Good goals and bad beans

We're in our RV, traveling back from a Christmastime visit with our son in San Francisco. The California coast is lovely, but Lord, did we have rain. Driving the freeways proved scary in the Pasadena area, but all in all was not bad. I had the good fortune to visit with fellow writer and book reviewer Jack Shakely in California yesterday, and we spent almost four hours talking about the Internet Review of Books and lots of other subjects. Jack is a fine writer and, I discovered, an equally good conversationalist.

Last night after we parked the RV, it rocked in the wind as a front blew through and brought cold air with it. We're in Tonopah, Arizona, tonight. The local truck stop served up an awful "Mexican combo" that included unappetizing rice and refried beans, Keebler crackers that smelled like an industrial chemical, and chips without salsa. They were out of salsa. But the tacos were passable, and the Miller Light was cold and good.

Now we're both at our computers, with blankets wrapped around our shoulders. I've been working on my review of the Kindle version of Mark Twain's Autobiography tonight, but the venue isn't ideal. My writing goals for 2011 are all set, spurred in part by other bloggers' posts. Publishing a new novel is high on the list, as is learning how to create and market a Kindle version.

Do you set specific goals for the new year? Most effective for me has been setting measurable goals. Last year I decided to lose 35 pounds but lost only 25. That's okay, though. It gives me a new goal.

Five Stories

Now and then, an incident in my life tickles people’s funny bones. It knocks around in my brain for a while or hides quietly in an unused synapse. When it comes back to mind, the question always arises: Can the humor survive the retelling, or did you have to be there? What follow are five such incidents.

The Flag

At a writers’ group in the early ’90s, ten of us sat in the home of a man who was attempting his first short story. He admitted he had no idea where the story was going, but he knew for sure that a murder had occurred in the lobby of an office building not unlike his place of employment. Witnesses found the victim stark naked, lying face-down, “with an American flag sticking out of his ass.”

That certainly caught our attention, but the author didn’t know what to do with the absurd calamity he’d created. Over several meetings, he re-read versions of his story, each including the flag in the butt. Finally, as he droned on, I leaned over and whispered in a woman’s ear, “Americans have landed on the Moon.”

The Guard

My brother Larry had been a guard at the county jail, and he liked working shifts no one else wanted, such as holidays and midnights. Often he had little to do but sit at a desk and read novels. He always told me he had a sweet gig. Then one day he died suddenly, leaving all who knew him in a state of shock. At his wake a tall uniformed deputy sheriff introduced himself to me, offered his condolences, and began telling stories about how Larry could make people laugh. One night the deputy walked in on Larry, who had fallen asleep face-first on his desk.

“Larry! What do you think you’re doing?” the deputy yelled.

Larry woke suddenly and sat up straight. “Oh, I was just praying,” he said.

The Moose

Shortly after my stint in the Air Force, I accompanied a group of Jaycees to visit inmates in the county jail. Several of us spoke to an audience of about 30 inmates. When my turn came to speak, my story went something like this:

Guys, I can relate to being in jail. I just got out of the Air Force, where my last assignment was a year on Fire Island Air Force Station up in Alaska. Fire Island is this godforsaken little island about three miles long and a half mile wide in Cook Inlet, within sight of Anchorage. The inlet has the second highest tides in the world, and at low tide the inlet turns into a mud flat that moose supposedly cross over. There were about two hundred guys on the island manning a radar squadron that was on the lookout for Russian bombers. Wives weren’t allowed, so my wife stayed home in Massachusetts. We spoke on a radio phone once every couple of weeks. All my letters to her were the same: I love you, I miss you, nothing’s happening. Once I was so bored that I slept 17 hours straight.

One day an earthquake shook the windows and briefly woke me up.  Another time there was a small plane crash on the island, and that was terrible. But that was all the excitement for the year. Outside in the winter you could feel ice crystals forming in your throat. Summer days were so long we played softball until almost midnight.

Anyway, I must have hiked every part of that island, down the dirt road to the shore line, hiking through the trees and bushes and around a little pond. So one day when I’d been there about six months I was walking alone back up the dirt road toward my barracks, and out from behind a small shack walked this moose. He—she—I don’t know—moseyed right up to me. It stared down at me with this bored look. Down, yeah. I’m six feet tall, and I only came up to its shoulders. I was a little scared of pissing it off, because it could stomp me to death or drown me in its drool. So I didn’t move, and eventually it just trotted off into the woods, and I was okay.

So that’s kind of why it felt like I’d been in jail too. I’ve gotta tell you, though, after six months without a woman, that moose looked pretty damned good to me.

The Wake

My brother Roy was married for twenty long years to an abusive, alcoholic woman. A meek soul, he took whatever trouble she gave him. Any time he displeased her, which was often, she screamed or threw things at him and threatened him with divorce.

In time, she developed terminal cancer, but her rants continued all through her illness. Even on her deathbed she was threatening to divorce poor Roy.

She died friendless. At her wake she lay in an open casket, for once at peace. The room contained a half dozen rows of chairs, nearly all empty. Roy stood alone until our mother arrived and gave him a hug. Then he said to her with complete seriousness, “Well, I guess this settles the divorce issue.”

The Goddess Diana

Years ago, I took part in a writing workshop in which each member read a person’s story in advance and came to the next meeting with a detailed critique. One person wrote a lengthy story about a woman named Alice who had difficulty getting pregnant. She tried everything she could think of, but without success. She even purchased a replica of the Greek goddess Diana, described in the story as the goddess of love. Even that tactic was to no avail.

I always tried to critique thoroughly, so when it was my turn to comment on the story I went through the usual set of nits and suggestions. At the end I said, “Oh, and one more thing. I looked up Diana in the dictionary. She’s the goddess of the hunt, not the goddess of love—so that’s why Alice couldn’t get pregnant.”

Writing goals for 2011

Tomorrow we're heading off in our RV to California for the rest of December to visit with our son in San Francisco. This may give me time to reflect and perhaps refocus my scattered energies.

Already one of my promises to myself and others was not to continue as president of Mesilla Valley Writers for a fourth year. Unfortunately, the person who volunteered to take over had a tantrum and decided to renege. You'd think someone about 70 years old would act like an adult, but no. No one else will take the job except one lady who has no experience running anything and never speaks up in meetings.  So we agreed she'll get tasks to help her prepare to become president eventually, like chairing some of the meetings. The job remains mine in the meantime. So that's one resolution already broken, and the new year hasn't even started.

The other writing group I'm active in is 40 miles down the road, in El Paso, Texas. They are a larger and more vibrant group, but El Paso is also five times larger than my home town of Las Cruces. The El Paso Writers' League held its annual awards luncheon and installment of officers yesterday. They awarded prizes in their writing contest, which is highly anticipated all year. I won a few prizes for fiction and poetry, though my non-fiction did less well.

One commitment for 2011 is to co-edit and produce Border Tapestry, an annual book for the League showcasing the contest's first-place winners. It will be the third year on this great project, and it's a lot of work. One of the stories in the book will be the first and so far only chapter in a novel I began about 5 or 6 years ago. The judges' comments were encouraging enough that I'd like to start working on it again.

As for Mesilla Valley Writers, our January program will focus on members' writing goals for 2011 and how to achieve them. My own focus will be to pay more attention to my own writing and less on these peripheral writing-related activities.

How about you? Do you use this time of year to plan realistic writing goals? What do you hope to do differently, or better?

Foolish words

Words can cut in ways we don’t always intend. While stationed in the deep South in the ’60s, I decided to look up some relatives who lived on Kuhn Street in Biloxi, Mississippi. While my wife and I were trying to find our way, I thought to ask for directions. A young black woman walked down the sidewalk, so I pulled alongside and asked her where Kuhn Street was. She never slowed, never opened her mouth, never looked in my direction.  Had she looked at me, she’d have seen not a malicious person, just a foolish innocent. How many times had that woman been mocked?

We found Kuhn Street on our own, just a couple of blocks away. We had a pleasant evening playing cards with my relatives, who were cordial to us Yankees.  I sensed that the friendliness would last as long as we didn’t discuss race or politics.  When one of them made a passing reference to “darkies,” we ignored it in part because we were their guests and in part because we felt like foreigners. Also, I felt quietly embarrassed over my thoughtless request for directions.

A writin’ pen

Beth Morgan spoke at Mesilla Valley Writers about oral histories the other day and mentioned capturing colloquialisms. That brought to mind Montgomery, Alabama, in the late 1960s. My wife and I were newly married kids from Massachusetts, and Gunter Air Force Base outside of Montgomery was my first duty station. We lived off-base for a while, and one day I walked to a local mom and pop store looking for a loaf of bread. Not finding any, I asked a clerk, who couldn’t understand me. Then I explained somehow, maybe saying it was for sandwiches, and she said, “Oh, you want BRAYud!”

Another time I came home from that same store, and my landlady asked me what I bought.

“I just bought a pen,” I said.

“What kinda pen, Bob? A fryin’ pen?”

“No, something to write letters with.”

“Oh,” she said, “a writin’ pen!”

What a difference a word makes

We have a good group of people in Mesilla Valley Writers, where I'm president until the end of this year. At age 67, I am one of the younger members. Most of us live in our own homes, but we gather once monthly at an assisted living facility where Pat, one of our members, lives just a few feet away from our meeting room. Before each meeting, a couple of us arrange comfortable chairs in a cozy oval so that the 16 or 17 who typically attend can see and interact with each other.

Yesterday, we had a guest speaker talk to us about researching and writing oral histories. She talked about interviewing primary sources, listening to and studying but not transcribing what people have to say, and looking for useful anecdotes while paying attention to regional speech patterns. She had members briefly interview each other, so I questioned 80-something-year-old Helen about her trip to America from England when she was a young teenager in 1940. Hitler was in the process of trying to demolish Britain, and the British wanted to protect their children by sending them to the countryside or out of the country altogether. Though British, Helen had been born in the U.S. and was allowed to sail back to the States, accompanied only by her teenage sister. She hadn't gotten much past talking about the threat of U-boats when our interviewing exercise had to end.

Then we noticed the tea in the back of the room. One of our few refreshments in the meeting is the iced tea we purchase from the assisted living facility and which a staff person rolls in on a cart.  This time it arrived after the meeting started, and hardly anyone noticed. After our speaker finished her program, Helen good-naturedly chastised me for not announcing earlier that the tea had arrived. So I then announced it to all, saying "Helen is mad at me because I didn't tell you about the tea earlier."  After a minute, an elderly gentleman sitting next to Helen pointed to the door and said to me, "You know, Pat's door is open. You can use her bathroom."

Helen and I looked at him. "I'm sorry," I said. "What are you talking about?"

"You said Helen is mad at you because you didn't pee earlier," he said.

Helen and I had a great laugh, but the poor man was simply trying to be helpful.

Cover art for One Must Die

Here's my novel's new cover, designed by the talented El Paso artist Maritza Neely. I asked her to combine three basic elements: death, Cambodia, and America to suggest the novel's tone and subject matter. The temple is Angkor Wat, which readers won't have to recognize to know that it's Asian.

The manuscript is complete and has been so for years. Once it had a willing small publisher who--alas!--decided to get out of the business. Now with low-cost publishing options like CreateSpace, I'm publishing it myself, with my greatest expense being a reasonably priced cover design. My goal is to publish on both CreateSpace and Kindle by the end of the year--easy enough if I shift around a couple of priorities.

I think people will like One Must Die, not that I'm objective. There is culture conflict, a likable protagonist, and a slant on a cop story that you probably haven't seen before.

If you'd like to work with Maritza yourself, you can contact her at http://www.maritzajauregui.com/studio.

Check out the new IRB

Today the Internet Review of Books relaunched as a daily blog instead of as a monthly website. Our dear friends and founders Carter Jefferson and Ruth Douillette needed time and space to do other things in their lives, so they've moved on. Now Julie McGuire, Gary Presley, and I are pleased to issue the IRB daily, generally publishing a single review every day. We'll tend to alternate between fiction and non-fiction that have been published within the last six months, with occasional interviews for variety.

Julie McGuire is a dedicated reader and reviewer of novels, and she'll continue as our intrepid Fiction Editor. Gary will manage the blog, doing lots of essential work to keep us rolling. I used to manage the website but now am the new Non-Fiction Editor.

So please stop by our blog, and be sure to follow it. You'll be eligible to win a $25 Amazon gift certificate that we'll be giving out on November 15.

Not a reader?

My blog isn't meant to be political. Although I happen to like President Obama, I understand that many people don't. Fair enough. But today I walked past a shop that had its windows filled with anti-Obama t-shirts, bumper stickers, and gewgaws. All in all, its tenor was little different from what the left inflicted on President Bush. One slogan said, One Big Ass Mistake America. Okay, that's cool. The freedom to disrespect our political leaders is essential to what makes our country great.

What annoyed me was the bumper sticker with a cartoon of Obama pointing at Bush and saying "It's his fault!" and the slogan, "WE NEED A LEADER NOT A READER." Wait a minute. Are the two mutually exclusive? Doesn't a leader need to be informed, to actually know something? Or does he just need to really, really believe?

Remembering the Sky Buddy

At my writing group today, our presenter asked us to write on the theme of remembrance. Here is what I came up with.

Our family owned a black metal Sky Buddy radio ever since I can recall. My father bought it in New Orleans during World War II during one of his breaks from duty in the Merchant Marines. It was a short wave radio made by Hallicrafters, and it could pick up signals from everywhere. As

a child, I would turn the steel dial and hear strange languages, Morse Code from ships at sea, exotic and popular music. My mom said that during the war a neighbor reported her to the FBI because the radio seemed like a spy's tool. Over the years I listened to Curt Gowdy announcing hundreds of Red Sox games, to the weekly band concert on local WESX in Salem, Massachusetts, to Queen for a Day with my mom, to Guy Kibbee's show on fishing, and to a show called The Answer Man. I marveled that the Answer Man always seemed to know everything. My brother Larry, the family fisherman, sent in a post card to Guy Kibbee, and the show kept mailing him prizes seemingly for years.

We were of course a family of Communist haters back in the early 50s--who wasn't? I remember hearing Walter Winchell's staccato voice delivering the news every night, and perhaps he was the one who announced Stalin's death in '53. Whoever the announcer was, I cheered the news. My Dad and I enjoyed stopping in briefly to listen to Radio Moscow and laugh when the announcer told his American audience how badly we were suffering under capitalism, and how the Soviets had invented everything from radio to toothbrushes.

But of course for a young boy, baseball was more important than politics. I remember hearing Curt Gowdy's play by play when a Red Sox relief pitcher came in late in a game with the bases loaded and gave up a grand slam home run with his first pitch. In the first game of one season at Fenway Park, the first batter up hit a home run on the first pitch of the year. Harry Agganis from Lynn, Massachusetts played for the Red Sox for a couple of years, then died suddenly from a relapse of pneumonia. He'd been my hero, and I was crushed at hearing the news.

Eventually I grew up and moved away from home. My father died in '67, my mother in '04, and the radio was still in her house, its vacuum tubes dusty and dead. I took custody of it for a while but could no longer get it to operate--and had no room to keep it anyway. In a way I miss the old relic, because for so long it had been a central feature in our family kitchen.

Ban these books!

Happy Banned Books Week, everyone! I just looked at a list of "most commonly challenged" books in the U.S. and see some great work I've read over the years, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Young Huck uses the "n" word about 200 times, which irritated me on second reading--but the kid's voice was that of the 1850s and bore no malice. We need to read this book to help us understand how far our great country has come.

Also on the list is Bless Me, Ultima by Rodolfo Anaya, which I'd never heard of until I moved to the southwest. The eponymous Ultima may or may not be a witch, which apparently had some readers' knickers in a twist. So what? It's a touching story.

Then there are To Kill a Mockingbird, a beautiful book that's only objectionable to people who hate justice; Lady Chatterly's Lover, of which I avidly read select passages as a teenager; the likes of Hemingway, King, Angelou, Sinclair, Capote, Morrison--so many scurrilous scribes--little wonder I have grown up to be so depraved.

Perhaps it's the combined influence of all these bounders that influenced my writing a banned book of my own. Did you know that When Pigs Fly was banned in Alamogordo, New Mexico, the same city that burned Harry Potter and other un-Christian books in 2000? In '07 the city's Friends of the Library first invited me to do a reading, then disinvited me because my antagonist (you know, the bad guy) lacked moral character.

In one of my frequently recurring daydreams, enemies of iniquity light a bonfire made exclusively of copies of When Pigs Fly and Getting Lucky--all having been purchased at list price, of course.

Blind but Now I See

Nonfiction
Music awash on our shores

BLIND BUT NOW I SEE:
The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson
By Kent Gustavson 

368 pp. Blooming Twig Books (Cardinal’s Publishing Group) $14.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

American music takes multiple forms—classical, jazz, show tunes, big band music, blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and more—and most of these genres have evolved by blending into one or more of the others. But there is one genre, entirely American now, that owes its origins to the Celts, Scots, and Brits who brought their music as they washed up on these shores. It’s the music of the South and the Appalachian Mountains, and it is the music of Doc Watson.

I knew the styles of the music but had never really connected with the people who played it ... I just had this sound ringing in my ears of this beautiful pentatonic, archaic-sounding music sung in a vocal style that left Frank Sinatra far behind.

So said Ralph Rinzler on first hearing Doc play. Rinzler, a young folk aficionado, was instrumental in bringing Watson out of the hills of western North Carolina to perform on a New York City stage. This occurred in 1961, at the initial wave of the folk music revival. Watson’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” at that performance created a sensation, making the old hymn once again part of the American songbook and identifying Watson as an icon of acoustic instruments and traditional singing.

Rinzler soon became a combination of representative, agent, manager, and friend to Watson, even pressuring him to maintain the purity of his repertoire when Watson wanted to incorporate other genres into his performances.

The musical wizard known as Doc was born Arthel Lane Watson in 1923, near Deep Gap, North Carolina on the family farm, a few meager acres of the three thousand passed down from David Watson, a Scotsman who came to America to fight the British “in exchange for the promise of land, should the Americans prevail in their struggle.”

Possibly as a result of an injury from an ill-measured dose of silver nitrate eye drops meant to prevent post-natal infection, Doc has never been able to see, but the blind youngster grew up without being coddled. He was allowed to run free across fields and farmland with his brothers and sisters, and he pitched in with chores, right down to being stationed at one end of a cross-cut timber saw. Like some who are blind, young Doc learned to listen. He calls it “sound radar,” a skill so highly developed that he can easily memorize music, or diagnose a car engine flaw simply by hearing it run.

Kent Gustavson’s biography is filled with such minutiae about hill country life, about the music and musicians of Appalachia, about Doc’s short sojourn at the Raleigh School for the Blind, and about the Watsons and related families.

Gustavson is a music professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and his knowledge, passion, and expertise offers readers a thorough insight into the magic that Watson makes. He chronicles Watson’s career from local dances and juke joints to appearances on small town radio stations. It was prior to a broadcast performance in a furniture store, in fact, that Doc earned his nickname. The host didn’t think “Arthel” came across well on the airwaves, and a young woman in the audience yelled out, “Call him Doc.” And so it was.

Watson married, had two children, lived off the land, a state pension, and his meager earnings from playing music at dances and picnics across the hills and hollers, in churches, and juke joints, but it wasn’t folk music then. It was “ ... America’s other traditional folk music ... rockabilly ... music that transformed Doc Watson from a street musician ... to a professional musician who could support his family on his own pride.”

Much of this biography covers those years before Watson met Rinzler. Rinzler had come to Appalachia to record the legendary Clarence Ashley, also known as Tom Ashley, a session for which Watson has been hired to play the electric guitar. Rinzler doesn’t want a modern instrument ruining music not meant to be amplified, but when he heard Doc sing “Tom Doula” and accompany himself with a banjo, Rinzler realizes he has found an American original.

Gustavson quotes a Who’s Who of folk musicians, and tidbits about music legends are scattered throughout the book. Pete Seeger is everything Doc Watson is not—a political and social liberal and scion of a prosperous family—but he can only imitate Watson’s blood-rooted authenticity. Woody Guthrie, dying from Huntington’s disease, is spirited from a hospital by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to be at one of Doc’s early New York City appearances.

Gustavson’s research is admirable. While an index would have been helpful, the author does include extensive notes at the end of each of the twenty chapters. Curiously, a reading of the author’s acknowledgements suggests Watson was not interviewed for this biography, but I would not doubt that Gustavson’s work presents an authentic picture.

The final chapters of the book are deeply affecting. They chronicle Watson’s years of international renown as his legend reaches outside the folk genre; the grind of day-after-day touring on the road; the integration of his son, Merle, into his performances; and the collapse of Doc’s world when Merle, also an extraordinary guitarist, died at age thirty-six in 1985. Doc Watson cherished Merle as musical soulmate and best friend. Merle also had orchestrated and guided much of Doc’s tour life for fifteen years, and the older man felt his loss deeply, so much so that some of the people interviewed note his son’s death left him a “harder” man. But the legend continued to tour and record for several years, and to take part in an annual acoustic music festival in honor of his son. Watson resides in North Carolina today, although friends sometimes characterize him as reclusive.

Musicologists will appreciate the chapters on Doc’s singing style, and his guitar work, both flat-picking and finger-picking. Music fans will delight in the book as a whole, a splendid recounting of Doc Watson as man whose “ ... approach to folk music on a guitar was like Horowitz’s approach to the piano ... Music awash on our shores

BLIND BUT NOW I SEE:
The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson
By Kent Gustavson
368 pp. Blooming Twig Books (Cardinal’s Publishing Group) $14.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

American music takes multiple forms—classical, jazz, show tunes, big band music, blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and more—and most of these genres have evolved by blending into one or more of the others. But there is one genre, entirely American now, that owes its origins to the Celts, Scots, and Brits who brought their music as they washed up on these shores. It’s the music of the South and the Appalachian Mountains, and it is the music of Doc Watson.

I knew the styles of the music but had never really connected with the people who played it ... I just had this sound ringing in my ears of this beautiful pentatonic, archaic-sounding music sung in a vocal style that left Frank Sinatra far behind.

So said Ralph Rinzler on first hearing Doc play. Rinzler, a young folk aficionado, was instrumental in bringing Watson out of the hills of western North Carolina to perform on a New York City stage. This occurred in 1961, at the initial wave of the folk music revival. Watson’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” at that performance created a sensation, making the old hymn once again part of the American songbook and identifying Watson as an icon of acoustic instruments and traditional singing.

Rinzler soon became a combination of representative, agent, manager, and friend to Watson, even pressuring him to maintain the purity of his repertoire when Watson wanted to incorporate other genres into his performances.

The musical wizard known as Doc was born Arthel Lane Watson in 1923, near Deep Gap, North Carolina on the family farm, a few meager acres of the three thousand passed down from David Watson, a Scotsman who came to America to fight the British “in exchange for the promise of land, should the Americans prevail in their struggle.”

Possibly as a result of an injury from an ill-measured dose of silver nitrate eye drops meant to prevent post-natal infection, Doc has never been able to see, but the blind youngster grew up without being coddled. He was allowed to run free across fields and farmland with his brothers and sisters, and he pitched in with chores, right down to being stationed at one end of a cross-cut timber saw. Like some who are blind, young Doc learned to listen. He calls it “sound radar,” a skill so highly developed that he can easily memorize music, or diagnose a car engine flaw simply by hearing it run.

Kent Gustavson’s biography is filled with such minutiae about hill country life, about the music and musicians of Appalachia, about Doc’s short sojourn at the Raleigh School for the Blind, and about the Watsons and related families.

Gustavson is a music professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and his knowledge, passion, and expertise offers readers a thorough insight into the magic that Watson makes. He chronicles Watson’s career from local dances and juke joints to appearances on small town radio stations. It was prior to a broadcast performance in a furniture store, in fact, that Doc earned his nickname. The host didn’t think “Arthel” came across well on the airwaves, and a young woman in the audience yelled out, “Call him Doc.” And so it was.

Watson married, had two children, lived off the land, a state pension, and his meager earnings from playing music at dances and picnics across the hills and hollers, in churches, and juke joints, but it wasn’t folk music then. It was “ ... America’s other traditional folk music ... rockabilly ... music that transformed Doc Watson from a street musician ... to a professional musician who could support his family on his own pride.”

Much of this biography covers those years before Watson met Rinzler. Rinzler had come to Appalachia to record the legendary Clarence Ashley, also known as Tom Ashley, a session for which Watson has been hired to play the electric guitar. Rinzler doesn’t want a modern instrument ruining music not meant to be amplified, but when he heard Doc sing “Tom Doula” and accompany himself with a banjo, Rinzler realizes he has found an American original.

Gustavson quotes a Who’s Who of folk musicians, and tidbits about music legends are scattered throughout the book. Pete Seeger is everything Doc Watson is not—a political and social liberal and scion of a prosperous family—but he can only imitate Watson’s blood-rooted authenticity. Woody Guthrie, dying from Huntington’s disease, is spirited from a hospital by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to be at one of Doc’s early New York City appearances.

Gustavson’s research is admirable. While an index would have been helpful, the author does include extensive notes at the end of each of the twenty chapters. Curiously, a reading of the author’s acknowledgements suggests Watson was not interviewed for this biography, but I would not doubt that Gustavson’s work presents an authentic picture.

The final chapters of the book are deeply affecting. They chronicle Watson’s years of international renown as his legend reaches outside the folk genre; the grind of day-after-day touring on the road; the integration of his son, Merle, into his performances; and the collapse of Doc’s world when Merle, also an extraordinary guitarist, died at age thirty-six in 1985. Doc Watson cherished Merle as musical soulmate and best friend. Merle also had orchestrated and guided much of Doc’s tour life for fifteen years, and the older man felt his loss deeply, so much so that some of the people interviewed note his son’s death left him a “harder” man. But the legend continued to tour and record for several years, and to take part in an annual acoustic music festival in honor of his son. Watson resides in North Carolina today, although friends sometimes characterize him as reclusive.

Musicologists will appreciate the chapters on Doc’s singing style, and his guitar work, both flat-picking and finger-picking. Music fans will delight in the book as a whole, a splendid recounting of Doc Watson as man whose “ ... approach to folk music on a guitar was like Horowitz’s approach to the piano ... “Music awash on our shores

BLIND BUT NOW I SEE:
The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson
By Kent Gustavson
368 pp. Blooming Twig Books (Cardinal’s Publishing Group) $14.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

American music takes multiple forms—classical, jazz, show tunes, big band music, blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and more—and most of these genres have evolved by blending into one or more of the others. But there is one genre, entirely American now, that owes its origins to the Celts, Scots, and Brits who brought their music as they washed up on these shores. It’s the music of the South and the Appalachian Mountains, and it is the music of Doc Watson.

I knew the styles of the music but had never really connected with the people who played it ... I just had this sound ringing in my ears of this beautiful pentatonic, archaic-sounding music sung in a vocal style that left Frank Sinatra far behind.

So said Ralph Rinzler on first hearing Doc play. Rinzler, a young folk aficionado, was instrumental in bringing Watson out of the hills of western North Carolina to perform on a New York City stage. This occurred in 1961, at the initial wave of the folk music revival. Watson’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” at that performance created a sensation, making the old hymn once again part of the American songbook and identifying Watson as an icon of acoustic instruments and traditional singing.

Rinzler soon became a combination of representative, agent, manager, and friend to Watson, even pressuring him to maintain the purity of his repertoire when Watson wanted to incorporate other genres into his performances.

The musical wizard known as Doc was born Arthel Lane Watson in 1923, near Deep Gap, North Carolina on the family farm, a few meager acres of the three thousand passed down from David Watson, a Scotsman who came to America to fight the British “in exchange for the promise of land, should the Americans prevail in their struggle.”

Possibly as a result of an injury from an ill-measured dose of silver nitrate eye drops meant to prevent post-natal infection, Doc has never been able to see, but the blind youngster grew up without being coddled. He was allowed to run free across fields and farmland with his brothers and sisters, and he pitched in with chores, right down to being stationed at one end of a cross-cut timber saw. Like some who are blind, young Doc learned to listen. He calls it “sound radar,” a skill so highly developed that he can easily memorize music, or diagnose a car engine flaw simply by hearing it run.

Kent Gustavson’s biography is filled with such minutiae about hill country life, about the music and musicians of Appalachia, about Doc’s short sojourn at the Raleigh School for the Blind, and about the Watsons and related families.

Gustavson is a music professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and his knowledge, passion, and expertise offers readers a thorough insight into the magic that Watson makes. He chronicles Watson’s career from local dances and juke joints to appearances on small town radio stations. It was prior to a broadcast performance in a furniture store, in fact, that Doc earned his nickname. The host didn’t think “Arthel” came across well on the airwaves, and a young woman in the audience yelled out, “Call him Doc.” And so it was.

Watson married, had two children, lived off the land, a state pension, and his meager earnings from playing music at dances and picnics across the hills and hollers, in churches, and juke joints, but it wasn’t folk music then. It was “ ... America’s other traditional folk music ... rockabilly ... music that transformed Doc Watson from a street musician ... to a professional musician who could support his family on his own pride.”

Much of this biography covers those years before Watson met Rinzler. Rinzler had come to Appalachia to record the legendary Clarence Ashley, also known as Tom Ashley, a session for which Watson has been hired to play the electric guitar. Rinzler doesn’t want a modern instrument ruining music not meant to be amplified, but when he heard Doc sing “Tom Doula” and accompany himself with a banjo, Rinzler realizes he has found an American original.

Gustavson quotes a Who’s Who of folk musicians, and tidbits about music legends are scattered throughout the book. Pete Seeger is everything Doc Watson is not—a political and social liberal and scion of a prosperous family—but he can only imitate Watson’s blood-rooted authenticity. Woody Guthrie, dying from Huntington’s disease, is spirited from a hospital by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to be at one of Doc’s early New York City appearances.

Gustavson’s research is admirable. While an index would have been helpful, the author does include extensive notes at the end of each of the twenty chapters. Curiously, a reading of the author’s acknowledgements suggests Watson was not interviewed for this biography, but I would not doubt that Gustavson’s work presents an authentic picture.

The final chapters of the book are deeply affecting. They chronicle Watson’s years of international renown as his legend reaches outside the folk genre; the grind of day-after-day touring on the road; the integration of his son, Merle, into his performances; and the collapse of Doc’s world when Merle, also an extraordinary guitarist, died at age thirty-six in 1985. Doc Watson cherished Merle as musical soulmate and best friend. Merle also had orchestrated and guided much of Doc’s tour life for fifteen years, and the older man felt his loss deeply, so much so that some of the people interviewed note his son’s death left him a “harder” man. But the legend continued to tour and record for several years, and to take part in an annual acoustic music festival in honor of his son. Watson resides in North Carolina today, although friends sometimes characterize him as reclusive.

Musicologists will appreciate the chapters on Doc’s singing style, and his guitar work, both flat-picking and finger-picking. Music fans will delight in the book as a whole, a splendid recounting of Doc Watson as man whose “ ... approach to folk music on a guitar was like Horowitz’s approach to the piano ... “Music awash on our shores

BLIND BUT NOW I SEE:
The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson
By Kent Gustavson
368 pp. Blooming Twig Books (Cardinal’s Publishing Group) $14.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

American music takes multiple forms—classical, jazz, show tunes, big band music, blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and more—and most of these genres have evolved by blending into one or more of the others. But there is one genre, entirely American now, that owes its origins to the Celts, Scots, and Brits who brought their music as they washed up on these shores. It’s the music of the South and the Appalachian Mountains, and it is the music of Doc Watson.

I knew the styles of the music but had never really connected with the people who played it ... I just had this sound ringing in my ears of this beautiful pentatonic, archaic-sounding music sung in a vocal style that left Frank Sinatra far behind.

So said Ralph Rinzler on first hearing Doc play. Rinzler, a young folk aficionado, was instrumental in bringing Watson out of the hills of western North Carolina to perform on a New York City stage. This occurred in 1961, at the initial wave of the folk music revival. Watson’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” at that performance created a sensation, making the old hymn once again part of the American songbook and identifying Watson as an icon of acoustic instruments and traditional singing.

Rinzler soon became a combination of representative, agent, manager, and friend to Watson, even pressuring him to maintain the purity of his repertoire when Watson wanted to incorporate other genres into his performances.

The musical wizard known as Doc was born Arthel Lane Watson in 1923, near Deep Gap, North Carolina on the family farm, a few meager acres of the three thousand passed down from David Watson, a Scotsman who came to America to fight the British “in exchange for the promise of land, should the Americans prevail in their struggle.”

Possibly as a result of an injury from an ill-measured dose of silver nitrate eye drops meant to prevent post-natal infection, Doc has never been able to see, but the blind youngster grew up without being coddled. He was allowed to run free across fields and farmland with his brothers and sisters, and he pitched in with chores, right down to being stationed at one end of a cross-cut timber saw. Like some who are blind, young Doc learned to listen. He calls it “sound radar,” a skill so highly developed that he can easily memorize music, or diagnose a car engine flaw simply by hearing it run.

Kent Gustavson’s biography is filled with such minutiae about hill country life, about the music and musicians of Appalachia, about Doc’s short sojourn at the Raleigh School for the Blind, and about the Watsons and related families.

Gustavson is a music professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and his knowledge, passion, and expertise offers readers a thorough insight into the magic that Watson makes. He chronicles Watson’s career from local dances and juke joints to appearances on small town radio stations. It was prior to a broadcast performance in a furniture store, in fact, that Doc earned his nickname. The host didn’t think “Arthel” came across well on the airwaves, and a young woman in the audience yelled out, “Call him Doc.” And so it was.

Watson married, had two children, lived off the land, a state pension, and his meager earnings from playing music at dances and picnics across the hills and hollers, in churches, and juke joints, but it wasn’t folk music then. It was “ ... America’s other traditional folk music ... rockabilly ... music that transformed Doc Watson from a street musician ... to a professional musician who could support his family on his own pride.”

Much of this biography covers those years before Watson met Rinzler. Rinzler had come to Appalachia to record the legendary Clarence Ashley, also known as Tom Ashley, a session for which Watson has been hired to play the electric guitar. Rinzler doesn’t want a modern instrument ruining music not meant to be amplified, but when he heard Doc sing “Tom Doula” and accompany himself with a banjo, Rinzler realizes he has found an American original.

Gustavson quotes a Who’s Who of folk musicians, and tidbits about music legends are scattered throughout the book. Pete Seeger is everything Doc Watson is not—a political and social liberal and scion of a prosperous family—but he can only imitate Watson’s blood-rooted authenticity. Woody Guthrie, dying from Huntington’s disease, is spirited from a hospital by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to be at one of Doc’s early New York City appearances.

Gustavson’s research is admirable. While an index would have been helpful, the author does include extensive notes at the end of each of the twenty chapters. Curiously, a reading of the author’s acknowledgements suggests Watson was not interviewed for this biography, but I would not doubt that Gustavson’s work presents an authentic picture.

The final chapters of the book are deeply affecting. They chronicle Watson’s years of international renown as his legend reaches outside the folk genre; the grind of day-after-day touring on the road; the integration of his son, Merle, into his performances; and the collapse of Doc’s world when Merle, also an extraordinary guitarist, died at age thirty-six in 1985. Doc Watson cherished Merle as musical soulmate and best friend. Merle also had orchestrated and guided much of Doc’s tour life for fifteen years, and the older man felt his loss deeply, so much so that some of the people interviewed note his son’s death left him a “harder” man. But the legend continued to tour and record for several years, and to take part in an annual acoustic music festival in honor of his son. Watson resides in North Carolina today, although friends sometimes characterize him as reclusive.

Musicologists will appreciate the chapters on Doc’s singing style, and his guitar work, both flat-picking and finger-picking. Music fans will delight in the book as a whole, a splendid recounting of Doc Watson as man whose “ ... approach to folk music on a guitar was like Horowitz’s approach to the piano ... “

Barefoot in Baghdad

Nonfiction
If only

BAREFOOT IN BAGHDAD:
A Story of Identity—My Own and What it Means to Be a Woman in Chaos
By Manal M. Omar
237 pp. Sourcebooks $14.99

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

She speaks American English, but she also wears a headscarf, is fluent in Arabic and can quote the Koran. It’s right after the 2003 American invasion, and she says she’s in Iraq on a humanitarian mission. Neither side trusts her.

But she’s not a spy, a journalist, nor an agent of the CIA. Manal Omar is a Palestinian-American, who comes to Baghdad after the U. S. invasion as regional coordinator of Women for Women International, an organization struggling for women’s rights. Her memoirs from this period, 2003 to 2005, shed considerable light on our nation’s problems in Iraq.

Fearing she might be seen as a tool of the American occupation, Omar at first refuses to enter the Green Zone or attend meetings run by the military. Thus pro-war Iraqis are suspicious of her. Because her headscarf bespeaks religious conservatism, Baghdad women accuse Omar of being Iranian and insidiously bent on rolling back the freedoms they have won. They deny there are pockets of poverty in the city and irately reject any idea Iraqi women need help. She finds it difficult to add a woman to her staff, because educated women are loath to go into the poor areas, as she does.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have entered the country have little clue about what’s needed. Because Omar has the courage—and the contacts—to talk to all classes of Iraqi women, she is able to persuade representatives of other NGOs that the basic needs—food, shelter, health care, electricity—must be met before they can think about larger issues like women’s rights and teaching money-making skills to women.

Initially, Iraqis welcomed the allied armies and celebrated the end of Hussein’s rule. But as time goes on, slowness in meeting those needs alienates the people from the temporary government of the occupiers. The situation sours—aid money goes to crooked contractors who deliver shoddy work and pocket huge profits. Powerful clans resent loss of their power and property and turn to murder. Civil strife erupts.

Omar’s friend Fern Holland expressed this pessimism:

...the window of opportunities to create a new Iraq was rapidly closing...the people to pay the price were going to be the women of Iraq...These women are unbelievably strong. And I am afraid we are setting them up for failure. We are giving them nothing but bricks and fancy equipment.

In an epilogue, Omar says,

I have worked in other war-torn countries, but my time in Iraq haunts me more than any place I have been... It maddens me that so many of the mistakes that pushed Iraq into chaos were avoidable. From the outset of the U.S. invasion, those in power repeatedly betrayed the people of Iraq by standing on the sidelines as the society crumbled and making promises they could not keep.

Because she still adheres to her culture’s family values, “The decision to go to Iraq was not mine alone. It was a family affair. ” The author had worked for the UN, Oxfam, and then for World Bank, and her Arabic-American family couldn’t understand why she would leave an enviable job to go into a dangerous situation. Omar felt she had a perspective few others did—she was right—and after a long campaign received her father’s permission.

For my Palestinian family, the Iraq war hit a raw nerve. It was a reminder of what had happened to the Palestinians in 1948...another humiliation of the Arab world at the hands of the West. And as far as they could tell, I wanted to be part of it — and I was on the wrong side.

When she is introduced to her staff—all men, she is shocked to discover—she gets a chilly reception. It takes some time for her to find out what the problem is: having been told they would have a female American boss, they had entertained visions of the blond, blue-eyed Barbie starlet type they had seen on television. They were crushed to find they would be working for a scarf-wearing Arabic woman instead.

The author makes many of her points anecdotally, recounting the stories of individual women she helped—or was unable to help. Patriarchal customs hampered her time and again, and U. S. military rules often imposed other obstacles.

She makes good friends in Iraq and finds a husband—but they are forced to flee by extremists. One of her staff is murdered. Some of the others flee to the U. S. But Muna, the woman Omar recruited to her staff, courageously remained in Iraq carrying forward the work of Women for Women, pushing the program to help the most vulnerable.

Despite the retrogression in Iraqi life in the past six years, Omar remains optimistic that the strength and resilience of the Iraqi people will win out and make the country the great nation it could be. If only. 

The self-publishing experiment, part 2

The self-publishing experiment with CreateSpace worked out nicely, with the second chapbook going through without a hitch. Here is the front cover of the second one. The artwork is by the terrific El Paso artist Maritza Jáuregui-Neely. My co-editor and I asked her to capture the flavor of El Paso, and she certainly did:

About a Mountain

Nonfiction
A Noble Miss

By John D’Agata
236 pp. W.W. Norton $23.95

Reviewed by Tim Elhajj

In 2002, John D’Agata helped his mother move to Las Vegas and found himself following the ongoing controversy to relocate and store radioactive waste material from all over the country nearby. He then volunteered for a local community suicide prevention help line, and that same summer sixteen-year-old Levi Presley jumped from the roof of a hotel to his death. In About A Mountain, John D’Agata takes these disparate threads of his experience and weaves them into a meditation on bureaucracy and corrupt politics, the self-destructive impulses of individuals and nations, and the limits of language over time.

For over twenty years Yucca Mountain has been at the heart of a plan to dispose of waste from every nuclear power plant or weapon development site across the United States. The government plans to store this material inside the mountain until it no longer poses a threat to human life. But as D’Agata unpacks the decisions that led to this course of action, it becomes clear that the threat to humanity isn’t what’s driving the policy.

There are politics at play at almost every level of the process, from the assessment of risk—does the threat of transporting nuclear waste outweigh the threat of storing it in multiple locations?—to adopting Yucca Mountain as the central storage facility. Will anyone be surprised to learn that Congress selected this mountain, which may not be the most suitable location for a variety of geological reasons, because its state and federal representatives were among the weakest and least able to protect their constituents from harm?

Fortunately D’Agata has his sights set higher. He isn’t primarily concerned with rabble-rousing against corrupt politicians, but wants us to consider instead the act of self-destruction itself. We consider it literally as he traces Levi Presley’s last hours. We consider it figuratively as we reflect on how long the toxicity of the radioactive waste we’re creating will last, compared to the length of the longest-known civilizations and cultures, or the efficacy of language itself.

D’Agata gets high marks for the scope and breadth of this work. He reaches for and imagines descriptions of everything from Edvard Munch contemplating the world as he paints The Scream to the few hours prior to Presley’s leap from the tower at the Stratosphere. I really wanted to enjoy this book, and for the most part I did, but somehow, something about its execution left me cold.

D’Agata has a penchant for lists. He includes lists of contradictory facts, lists of the exact types of devastation that might occur in a traffic accident involving a truck with a payload of nuclear waste, lists that include everything that would be contaminated in such an accident from rusted bolts to light bulbs, lists of the accumulation of cosmic sums of interest that accrue over vast periods of time. One or two these lists seems fine, a good idea—this is, after all, a book about the existential grief of modern life. What better way to present this than by asking the reader to wade through this sort of data? But I am the type of reader who wants to drink in every word, and I feel cheated when I am tempted—no, invited is a better word—to scan so many lists by the author.

Worse, D’Agata has chosen to bring into the story his own experience, and his tale of moving his mother to Vegas is incredibly inconsequential and dull. Mom and son look for somewhere to live. Mom and son march in a small parade. He describes a visit to the proposed site at Yucca Mountain, which isn’t as trite. And his work on the suicide prevention hot line allows him to segue more easily into the material about poor Levi. But there is little self-revelation here. The material from his life is simply a way to frame the text, lacking any sort of urgency or depth. Why bother?

Compare D’Agata’s use of memoir here with something like Nick Flynn’s sublime memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, where Flynn, a soon-to-be father, uses his book to examine his fears of fatherhood and intimacy and, as the Abu Ghraib scandal breaks in the news, his growing obsession with torture and pain. Under Flynn’s deft hand, the connections between his own personal fears, American fears of terrorist attack, and the fears of torturer and tortured alike seem plain enough, but each is made all the more urgent by the immediacy of the prison scandal or the infant growing in its mother’s womb. This is how to use personal experience to inform a political issue. D’Agata presents some intriguing ideas, but his text misses on some important marks. It’s a noble miss, but a miss all the same. 

A self-publisher's progress

Today I submitted a 64-page chapbook to CreateSpace on behalf of Mesilla Valley Writers (MVW), which is here in New Mexico. It's my first such endeavor, and writers considering self-publishing might want to see how it goes. I'll be publishing a second chapbook very soon, and if all goes smoothly, a novel in the fall.

In previous years, MVW has published using a local print shop. We'd print a set number for a set price, and would always have unsold copies languishing in someone's garage. We decided to experiment with an online company this year because we avoid the upfront printing costs and we can buy exactly the quantity we want.

My first inclination was to go with Lulu.com, but they have an 84-page minimum; neither this chapbook nor the next one will meet that criterion. CreateSpace doesn't have that requirement, and their association with Amazon gave me the confidence to try them.

My software includes Word 2007 and Corel Paint Shop Pro X. No doubt other software would do just as well. Formatting the layout and page size in Word was straightforward, just changing it to the 6" x 9" dimensions planned for the book. The page count has to be a multiple of four for any printed book, so I arranged my material and illustrations accordingly. Of course, a few blank pages at the end would be no problem, but you do need to plan for it.

With CreateSpace and probably other such outfits, you have to upload your book in two separate PDFs, one for the contents and one for the cover. Word 2007 allows you to create a PDF of a word processing file, which you can then look at in Adobe. (If you don't have it, download the free Adobe 9 reader. You'll need it.) This is a good time to inspect the entire file for any formatting errors. Then you can upload the PDF to CreateSpace on their website. It's quite straightforward--you get a template into which you upload the file.

After that, I turned to the cover, which was a little more intimidating for me. My front cover graphic had to be 300 dpi and sized at 6 x 9. This was a little tricky getting just right, but mainly because of my inexperience. But it wasn't too bad. The CreateSpace instructions said to export the graphic into PDF. The trouble was, I couldn't see a way to do that using Paint Shop Pro. Maybe I just missed something.

But no matter. A number of free PDF-creating tools exist on the Web. I used

http://www.freepdfconvert.com/, which worked beautifully. I just uploaded my graphic, and got a PDF in return. Very nice. Then it was a matter of uploading that into the cover template. You'll also need to create a back cover and the spine, which of course varies in thickness by page count. They

have a book tour video that shows the process. This is what took me the most time in the submission process, because it requires close attention to detail--and for me, a bit of trial and error. Here is the result:

That red border is not part of the cover; it's the trim area. Anything extending into the trim area will not be part of the cover. The yellow rectangle on the back cover is an area reserved for the ISBN, which CreateSpace puts in automatically.

And wouldn't you know it? After submitting, I realized I needed to make a small change in text. It turns out that all you have to do is resubmit the corrected file.

I'll post more about my experiences as time goes on. Hopefully, they may help someone.