIRK: FIGHT TO THE LAST MAN WAS A GOOD READ, BUT IT READ TOO MUCH LIKE A TEXTBOOK. TOO MUCH INFORMATION FOR MY TASTE AND WAS TOUGH TO READ AND KEEP TRACK OF WHO'S WHO AND WHO'S WHERE DOING WHAT. I DON'T RECOMMEND THIS FOR LIGHT READING. (Amazon Customer Review of Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man.)

In depth analysis of the global economies and its effect on American Jobs and American Corporations. What I really like is the fact that you don’t have to be a Ph.D. in Economics to relate or understand the book. The author does an excellent job to explain his point of view. (Amazon Customer Review of Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat)

I have no doctorate in History, but I have read many books about World War II. This one, Dunkirk, was the most difficult to get through because it read “too much like a textbook” when it would have been much better as an engaging narrative of a crucial episode in the history of the world. The World is Flat has been on the New York Times Book Review “Bestseller List” for two years. Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man has yet to appear there; while it is a later book, it has been available since November. I have read both books and thoroughly agree with these reviews.

I have to admit that I bought the Dunkirk book because I’ve long had an interest in the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the beaches of France in 1940, without which the Germans would probably have won WWII; but I found the The World Is Flat more interesting and readable. I do not have a doctorate in Economics either, but it was clearly written and well explained.

The Man Who Compelled Me To Write

2007-05-01T15:56:00.000-07:00

I was fortunate enough in my freshman year at St. Louis University to take English 1, Composition and Rhetoric, from a nattily dressed (then) bachelor professor from Memphis named Dr. Albert J. Montesi, or “Crazy Al” as we affectionately came to call him. He spent most of the class session talking about whatever national or international horror that had most spooked him for the day; after about five different Cold War calamities, he told us to write an essay on one of them. For some reason he liked my writing and invited me to join the Writers’ Institute, a substitute for English 2.

The Writers’ Institute consisted of little instruction but much practice—we had to produce a story every week! Talk about writer’s block! Of course, many of the twelve of us fell way behind, but I never did. For every good story, I wrote three or four awful ones, just to keep up. “That’s okay, son,” Crazy Al would reassure me, “we all have to get bad stuff out of our systems.” Class sessions consisted of student stories being read aloud and then critiqued. This was all done anonymously. At the end of the semester, we were asked to vote on the best writer. Since we did not know who had written what, the vote was a tie since we all voted for ourselves.

The thing about Al was he compelled you to write—the written word oozed out of his pores and was supposed to ooze out of yours. If you had a killer calculus exam one week and saw Al coming toward you, you crossed the street to avoid his inevitable question: “What are you writing this week?” He kept track of you through all four years and hoped you would not disappoint him. In my freshman year, his star senior writer was John Coyne, a standard that you felt you had to attain! John has gone on to write more books than I have, drawing regularly on his experiences in the Peace Corps. His most recent book, 4.5 stars on Amazon’s 5-star scale, is The Caddie Who Knew Ben Hogan, published by St. Martin’s and due out in paperback this month. Tough row to hoe!

All of us who studied under Al never forgot him nor did he forget us. We were often invited to his home in a gentrified section of St. Louis. In 1987 he invited me to give the “Montesi Lecture,” an endowed engagement. I was proud to be chosen—but I had forgotten one thing over the years. He was a horrible driver, his mind always on writing. The following day he “drove” me to see the Remington traveling exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum in Forest Park. He was a small man who viewed the road through the space under the top of the steering wheel and the dashboard. He always bought used cars, the biggest boats from the past. Lane lines on the roadway were as meaningless as Morse Code to Al. He swam all over them. Kingshighway Blvd., the major north-south artery at midtown, had four lanes in each direction. Al haphazardly used all four and, at times, parts of a fifth. Serenading horns were in continual concert—you felt you were an American in Paris (or at least in St. Louis). Al would roll down his window, stick his arm out, and gesture obscenely at anyone who leaned on his or hers too long for his taste. All the while he was talking to his terrified passengers about writing. From Memphis, Al had little tolerance for the honking of minority drivers. They received shouted epithets as well as obscene gestures. Al’s passengers ducked down below the windows. Al was no racist for he treated minority students the same as he did the rest of us. Streets just were something Al owned. Even white kids, pedaling in the bike lane, were cursed if Al felt he needed to be in it for some reason.

The worst were turns. He would make left turns out of the center lane and wind up in the oncoming traffic lane of the street he was aiming to enter. None of this interrupted his chatter about writing. Al lived and breathed writing. Driving was simply an annoyance that he was compelled by Fate to have to endure. Twenty years of not seeing Al had darkened my memory of this fact.

But not of Crazy Al Montesi. Every time I write, his spirit crosses mind. One day he introduced me to the work of a “fine new writer,” William Styron, upon whom I much later wrote an award-winning book. On November 2, 2006, Styron died at the age of 81. On the very same day, Al Montesi passed away. I cannot tell you how old he was; nobody ever seemed to know. I could not write that day or for several days after.