Category Archives: history

“these people are a part of me”

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Unlike the last time I blogged, I’ve kept these posts away from election campaigns. But reading Obama’s speech today, a passage struck me that could have been written for my entire family:

I can no more disown [Rev. Wright] than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

As an ex-boyfriend once told me about my family, it’s people like that who teach you to live in the space between who someone is and who you want them to be. And that, my friend, is what we call maturity.

(p.s. I swore I would post daily from Winter Soldier: but I have severe illness in my family, and could barely get away to do my job.)

international development mit schlag

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I’ve been sick, on top of everything else, which is why I’ve not posted in the past two weeks.  I’ll make up from it this week, by blogging daily from Winter Soldier.

Meanwhile, stop by Jina‘s shop: you’ll be hooked. She’s doing important, groundbreaking work in Rwanda, documenting a country’s recovery from a very dark place. But that makes it sound like her blog is preachy or sad, and it’s not.  Like all good writing, it goes down  like whipped cream, not Vegemite.

Today’s posting, for example, starts out:  “3 kegs of Mutzig, a DJ with speakers that throbbed like a dance club, and a goat on a spit. Jack Kerouac crossed with Samantha Power with a dash of Angelina Jolie.

That’s how you save the world.

…..the more they stay the same

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Since almost no one reads this blog (unless they’re looking for term-paper help), I’ll reward those of you who do — by sharing some historic tidbits,  jewels meant to be embedded in the story-cloak I’m weaving.

Now we know for sure: military doublespeak has always sounded just like that.

First, as the War of 1812 began and rumors surged through the military town of New-York that young men stationed at Staten Island would be deployed in the invasion of Canada, a pro-government newspaper scoffed:

We are authorized to state that no troops stationed on Governor’s Island have proceeded or are ordered to proceed to the North. The rumour that such an order is to be given is false and groundless.

Read that carefully for what it doesn’t say.

Then, once those same troops had been bloodied in Montreal, news came that the British had set fire to Washington, D.C. Leave it to the recruiters to see a silver lining, according to a young infantryman:

Now, says the orderly sergeant, the British have burnt up all the papers at Washington, and our enlistment for the war among them, we had better give in our names as having enlisted for five years.

At least they hadn’t yet invented stop-loss.

the things we stumble on looking for something else

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 From Peter Doyle, a train conductor who came across  a New York poet named Walt Whitman one evening:

“He was the only passenger; it was a lonely night, so I thought I would go in and talk with him. Something in me made me do it and something in him drew me that way. He used to say there was something in me had the same effect on him. Anyway, I went into the car. We were familiar at once–I put my hand on his knee–we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip–in fact went all the way back with me….From that time on we were the biggest sort of friends.”

And his habit of bold talk rubbed off on you, sir.

500 words

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Everything old is new again.

When did I first hear that Graham Greene wrote 500 words a day? Long before I thought I might try to emulate his multifaceted career:

Graham Greene had a reputation for prophecy; as early as 1955 he published “The Quiet American,” a book about the perils of American meddling in Vietnam. What seems like foresight actually came from his knack for cutting down to the heart of the matter — to appropriate the title of another of his novels, this one about Sierra Leone. It was less that he saw things coming than that he recognized the same scenarios of human foolishness and venality unfolding over and over again. If anything, his was a gift for timing, and it’s still in operation, even now, 13 years after his death. His centennial (Greene was born in 1904) arrives just as some of his most barbed political observations have acquired a brand new — and simultaneously all too familiar — relevance. Greene wrote steadily (500 words a day, every day) and as a result produced a large body of work: journalism, travel writing, novels and stories, plays, memoir, criticism. There are several fat veins in his fiction alone: the “Catholic” novels, thrillers, comic fiction like “Travels With My Aunt” and “Our Man in Havana” (also a spy novel); and harder to categorize works like “The Quiet American,” the book that more than any of his others has stamped itself upon the American imagination.

Those years ago, I mostly was impressed by his daily output — a quota I used steadily during the fiction writing days. Of course, back then I also fantasized about spending my days like Babbo: starting in a cafe, working from 11-5, and going to the theatre every night (if not, perhaps, the riotous drinking after, which ultimately killed him).

But lately, amid the press of Chelsea Now angst and other assorted disasters, that 500-words -a-day rhythm has felt impossible. Until this morning. Now I’m back where I began, albeit maybe a touch wiser (no more fantasies about some millionaire admiring my work so much that I needn’t ever work again). Just focusing on that number 500, setting it as a daily can’t miss,, as a way to amass the marble I need to get this book underway whatever happens.

Many thanks to yesterday’s commenters, who helped me acknowledge my terrified block, and reminded me how to end it. Meanwhile I’ll let myself stay inspired by Greene, who shared Joyce’s capacious Catholic sensibility if not his optimism.

what writers block?

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Last night we were hanging out with our  neighbors Mike and Betsy Fitelson  (a somewhat unprecedented event, despite the fact that he’s a fellow journo and they live in the apartment next to ours). Midway through,   Mike said something I’ve often tossed off just as easily:  “I don’t know what writers’  block means.” Given a deadline, a topic, or even a blank piece of paper,  you just do it, he said.

I nodded,  because in general it’s true: I’m generally a graphomaniac, not the opposite.

But right this second I’ve found myself stalled,  near-unwilling to commit the characters I’d so happily unearthed from history to narrative life. This is unlike me. Part of it’s the lack of a short-term deadline, though that excuse has evaporated of late. Another part, as I told Mike, Betsy and my fiancee Rachel last night: “I think I’m terrified.”

How dare I try to bring these lesser-known figures to life? How dare I try to contend with, and in the process redefine, familiar figures like Andrew Jackson? How dare I try to make them relevant to young men and women still in Iraq,  to those just returning?

Kind of late to tremble on those questions. In addition to my contract with Cal Press, I just accepted money from two foundations after telling them: ” The book’s scheduled publication date, in January 2009, is quite intentional: after the Presidential election, but early enough to have an impact on the floor of Congress and the general public, all of whom can benefit from the light to be cast by the book. The idea is to loosen the story of such dissenters from the ideology that all sides attach to it, using humor and full-throated accuracy to give the whole picture. Clinicians working with veterans and educators with college students can benefit from this resource —— but less so if it arrives years after all those veterans are either safely home or dead.”

Such language, of course, panics me more. Maybe I’m trying to flood my system with stress hormones, to keep myself on mission. But how to jump-start the dream?

the glass slipper of Bryant Park

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Reporting my two Chelsea stories last week, I had cause to learn about the Bank of America’s new tower at One Bryant Park, as I prepared to talk to Jared Gilbert and Alice Hartley of architecture firm Cook+Fox about green buildings. (The BOA tower is slated to earn a “Platinum” certification from the U. S. Green Building Council). Turns out that given the site, near the park that 30 years ago had a seedy rep (so much so that we thought this movie was set there), the architects reached back much further: to the 1853 World’s Fair, when New York decided to best London and build a Crystal Palace.

As I said to a colleague, “That’s all a history slut like me needed to hear.” I spent far too much time reading about the building, designed by architect George Carstensen. It filled what is now Bryant Park with nearly 40,000 square feet of glass, 1,250 tons of iron and 70-foot columns supporting its central dome. Walt Whitman, still in his exuberant “Manahatta” phase, wrote of the result, which supported all that glass with 19th-century iron:

… a Palace,
Lofter, fairer, ampler than any yet,
Earth’s modern wonder, History’s Seven out stripping,
High rising tier on tier, with glass and iron facades,
Gladdening the sun and sky – enhued in the cheerfulest hues,
Bronze, lilac, robin’s-egg, marine and crimson
Over whose golden roof shall flaunt, beneath thy banner, Freedom.

I spend a lot of time writing about newer glass behemoths in this rapidly changing city, like Renzo Piano’s Times Headquarters or Jean Nouvel’s haute condo complex in Chelsea. The closest they get to such poetry is New York Times architectural writers exulting about Nouvel’s “undulating glass wall.” Which is to say, not so close. I wonder if Dostoevsky, who cites the London version of the palace as among his spurs to renounce modernism in favor of dour religious fundamentalism, would have been even more offended by this glass temple of commerce in the Babylon of Manhattan.

He likely was not surprised in 1857, when — in the middle of the annual fair of the American Institute — the building’s “fireproof” wooden/iron frame smoldered and snapped, its glass shattered and melted. (Made me think a little of the recent wave of glass flying to the ground, from the Times building and other glass towers.)

I wonder if Cook+Fox has paid extra attention to that fire as they designed One Bryant Park. Or if somewhere in their minds, in between such laudable goals as energy efficiency and air quality, they hearDostoevsky’s ghost warning that all glass carriages need to be put away at midnight.