Sonja Sotomayor

We attended Sotomayor's talk as part of the overflow flow at the Portland Art Museum. She was wonderful, well spoken,  brilliant, and sincere. I wish my daughter Belinda had been there, for the advice was apt. My only objection was that Sotomayor kept referring to her book. That made it sound like a book tour sales pitch. In reality, what is important is that it is her story. Everyone has a story, and hers is remarkable and noteworthy. But though her name is the only one on the title page, the book itself is not only her own product. It's the product of pages and pages of the people who helped her bring it to fruition. Reading it I cannot help but be reminded that every sentence has been gone over by collaborators, editors, and the publisher many times. So naturally it's a best seller.
Margolin, a local mystery writer of renown, published a children;'s book, but they had to hold his hand through the entire process so the vocabulary of the children's book was appropriate to the audience. They had his name and his idea as selling points.

When an author is published by a major publisher she is part of a stable of authors, just like a horse in a stable of race horses. Illustrators of children's books are also part of a stable. The books produced are properties that belong to the publishers. The author' name becomes a product like Coca Cola. The books are not the sole product of the author, for there are cover designers, book designers, layout people, copy editors, a literary agent etc. who all contribute to the final product. That's not the case of an ebook author. An ebook doesn't need special design and can stand on its content alone. That's the author's own words. I have thirty-five books published. With minor exceptions (at Wing Press) they were done without an editor, designer, and in most cases without an artist. I've done my own illustrations. When I look at the result I can proudly say, "This is my book. I did it by myself." No agent, no editor, no book designer, no middle man, no commissions to pay.

A pitch for "StopRape.com" my new book

Can a young country girl find fame as a network television broadcaster? StopRape.com is a novel set in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula. A third of the population is Finnish-American and people “talk like dat dere, hey.”  This is country with snow six months of the year. The protagonist, native Yooper Kerstin Mikkola, is a TV broadcaster at KDUP with offices at an old airport terminal.  She works for Queen Annie, her mentor and widow of the original station owner. What Kerstin would like is to move up to a network job but she is unknown.

A surprise arrival at the station is Imogene Michener who, as a marine recruit, was raped by her training sergeant Carlos Wayne Sauvenier. Imogene’s traumatic case was blown off by her commander. Suffering from extreme PTSD and discharged, Imogene set up the StopRape.com web site, inviting other victims to post their stories for the world to read. As a result of the web posting, Sauvenier has been castrated by a gang of violent California Women Warrior bikers.

Interviewed on KDUP television without showing her own face, Imogene persuades Kerstin to give her a copy of the recorded but unedited interview, and places the revised pitch for her web site on You-Tube. Now Kerstin is identified, and hate mail follows. Kerstin wanted to be noticed, but not to be vilified by alleged rapists.

Identified as a friend to rape victims, Kerstin helps Heather Rasmussen, who claims she was raped by her boy friend Joe Pascoe and, with Kerstin’s advice, puts his picture up on the StopRape site. All this begins to come together, enmeshing Kerstin Mikkola as a figure in international news. As a reporter, she knows she should not be other than an observer. Out of her depth, she still hopes for network notice. 

How to Save Social Security

One benefit of being a Swedish  and a Danish pensioner is I get to see how different the income taxes are paid there and here in the USA. For instance, in Denmark the income tax includes a 5% health tax which pays for the National Health. That might be the approach we could take in the United States.

This year the Swedes have made a change in the Social Security benefit. Instead of a COLA as we Americans sometimes get, the Swedes adjust the social security pensions according to how much is paid into the system. In 2013 less was paid into the Swedish pension system than was paid out, so they are reducing the pensions by 2,7%. No deficit spending there!

Our government would be more fiscally responsible if it followed the practice of the Scandinavians: an annual health tax to fund Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare and a floating social security benefit. That could save Social Security from eventual bankruptcy.  The Cost of Living Adjustment can go both ways, you know. If the cost of living goes down, so goes the pension plan. Makes sense.

But then, since when did our government’s fiscal policies make any sense?

What about contests?

Normally I avoid literary contests. At the worst, they are a scam, like the national poetry contest that invites wannabe poets. The result of the submission is likely to be a notice that your poem is to be published (copies available for you and your family members, relatives, friends, etc, of course) for only xxx dollars per copy, and you are invited to the national meeting at a fancy hotel (expensive registration, etc.) which turned out to be a way to lure people to a meeting and cash in on he fees. This play on the egos of the gullible and, perhaps, desperate for publication is unethical.

Other contests typically charge an entry fee,  ostensibly to provide an honorarium for the judges who spend their time screening the submissions.  Some of the entry fees are pretty steep, like for the book awards, several hundred dollars. One reason for he steep fees is to weed out those who are too cheap or poor to pay, but also to limit the inevitable flood of submissions. As one reviewer pointed out, some people who are bad writers have money, so a price gate doesn't keep them out.

Publication is like a game, especially academic publishing where one collects brownie points, titles on the resume, like tokens to be used to cash in for raises or promotions. The so-called "little" magazines are like the long dead one, "Tailings,"  that had a very brief life at Michigan Technological University. Being the editor of a campus literary magazine can provide an element of prestige with the department head. Academic authors who write for such endeavors can trade, "I publish your piece and you publish mine." I did a satire of this in a short story in my collection "Misplaced Persons" where the professor, hungry for tenure but not capable of doing great writing himself, decided to edit a book of poetry, set up a contest with a fee, sold copies of the published booklet,  and was doing great until it turned out the winning poem was stolen lyrics from an obscure musical number. He got sued for plagiarism and fired.

There are also reviewers playing their own sort of game. For several years I actually did review children's books on my radio show and gave three books a plug with each broadcast. Over ten years of broadcasting, I acquired a collection of 800 delightful children's books my daughters picked out of the publishers' catalogs. Other reviewers only want books they can sell and might not review at all. Authors review each other's books, too, a variation of "I'll publish your story and you publish mine." My daughter, who used to work for Coffee House Press,won't read anything if it isn't reviewed in the NY Times. I'm not reviewed there, so it's only because I'm her dad that she'll read mine.

The upshot of all this is I don't give much credence to any contest that charges an entry fee.  I do review books I've read on my Kindle. I think if you've posted enough reviews you begin to get some notice as someone with a reliable opinion. Maybe.
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The Death of E-Readers

The Death of E-Readers

Back in May of 2004 Northern Express ran my column “Electric Ink” about a new development in technology. In the time since we have seen the Kindle, Nook and other e-readers have come out using that energy-saving technology. The charge on a plain vanilla Kindle can last a month! Now the e-readers are already on the brink of extinction.

The development of new technology seems to be progressing more and more quickly. Hardly anyone any more remembers eight track tape. That was replaced by cassettes, but now those are hard to find. You can’t find a cassette player now unless it is bundled with a CD player. Want one? Try the Goodwill store.

Beta video recorders disappeared with the advent of VHS. Then VHS was replaced by DVD, and now Blue ray is taking over as the next step. Blockbuster video has gone out of business, thanks to Netflix and streaming video on demand. There’s 3d TV and even 4d, whatever that is.

Amazon.com, Kindle maker of the first truly mass marketed electronic book reader after numerous others like the Hamilton Bookman and Rocket Reader failed, is trying to compete with the Apple I-pad. Amazon has progressed from the basic Kindle, to the Kindle white which is lit for reading in the dark, and the Kindle Fire which incorporates some of the features of the I-pad.

Tablets are fast overtaking tower PCs and can do almost as much as laptops. The I-pad is pricy, though, at around $400. I just bought a marked down Prestige tablet the same size as my  3g Kindle for $50, free shipping.

This is made possible by the ever more compact memory storage.

When computers first were developed there was no memory storage. Shut off, those big main frames forgot everything that wasn’t hard wired into the system. Then we got tape storage of data. Early computers came with little tape cassettes to store memory. Major office computers used spooled tape. Then we got disks. Spell check software for my first computer, a 64k CMP system, was purchased on an 8 inch floppy disk and had to be converted to the then standard 5 inch floppy. Those were replaced by the 1.2 megabyte 3 ½ in disks, and now PCs no longer come with drives to read those, either.

I paid $300 to have a 40 meg hard drive installed on my Compaq luggable PC. Imagine.

The advent of the flash drive changed that, too. You can now buy a 64 gigabyte flash drive that simply plus into a USB port. That’s more memory than my replacement 40 gig hard drive! It’s that kind of memory storage that made the Prestige baby tablet possible. It is a flash drive system, no spinning mechanical hard drive to slow down data access. Tablets today come with 8 or16 gigabytes of storage.

Survival depends on versatility. When I upload a text for an Amason.com ebook I can preview how it will look on the screen of a Kindle, on an I-pad, and even a phone! Thanks goodness the books can be read on all those platforms. Otherwise my books would be as accessible as the Rosetta stone which took twenty-four years to decipher. I joke that I have the secret of eternal life on my 8 track tape player.

Does anyone remember the Linier dedicated word processor? It was quickly replaced by the PC with its variety of off the shelf software.

Like the cassette player, it seems obvious that e-readers like the Kindle and Nook, surpassed by the more versatile tablets, will soon be obsolete. My Kindle cost nearly $200. My tablet cost $50. Now all I have to do with my obsolete brain is figure out how to use it (ambiguity intended). You have to keep running faster and faster just to keep up. Wish me luck. 

End of Year Reflections

Time to pause and reflect. This year I am not going to write one of those brag letters people send about how great the kids are doing, who visited whom and where did we travel during the year because, frankly, nobody cares and those letters are incredibly boring.  Nor am I going to bore you with what they call “organ recitals” here at this old folks’ home, e.g. “How’s your gall bladder?” You don’t want to know our infirmities. Instead, as I approach my 84^th year which begins on January 1 (not a hint for a gift, as I need nothing), let’s think about the meanings of growing old. It has its awesome memories, and profound losses.

The awesome aspect of hanging around this long is that we are history. We have experienced history and have a sense of it that people under sixty simply don’t conceive of. In fact, kids under thirty must find it puzzling and mysterious. You see, I remember.

Consider this: during the brief period when I taught at Southern Illinois University I took a couple of classes from Adjunct Professor Cutright. He was a big man, a genuine capitalist of the type that the Soviets most feared and respected, for he had overseen the installation in Moscow of the American printing presses that put out Isvestia, purveyor of Communist news on an American web press. Cutright was a veteran of World War I and had been in that fearsome battle of the Marne where in hand to hand combat he had bayoneted a German kid and suffered from PTSD for years afterward. He had also been part of the 1914 mine strike in the coal fields of Appalachia. And I knew him. I had shaken the hand of a survivor of the Marne. My God!

I remember the German invasion of Poland in 1937 and the fiery crash of the Hindenberg, described at the time as a terrible tragedy, yet only 24 were killed. Compare that with 9/11 when more died than we lost at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

 I remember the letter my father got from Poland in 1940 reporting the slaughter of his family in Warsaw, a pogrom that happened before the Holocaust got under way.

I remember Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, and listening to the news announcing it while we stood by my father’s radio in the fur shop on South Michigan street in South Bend, Indiana, a building long since torn down. I remember circus elephants parading trunk to tail down the main street announcing the arrival of the Barnum and Bailey circus before the big top burned down. I remember the side show with the bearded lady and the sword swallower but didn’t have the dime needed to see Fatima and her dance of the seven veils. But then, I wasn’t over 18, either. .

I remember the afternoon in a rental cottage in Michiana Shores, Indiana,  in August 1945 the  announcement of the atom bomb bring dropped on Hiroshima, news I heard while writing a sci-fi story (never published).

 I remember the news my brother Morton got in 1950 or 51 when he learned his friend from Central High School in South Bend had been killed when the Chinese came over the Yalu River in Korea by the thousands, a war we missed, thanks to college deferments which lasted until the shooting had stopped.

I remember demonstrating against the Vietnam War while we were being photographed by FBI men looking for agitators. I remember the First Iraq War. I remember the day the Iron curtain came up in Berlin as a simple barbed wire fence, the blockade and the air lift, and later when the subsequent wall came down.

Those who can’t remember all this have missed out on History.

But there are also profound losses. In life there are many passages. There are bar mitzvahs, weddings, baby showers, retirements and, ultimately, deaths and funerals. We expect to outlive our parents, but not our friends. One of the sorrows of growing old is the death of friends. Few of my old pals are still alive. At this writing I think Bob Priest of high schools days is still playing golf in Santa Barbara, but best friend of all, Bob Reinhold, is long dead. So are Duane Burnor, who wanted to be an Ojibwa and Bill Dupree, cave explorer, doctor, and alcoholic.   Alex von Seld and Lenny Rozansky of my days in the Army in Heidelberg are still around, but Richard Ziff died last October. Jay Hutchinson, Ray Bradfield, Patricia Kelso, Sonja Barron and Sven Huldt of Stockholm days are still alive, but Fred Hetter who spotted me as a potential CIA agent, is long gone.

We have very few real friends in life. We have many acquaintances, but not many people who, like us, have experienced the same history. We can talk about World War II, because we were around then, even if we did not personally participate.

Living here among the elderly where the average age is 86, we are like neighbor John Cooper who flew a B17 in the first daylight raid on Berlin and returned alone to the barracks while most of the others were shot down, dead or taken prisoner. In that situation, and in ours, he hesitated to get too close to replacements, for who knew would be the next to go? Because an average of two residents die here every month, we hesitate to make strong attachments..

To sum up: there are awesome memories, which give us perspective on life and politics and human folly. There are also solemn losses and regrets as we see the same errors repeated. We are enriched by our experience and there are fewer and fewer survivors who share that knowledge.

The end of the year is a time of reflection. May your next year be one of peace, health, and prosperity.

Taxing Sex

Taxing Sex

This may shock you. In this state we have huge income from various sin taxes. We have a tax on alcohol, on nicotine addiction (tobacco), and income from gambling on the lottery and video poker machines. When marijuana is legalized here, as it is in Washington, we will have a tax on that. What we don’t have is a tax on sex.

Not all sex is a sin, of course, but prostitution is. It’s time the state intervened and acknowledged the sex workers, both male and female. If the state made sex workers state employees, and provided clean and safe places to work, a.k.a bordellos, with a pension plan and health benefits we would take the amateurs off the street and put the pimps out of business.

This brings to mind a series of changes in the law, e.g. prostitution without a license and IRS rules about deductibles for sex toys and various accouterments connected with the trade. The state is already a shill for gambling, and a dealer in alcohol and other addictive drugs, so why not the state as procurer, e.g. pimp?  

Legalizing and controlling the sex trade would also protect health of the sex workers and reduce the risk of what is clearly a sometimes dangerous profession. But if sex workers were licensed, like many professions such as lawyers, doctors, hair dressers and barbers, they would benefit. And if there were a tax on their services, the state would take in a ton of money we could spend on health care, schools, and public housing.

A tax on sex would be an all around winner.