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. 

"A Tree Sees..." (an occasional poem)

Tom Wright celebrated his 93rd birthday November 22. He often publishes a poem about his window on the world and the tree he watches out his window. Here is a conceit with the tree watching him back:

A Tree Sees…

Behind its leaves

Into the windows that squint out upon the world,

Through bifocals, trifocals, and cataracts.

Theirs are the heroic faces of the septuagenarians,

the octogenarians,

and the merely elderly

but not yet old.

Not old like the tree that watches,

the observant tree,

whose life cycle has its own seasonal rhythm and perspective.

The human animals come and go.

The trees, stoic, rooted, stand fast and watch.

How Obama screwed up on the ACA

Aside from the 56 million paid to an incompetent foreign web design company to set up the ACA log on system, Obama messed up by omitting two simple words when he promised people they could keep their old health plan if they liked it. Those words were "if legal."
Anyone with the sense to read the provisions of the ACA should know that certain provisions made some old policies illegal, like not covering preexisting conditions, like putting a lifetime cap on coverage, like not including maternity benefits, not providing for annual examinations, etc. Failing to live up to those ACA provisions makes an old policy illegal under the law. But people don't read their own policies and don't pay attention.

Politically savvy readers will realize the passage of the ACA with the cooperation of lobbyists from insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies was possible because they were promised a pool of 47 million new customers, many subsidized by the US government. Who could pass up that deal? So it passed, barely.
Now the insurance companies are scrambling to cash in and the melee is causing confusion and anger.  Eventually the public will say, "Screw the insurance companies! We want Medicare for all." Then we will finally have a single payer plan.
In Denmark where I have access to the tax forms being a potential payer of Danish income taxes I see they have a 5% income tax for health, just as we have a Social Security tax. That pays the so-called premiums for health in Denmark. So why can't we be that smart?

Dear Solicitor:

Harley  L.  Sachs

2545 SW Terwilliger Blvd. Apt. 328

Portland, OR 97201

Dear Solicitor,

Your invitation and information have arrived here and been given careful, thoughtful consideration. As you are no doubt aware, nowadays we get a great number of offers and requests. What we have to do is put them in perspective in consideration of our own financial limitations.  What we are prepared to do is make a counter offer.

I am Harley Sachs, a professionally published author for more than fifty-five years. I retired from teaching in1986 and in the years since have published more than thirty books ranging from memoirs and short stories, to serious novels and mystery “entertainments.” In that long career I have never begged for donations or applied for grants. I am not now asking for money from you, either.

It is important to support the arts, not only the visual arts, but the art of the written word, for little has more staying power over the centuries than the book. However, being an author is a tough business. Thanks to the digitizing of entire libraries, an American author today is in direct competition with every other author who ever lived whose works are published in English.

The only way you can significantly support this author is to buy a book. I do not personally sell books. I do not have the capital or the space for an inventory of printed copies. I depend on my vendors, such as Amazon.com, B&N, and lulu.com for actual sales.

If you’d like to have the personal satisfaction of having supported an elderly American author in poor health, this is your opportunity. Take a careful look at the enclosed list. Visit one of the vendors and read a free sample. I know you will find a title you will enjoy. The price is right. Some are priced under $3.00! How can you go wrong?

                                     Harley L. Sachs