JOURNAL #47
August 15, 2009
A few weeks ago, I was invited to contribute a foreword to Paradise Regained, by Les Johnson, C. Bangs, and Gregory Matloff. The book describes some of the problems currently facing us, climate change, energy depletion, and so on. It proceeds to outline how, instead of cutting back everywhere, we might be able to use advanced technology, some of which is coming, much already available, to arrive at some solutions. The authors make a strong case that we can come out of our current dilemmas in good condition provided we have the will and some imagination. Let’s hope.
I was reminded of all this by Graeme Wood’s article, “Moving Heaven and Earth,” in the July-August Atlantic. The article and the book are both well worth our time, and should be required reading for politicians. Paradise Regained will be released by Springer in the fall. To read more about the book, go to www.lesjohnsonauthor.com/paradise regained.
The Atlantic ran an article on a different subject in its Jan-Feb issue that also caught my attention. In “The Founders’ Great Mistake,“ Garrett Epps points out that the framers of the Constitution were trying to do something no one had ever attempted before: Create a functioning executive without giving away dictatorial powers. Epps argues that they got it wrong. They were too vague about his powers, and consequently we have no real way to rein in a president except by impeachment. Which, if the party controlling Congress is also the president’s party, is less likely to happen. Among the author’s solutions: Delineate what he may and may not do, as, e.g., war making. Get rid of the electoral college, and let the president be elected by a straight vote. (Theoretically, the current system allows for the possibility that a candidate could lose by hundreds of thousands of votes and still win the election.)
Later this afternoon, I’ll be going to St Simons Island for the Scribblers’ Retreat Writers’ Conference. We’ll be talking about how to guarantee that our fiction doesn’t get published.
The first issue in a seminar of this type is: What is a writer trying to do? The answer that comes from the participants inevitably is: Tell a story. The truth, of course, is that if you’re at a party and somebody starts telling a story, you generally try to drift away. The object for a fiction writer is to create an experience. To arrange things so that the reader forgets he is home in a chair, and instead finds himself out on the beach with someone with whom he has fallen in love. And that when that person says goodbye, it's all over, the reader’s heart is broken. (Sorry about that, but that’s the goal.) That when the wind blows in from those April fields, you can smell the honeysuckle. It’s why you don’t tell the reader what happened. You put the characters on stage and let the action play out.
There’s a nationwide program called The Big Read, which invites communities to read a common book, and then get together to discuss it. We did Fahrenhiet 451 a couple of years ago. I participated as a moderator, although my preference would have been The Martian Chronicles. Anyhow, they invited me back. We’ll be doing a Poe collection. I’ve just finished reading seven or eight of his stories over the last few evenings. I’ll probably have more to say later. But for the moment: He’s not a writer to be taken straight. You have to mix in some Garrison Keillor or Mark Twain or Mike Resnick or something. Otherwise you start hearing strange sounds in the attic.