Mayor Frank Jackson is soft putty in the hands of the corporate downtown plutocracy.

The mayor from the most deprived area of the city has allowed and perpetuated for a decade Cleveland’s downtown to become a city within the city—pampered and showered with freebies.

What downtown wants downtown gets! It has self-determination. It gets what it wants.

Concentrated wealth has been allowed concentrated endowment.

The leeches have become a giant tick on the public teat.

Jackson has become the tool of the Greater Cleveland Partnership and the Downtown Cleveland Alliance. They run the city.

Jackson has commissioned two private corporate agents to determine public matters and continued the shower of scarce public funds for their agenda. The public be damned.

I’ve seen mayors going back to Ralph Locher. None has been as compliant to the wishes of the downtown moguls as Jackson.

Even George Voinovich was not as soft on corporate criminals as Jackson has been.

Now, with passage of the city tax increase, as I’ve said, he’s prepared to seek an unprecedented fourth term.

The ruling oligarchy will cheer this decision.

The latest move—closing Superior Avenue to public transit is just another Jackson nose thumb to those who need help the most. This time another slap at Continue Reading »

Previously…

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 10” with James Thurber:

INTERVIEWER: Is the act of writing easy for you?

THURBER: For me it’s mostly a question of rewriting. It’s part of a constant attempt on my part to make the finished version smooth, to make it seem effortless. A story I’ve been working on—“The Train on Track Six,” it’s called—was rewritten fifteen complete times. There must have been close to 240,000 words in all the manuscripts put together, and I must have spent two thousand hours working at it. Yet the finished version can’t be more than twenty- thousand words.

INTERVIEWER: Then it’s rare that your work comes out right the first time?

THURBER: Well, my wife took a look at the first version of something I was doing not long ago and said, “Goddamn it, Thurber, that’s high-school stuff.” I have to tell her to wait until the seventh draft, it’ll work out all right. I don’t know why that should be so, that the first or second draft of everything I write reads as if it was turned out by a charwoman.

Found in my electronic chapbook…

I’ve read the Russians—Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn, &c.—but not for a very, very long time and not with a writer’s eye. The importance of the Russians in literature, however, is repeated again and again as I work my way through the Paris Review interviews. Simenon is no exception.

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 9” with Georges Simenon:

INTERVIEWER: Early in your life did any particular book or author especially impress you?

SIMENON: Probably the one who impressed me most was Gogol. And certainly Dostoevsky, but less than Gogol.

INTERVIEWER: Why do you think Gogol interested you?

SIMENON: Maybe because he makes characters who are just like everyday people but at the same time have what I called a few minutes ago the third dimension I am looking for. All of them have this poetic aura. But not the Oscar Wilde kind—a poetry which comes naturally, which is there, the kind Conrad has. Each character has the weight of sculpture, it is so heavy, so dense.

I’m thinking I need to go back and look for the weight.

Found in my electronic chapbook…

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 9” with Georges Simenon:

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever dictated fiction, commercial or any other?

SIMENON: No. I am an artisan; I need to work with my hands. I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional. And I would like to make a man so that everybody, looking at him, would find his own problems in this man. That’s why I spoke about poetry, because this goal looks more like a poet’s goal than the goal of a novelist. My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world. And what makes me happy is the letters I get. They never speak about my beautiful style; they are the letters a man would write to his doctor or his psychoanalyst. They say, “You are one who understands me. So many times I find myself in your novels.” Then there are pages of their confidences; and they are not crazy people. There are crazy people too, of course; but many are on the contrary people who—even important people. I am surprised.

Found in my electronic chapbook…

Oliver Burkeman, writing in This column will change your life: habit chaining for The Guardian, explains:

First, this week, an astoundingly effective tip for developing beneficial habits, such as eating plenty of vegetables, flossing your teeth, keeping your desk tidy, phoning your mother or unfriending people who post self-written poetry on Facebook. Ready? Here’s the tip: just do those things. You know—as opposed to not doing them.

The rest is all a matter of hacking.

I’m aware this may strike some readers as relatively unastounding, perhaps even infuriatingly useless. Still, that’s one way of interpreting the underlying message of a popular—and not useless—new ebook, by the blogger SJ Scott, entitled Habit Stacking.

Like all body/mind/life hacking advice, there are no new ideas in habit chaining/stacking—I begin with Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations but I’m sure he was far from the first—yet the message can always be massaged to speak to a new generation.

There’s nothing wrong with the concept, but Yoda nails the nut. No hack works unless you do what you must do. The rest is all bullshit.

Burkeman concludes:

Habit stacking isn’t an approach I’d want to adopt for much more than the recommended half an hour a day: running through the checklist, I can report, feels robotic and dutiful, and not much fun. On the other hand, by 8am daily, I’d finished eight or nine things that would otherwise have nagged at me for the rest of the day. Sometimes, the secret of inculcating better habits is to forget all that inculcating business, and just do them.

With apologies to Derf*, The message is the alpha and the omega…

*From Punk Rock & Trailer Parks.

Bad writing is often referred to as flat, cardboard. The characters have no third dimension. Simenon uses painting as a way to understand how the good writing lifts the story out of the flatland of the page and into the real space of the reader’s imagination.

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 9” with Georges Simenon:

INTERVIEWER: I remember you once told me that in your commercial novels you would sometimes insert a non-commercial passage or chapter.

SIMENON: Yes, to train myself.

INTERVIEWER: How did that part differ from the rest of the novel?

SIMENON: Instead of writing just the story, in this chapter I tried to give a third dimension, not necessarily to the whole chapter, perhaps to a room, to a chair, to some object. It would be easier to explain it in the terms of painting.

INTERVIEWER: How?

SIMENON: To give the weight. A commercial painter paints flat; you can put your finger through. But a painter—for example, an apple by Cézanne has weight. And it has juice, everything, with just three strokes. I tried to give to my words just the weight that a stroke of Cézanne’s gave to an apple. That is why most of the time I use concrete words. I try to avoid abstract words, or poetical words, you know, like “crepuscule,” for example. It is very nice, but it gives nothing. Do you understand? To avoid every stroke which does not give something to this third dimension.

On this point, I think that what the critics call my “atmosphere” is nothing but the impressionism of the painter adapted to literature. My childhood was spent at the time of the Impressionists and I was always in the museums and exhibitions. That gave me a kind of sense of it. I was haunted by it.

Found in my electronic chapbook…

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 9” with Georges Simenon

My first face-to-face contact with a working writer came in the spring of 1981 when I took Daniel Keyes’ short story writing course at Ohio University. I learned a lot from Keyes, but the first lesson he taught me was that most writers begin their stories too early. Start the tale, he told us, at the inciting point, where change occurs. I think that this is where my distaste for prologues comes from. I don’t want to read what happens before the story, I want to read the story. Simenon suggest much the same.

SIMENON: The beginning will be always the same; it is almost a geometrical problem: I have such a man, such a woman, in such surroundings. What can happen to them to oblige them to go to their limit? That’s the question.

Begin at the beginning and keep writing until you reach the end.

Found in my electronic chapbook…

Over the course of my life I have found that when I feel out of sorts the reason lies in the chaos or clutter in my surroundings. If I want to be focused and deliberate then I have to ensure that my place is focused and deliberate. This is the lesson of Mise En Place, literally Put In Place. The term comes from cooking schools.

The term, Oliver Burkeman writes:

[R]efers to making sure you’ve got everything to hand before you begin, positioning your ingredients and equipment tidily, in order and in reach. To chefs, mise en place is a way of being. “As a cook,” writes Anthony Bourdain, “your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system.” An instructor at the Culinary Institute of America told National Public Radio that once students there are fully schooled in the “meez”, as it’s known, you “should be able to blindfold them, they should know that their tongs are always here, their oil is always right here, their salt and pepper is always right here.”

As I’ve often told my students, this was the lesson we were all meant to learn in bootcamp—that we ought to all do the same tasks in the same way so that we created a sense of order that would allow, in times of extreme chaos (when the bullets were flying and the bombs falling) to do what needed done.

This principle has carried over for me into my writing. If I can’t lay my hands on a file, or the typing paper isn’t in the right place, then my writing is disturbed. I’ve always just shrugged off this eccentricity by confessing to my on analness, or in polite company, being a Virgo. The principle, however holds.

The mise en place, then, is a ritualised alignment of inner and outer environments, even a merging of chef with kitchen. Or if you like your explanations more down to earth – less Fat Duck, more Brewers Fayre – consider the multiple practical benefits. First, it’s a systematic way of discovering what items or supplies you’re missing; second, it involves batching similar activities, reducing the delays and distraction of task-switching; third, it turns the whole thing into an exercise in mindfulness and deepening of concentration. And it implicitly embodies an ethical stance: “Resources are precious. Space is precious. Your self-respect and the respect of others are precious. Use them wisely,” as the writer Dan Charnas puts it.

It’s easy to see how you might replicate this approach when cooking dinner at home, arranging your desk, or assembling a bookshelf from Ikea. Less obviously, but perhaps more powerfully, Ron Friedman, a workplace consultant, recommends a daily 10-minute “intellectual mise en place” each morning: a calmly deliberate exercise in identifying, and then arranging in time, the most important tasks of the day.

Instead, most of us dive into emails or crunching through to-do lists—“the equivalent of entering a kitchen and looking for a spill to clean or a pot to scrub”. Isn’t Friedman’s advice a fancy way of saying “make a plan”? Probably. But doing it in the meticulous, focused spirit of the meez makes a difference. [Emphasis mine, JH] Just this activity, this moment. You’ve got the rest of your life to learn about tomatoes.

Less diving in and more making sure the pool is properly filled.

Ralph Nader, writing in The Guardian Angel for America’s Motorists, remembers:

America’s motorists are less safe today with the passing of their Guardian Angel—engineer/lawyer Clarence Ditlow, the Director of the Center for Auto Safety. The generating force behind the recalls of millions of defective motor vehicles, Mr. Ditlow pressured the federal auto safety agency and the auto companies with meticulous advocacy that was technically deep and morally powerful.

Calm, deliberate and a man of few words, this graduate of Lehigh, Georgetown Law and Harvard Law School bore down on wrongdoing, negligence and bureaucratic passivity with jack-hammer intensity year in and year out. While culpable auto executives were on the golf links, he was at his office on weekends assembling evidence about the causes of crashes and their human casualties, and preparing formal petitions and lawsuits demanding action.

I recruited this remarkable man about 45 years ago to work on auto safety. It took no more than fifteen minutes for me to invite him to work with us full-time. That’s the kind of first impression he made. He was serious, committed and answered Continue Reading »

I had not heard this monologue before, and I had no idea Carlin’s words would be so appropriate for today, but I could not have found a better video for today.

The linguistic evolution from shell shock to battle fatigue to operational exhaustion to post-traumatic stress disorder to PTSD is, as Carlin might have said before he passed on died, an immorality tale for the 21st century.

This last transition from post-traumatic stress disorder to an acronym is particularly distributing because acronyms are the ultimate euphemisms. NSA sounds friendlier, somehow, than National Security Administration. FBI, CIA, even EPA, remove us from the possible pain of internalizing the threat.

We do the same with bad news. Years ago a friend died from a heart attack at an early age and when I called friends to let them know of her death I simply said: Julia’s dead, and I caught hell for not using any number of euphemisms. I still think I was right in my word choice. One of the differences I’ve noticed between cop shows in America and cop shows in England is that when a cop has to inform family members, Americans rely on I’m sorry, I have bad news concerning your husband, while the English say I’m sorry, your husband is dead. Doctors have the same problem.

Now, I understand. Delivering bad news sucks, but I think honesty and a minimum of syllables are important.

John McCrae didn’t write We are those who have passed on, he wrote, We are the dead.

In Flanders Fields
by
Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead: Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved: and now we lie
In Flanders fields!

Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you, from failing hands, we throw
The torch: be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields

Remember today to stop at 11 a.m.—the time of the Armistice of Compiègne on the 11th of November, 1918—and give a thought to those who have given all, and who have been and are prepared to give all, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Previously…