Readers and writers blog

Oh brother¹, now we’re getting spam in French.

I can’t think of a reason Mademoiselle Ramatou Silue would send us a bonsoir in French, except once in a long-ago post on R&W Blog, I used the expression au contraire.

Mlle. Silue does not identify where she lives, but judging from her name, I am guessing somewhere in Africa. And she has a great deal of money — $7.5 million — and is quite generous. In fact, she is willing to give me more than $1.1 million to share my expertise in real estate or other promising investments in the U.S.

I am quite flattered.

For those of you conversant in French, here is her message:

Bonsoir,

Mlle Ramatou Silue

For those of you not conversant in French, here is a short translation:

If you send this woman d’argent, you are totally foutu².

I should give Mlle. Silue credit for guessing correctly that I am conversant in French — well, not conversant because, while I read it, I do not speak it very well. Let’s put it this way: I am conversant enough in French to get totally lost in Quebec.

(Ask my wife about my conversational ability in Spanish, which got us arrested on a military compound in south Texas because I refused to speak to the guard at the gate in English and he told me in Spanish that we weren’t supposed to enter, those words coming just before I thanked him cheerfully, still in Spanish, and drove past the gate onto the compound. Boy, was he pissed off when the police brought us back to the gate about a half hour later. We didn’t have to do any time, although the guard did talk to me sternly in English. As did my wife for some time afterward.)

And speaking of weird spam, we at R&W Blog keep getting comments from Doodee, a blogger in Thailand, who “thanks us for sharing.” Day after day. The first message piqued our curiosity, so we visited Doodee. And here’s what he said:

I Did Not Leave a Comment on Your Blog or Forum

If you’ve arrived at this blog by clicking on a link in a comment left on your own blog or a comment left in a forum (a comment supposedly left by me), then I’m sorry to tell you that you have been deceived – but not by me.

Someone is impersonating me.

By the way, Doodee runs an interesting blog. If you’re interested in a perspective from (what is to me) the other side of the world, check it out.

Ah, spam. One great breakfast meat. One growing blogosphere treat.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. My wife says I should change this expression to O frère, but I don’t think the French use it that way.

2. This is one word the French do use pretty much the way we do. It means, putting it politely, ‘having had sexual intercourse,’ but it also can be translated as ’screwed.’ An alternative would be dans la merde, which means, again politely, ‘in deep doodoo.’ (Sorry, Doodee, no pun intended.) Argent, by the way, means ‘money.’ And, oh yes, the French word for spam is, you guessed it, le spam.

Ray Rhamey is mad. Like the TV anchor in the movie Network, he’s mad as hell. In fact, he is so mad that he wants to . . . well, do something nice for you.

Rhamey is offering one of his novels, We the Enemy, complete and free to any reader who requests it via email through wetheenemy@live.com.

The only price is that the book may make you think a little.

A former top advertising writer in Chicago, Rhamey was moved to his free-book campaign by the Valentine’s Day shooting at Northern Illinois University in which a heavily armed graduate student killed five and wounded at least 16 other students in a lecture hall before taking his own life.

Banning lethal firearms is a major theme in We the Enemy.

Rhamey, a freelance editor and blogger as well as a novelist, himself raises the image of fictional anchorman Howard Beale and his famous line from the 1976 movie: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more.”

“I’m mad as hell about the continuing slaughter of innocents with high-firepower lethal firearms,” Rhamey says in the Feb. 18 entry of his weblog, Flogging the Quill. “The tragic Northern Illinois University shooting will not be the last.”

Unlike Beale, who descends into ranting at the TV camera, Rhamey in his campaign to do something positive is more like a main character in his novel, Noah Stone, head of a group called the Alliance.

Stone’s group has been so successful at making social and political changes in Oregon that the book’s leading character, Jake Black, a former CIA operative and now freelance hit man, is enlisted by a rightwing president and various fundamentalists to cripple the group by eliminating Stone.

In the story, the Alliance has successfully challenged the Second Amendment by getting lethal firearms banned in Oregon in favor of nonlethal, defensive devices called ’stoppers’ that immobilize their human targets by firing tranquilizers, snares or irritants.

The Alliance also has successfully eliminated Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination in Oregon by getting the state’s courts to require witnesses to testify while hooked up to brain-fingerprinting computers that determine whether the testimony is true.

Although the technology of defensive weapons and brain fingerprinting now exists or is being developed, We the Enemy takes it into the future by making it nearly foolproof.

Thus, a suspense story that moves with the pace of a Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler mystery — and certainly with a title reminiscent of Mickey Spillane — becomes a bit of science fiction as well.

In fact, the novel opens with the words, “Not many years from now,” and goes on to tell us that National Rifle Association hero Charlton Heston has been killed in a drive-by shooting, that Soldier Field has been destroyed by a category-five tornado and that, in general, the world has become even more of a mess than it is now — even rap music “has no anger left, only whining defeat.”

Rhamey doesn’t want to accept defeat: “If this book can stimulate debate about what to do about lethal firearms, I’m duty-bound to somehow get it out there,” he tells his blog readers.

He’d like to see the book published on paper and says he’d forego any advance funds, asking instead that they be used for promotion. For more on the origins of the novel and his campaign, see the following special page on Flogging the Quill.

We’d like to see a paper version, too. If you don’t have a laptop, reading a book at a PC is less pleasant than in an easy chair.*

It doesn’t surprise us that Rhamey would offer a free book. On his weblog, one of our favorites on our blogroll (well, they’re all our favorites, really), he offers free advice and line-by-line editing to would-be novelists who submit the first 15 or 20 pages of their manuscript.

He’s a very good editor and a very good writer. We the Enemy is a fast-moving story with action, suspense and, yes, some polemics thrown in. All of it interesting and thought-provoking.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*Actually, though, a computer can be helpful if you, as I do, sometimes have trouble keeping characters or facts straight. Previous references are easy to find with the search function.

We love our blogroll. We comb through it nearly every day, enjoying each of its writers. Like any proud host, we want them to be in their best light. But we also want them to be comfortable, so those who wish to appear in a little less light will be accommodated.

We call it TLC — tender and loving culling.

Since our last TLC six months ago, three of our blogroll’s weblogs have slipped into the shadows — New York Hack, Despair and Coffee and Varieties of Unreligious Experience. And so we give them the place of honor they deserve:

In the section at the bottom of our blogroll that we call ‘Inactive but still worth it’¹.

New York Hack was one of our favorites, but its author, Melissa Plaut, stopped blogging on Oct. 23 of last year, with no indication that she would continue. In fact, no word at all.

In our constant effort to keep our blogroll a combination of the best and most diverse weblogs, we’d like to find another taxi blog to replace New York Hack, but even in its curtailed form, it’s still the best.

Which is why Plaut got a book deal in the first place². Which wasn’t long before she stopped blogging and apparently quit her taxi job. More power to her. And we’ll continue to carry those 27 months of New York Hack as our taxi blog because, as we say, it’s still worth it.

Despair and Coffee is a different story. Its author, Nathanael, is a young religion student who, according to his blog’s subtitle, is pondering “the meaning of life, the elusiveness of true love and the apparent silence of God with cynical humor deliberately employed so I don’t sound suicidal.”

Nathanael notified his readers that he had taken a hiatus from blogging to deal with graduate classes and a lot of writing they required, and he hoped to be blogging again soon. That was last summer.

Nathanael’s writing reflects the uncertain inquisitiveness found in the best blogs written by today’s young people — and those not so young, for that matter — and it adds the factor of religion in a way that isn’t often found in so-called religious blogs. In fact, we haven’t seen anything else that’s quite like Despair and Coffee.

We wish Nathanael well and await his return.

Our saddest news is that the pseudonymous Conrad H. Roth has retired Varieties of Unreligious Experience, one of the most erudite, classy and intelligent blogs we’ve found.

Roth had given clues earlier that he was sliding into a dark musing about the world and his blog, questioning it all. And finally, on Jan. 2, two years after he started, Roth said his blog had “become moribund. And all around me I find the sites I once loved become monotonous.”

And so it was over. But we’ll tell you what we told him: Varieties will remain on our blogroll, albeit in the inactive section, because what he has written so far is worth reading for as long as our weblog is up.

We also worry about some of his comrades-in-erudition — God of the Machine and Outer Life, the former silent for the past month, the latter for two months. But we keep them on our active list and hope to hear from them soon.

There are others who are sporadic — The literary thug, Tim & Nancy’s Adventures and At Home, Writing come to mind — but we also keep them active. Because when they do write, it’s worth reading. And certainly worth waiting for.

Our goal, after all, is not to worry but to read and enjoy.

And speaking of enjoyable, we’re happy to announce that Readers and Writers Blog has been added to the blogroll of Bye Bye, Pie, a charmingly chatty weblog written with style and wit by June GonnaEatThat, née June Cutoff Cash when her blog was called Bye Bye Buy.

It’s great company. But so are all the sites on our blogroll — diverse, well-written, intelligent, some funny, some serious, some exotic, some just different. We planned it that way.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. Yes, there’s a ‘zz’ in front of the title, but as we’ve explained before, we’re not smart enough to override our blogroll’s compulsion to be arranged alphabetically. So that entry gets two ‘z’s just to keep it at the bottom. (There is a nice double entendre to the tag — like those blogs are all just sleeping peacefully.)

2. The book is Hack, subtitled “How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do With My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab,” published by Villard, an imprint of Random House.

I was going to write about something else today, but I’ve been feeling rejuvenated after attending a Levon Helm concert last Sunday at his home.

Besides revisiting songs of Helm with the legendary group, The Band, I’ve been listening this week to other songs of the past few decades, including a favorite from R.E.M. — ‘Everybody Hurts’* — that now has new meaning.

Not that I’m hurting. Hell, I’m feeling great after that concert. But there are lines in the R.E.M. song that give me pause anew — When you’re sure you’ve had enough of this life, hang on . . . If you feel like letting go, hold on.

Now I’ve been living in this suburban skirt of New York City for the past 16 years, and I lived here twice before in the mid-1970s and late 1980s, but I still don’t feel like I live here. I view my friends and neighbors not principally as friends and neighbors but as New Yorkers. The government here, even in our small town, is more complicated than necessary, people talk funny, and you can never tell whether someone is going to be friendly or rude. Except for waitresses — they call you ‘hon’ before they ask if you want more ‘cooawffee.’ It’s not that I particularly dislike the place. I’m just bemused by it, like it’s a foreign country.

I don’t know where I do belong. Certainly not in my native New Hampshire or any of the four other states where I’ve lived besides New York. But I do know I’m glad that I didn’t leave this outskirt for a third time, that when I’d had enough of it, I held on.

Because a coworker named Bonnie said she was sad that I was leaving again and wouldn’t I reconsider. I did. And a couple of years later, we were married.

And that’s who I went to the concert with Sunday. Bonnie has known Helm since 1993 when as a reporter for our local newspaper — although small, it’s the closest daily to Woodstock where Bob Dyan and The Band used to live — she hung out with the group on their trip to Washington for Bill Clinton’s first inaugural.

Helm knows a thing or two about holding on: After nearly three decades of uninterrupted success, he ran into a bad decade starting in the early 1990s — throat cancer that wasted his body, a fire that burned down his house and a series of bankruptcies that he’s trying to resolve by holding concerts at his rebuilt home and studio in Woodstock.

The studio is a timber barn built with mortise, tenon and pegs — not a nail to be found — and is heated during concerts by a big fireplace on one end as well as the studio lights and the bodies of the hundred or so people who can fit into the place.

Helm is noticeably thinner now, but you never would have known Sunday that a thing was wrong. And it wasn’t. Just as the concert was to start, he learned his latest album, “Dirt Farmer,” had won a Grammy award, his second of the evening. He also got one for lifetime achievement as part of The Band.

The previous day, his daughter, Amy, gave birth to a son. The boy is named Lavon, just as Helm was in his Arkansas childhood, before fame changed the ‘a’ to ‘e’ and shifted the stress from the second to the first syllable.

Helm’s voice is a little raspier these days, although still as strong as ever, and that huskier sound gives his singing even more authenticity and authority.

At the end of the concert, as he sang ‘The Weight,’ I stood by the fireplace and thought about who has taken a load off me. It was only four days before Valentine’s Day, and I’ll leave you to guess who I had in mind.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

* By the way, R.E.M. turned that song into one of the best music videos I’ve seen. (Don’t miss the very end.)

It’s Valentine’s Day, and our gift to you is a romantic one. Well, actually, it’s a Romantic one, in the traditional literary sense — a story filled with fantasy, heroism, adventure, mystery, maybe even a bit of the supernatural. (And it’s not in Latin¹.)

It’s a futuristic work called The Unearthing, and we offer you its first four chapters.

In fact, this sample of the novel was a gift to us from its author, Montreal writer Steve Karmazenuk, and now appears in our Works section at the upper right of this main page. Just click on the Fiction link and select either the full work by its title or one of the individual chapters.

The story opens amid the swirl of elemental forces at the beginning of time and space and moves into the quest of sentient beings to explore their universe. Suddenly, we’re dropped into another exploration, this one in the dust-blown reaches of New Mexico. It’s postwar New Mexico, but the war was War Three, and it’s not the same place.

Buried in the dry earth of the Southwestern Native Protectorate is an unnatural object. And Professor Mark Echohawk goes there to unearth it.

Everyone who has seen the object is mystified, some frightened, by its presence beneath the desert soil, and there’s a struggle to keep it a secret. Just as word gets out to the general population — wouldn’t you know it? — the four-chapter sample ends.

The full 411-page novel is available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

Besides The Unearthing, Karmazenuk is the author of a second novel, Oh Well, Whatever, Nevermind (excerpts available exclusively through www.phyte.ca), and a weblog, Kspace, where he discusses writing, life, politics and other subjects. He is also a music journalist with Confront Magazine.

By the way, both the Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites are awaiting a first reader review of The Unearthing. We’d also like to know what you think.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

1. The word ‘romance’ came into being in the 14th century to describe a heroic adventure story that was written in a Romance language — a vernacular, initially French — rather than the traditional Latin. By the 17th century, the definition was extended to love stories and included other Latin-derived languages such as Spanish and Italian. The word’s use as a verb — that is, to court someone as a lover — isn’t believed to have appeared until the 1940s.

I was reading an article about ‘legacies’ — you know, affirmative action for rich white kids who get into elite colleges because of their family’s influence — and it caught my attention because I also happen to read for an elite college.

No, not read in the British sense of studying a subject at university, but read as in tape-recording textbooks for students with disabilities.

Now, the idea of legacies irritates me — in fact, it pisses me off for several reasons I will discuss later — but I’m not prepared to say that the students I read for, even though they may come from rich alumni families, are particularly advantaged.

One of the books I recorded a while back was an astronomy text. Besides reading the words in the text, I also had to describe the charts, photographs and illustrations, and the book was full of them. Imagine trying to describe an illustration showing the relative sizes of planets, stars, galaxies and various nebulae — or how magnetic fields and stellar winds interact.

It wasn’t easy, especially when I wondered how the student was going to understand any of this.

Because she was blind. From birth, I think.

Jesus.

The college, which is very well known, will remain unnamed. I don’t live in the same town — the texts and recordings are exchanged by mail — and there are a lot of elite colleges here in the Northeast.

I went to one of those Ivy League-type schools, but I was no legacy. My parents were white but poor, and my legacy from them was that I knew how to work, which I did, serving meals every day to fellow students who didn’t have to work. And I studied. I had to. Unlike most of my classmates who were prepared in academia at places like Andover and Exeter, I came from a public school where most graduates didn’t go on to college.

I was lucky to go to that college, and I never forgot it. But I wondered how many of my advantaged classmates realized how lucky they were to be born into the right families. Well, at least none of them wandered off to Texas, became a fundamentalist and then decided to make war on all the fundamentalists who didn’t agree with him. (So now you know I didn’t go to Yale.)

What got me thinking about legacies was an article on the website Diverse that said more advantaged white kids get special treatment in admissions to elite schools than the combined number of blacks and other racial and ethnic groups who are admitted under affirmative action.

I came across a similar article on the website Outside the Beltway in which a commenter said some well-off families arrange for even more advantages for their children by getting them declared ‘learning disabled.’ That gets them extra time on exams and extra help like the recordings I provide.

My recording work, which started about 10 years ago, is sporadic. When I started, I was otherwise gainfully employed and did the reading for free. Now that I’m retired and on a tight budget, I take the small hourly fee the college offers.

Like I said, it’s off and on, and I never meet the students. In some cases, I’m told what the disability is so I can adjust my reading. For example, if the disability is dyslexia, the student follows the text while listening to the tape. In those cases, I read faster than usual because sight reading is faster than oral reading. In other cases, other visual or learning disabilities are involved.

In fact, some of these students may be legacy kids who are faking their disabilities. In most cases, however, considering the quality of the college, I doubt it. But maybe I’m being naive.

My current assignment is reading a textbook on statistics — you know, the mean, median, histograms, deviations and all that stuff. I’ve been told to read the charts, graphs and formulas with their Greek letters and mathematical symbols, although I haven’t been told what the student’s disability is.

I can’t think about it being a legacy kid faking a disability. Because what if it’s another blind girl?

– Sid Leavitt

There’s no doubt we’re finding new horizons with our new electronic devices, but I can think of one — the cell phone — that would have destroyed a world I discovered two decades ago.

Twenty years ago, they were called ‘cellular’ phones and they weren’t exactly hand-held. They were bulky, heavy, and they required radio equipment that took up as much space as a medium-size kitchen appliance, which is why they also cost about the same, and hooked into an expensive network, if you could find one.

I was about to embark on my life in a truck. It wasn’t going to be just life in a truck. It was going to be a minimalist life in a truck, expenses cut to the bone, squeezing each dollar until, as they say, the eagle screamed.

(Yes, you can read all about it in ‘Adrift in America,’ a book that is, conveniently for you, available free on this weblog.)

I lived five years in that truck, traveling for much of that time, and I managed to live a minimal life that stayed within my meager budget. And yet, minimalist that I was, I would gladly have had a mobile telephone in that truck. I just couldn’t afford it.

So it was stopping every now and then to use a pay phone when calls were necessary. And, of course, nobody could call me. On the road, I was incommunicado, cut off from all the world except for the immediate part I happened to be occupying.

Personal security was a concern.

When I was preparing for my road life, the truck and I lived at an RV park in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. When we weren’t commuting to my editing job in Portland, I was busy outfitting the truck with such things as lightweight cabinets, a generator, an auxiliary water supply, and the truck and I went on little shakedown trips to other wooded areas of Maine and New Hampshire.

One of the troubling questions I had in those days was how to assure my safety on the road. Without a phone, calling the police was not an option.

Then should I carry a gun? If so, should it be a rifle or a handgun? Now, I’m no stranger to guns. I grew up in rural New Hampshire where everybody had guns, and I qualified in the Army as an expert with a rifle.

It was this background that finally convinced me not to take a gun on the road. I planned to shoot no game, and as for personal confrontations, I knew, a gun is no help unless you’re ready to use it. I didn’t want to be on either end of a gunfight, lose or win.

Protection against animals? One of my discoveries: A spray bottle filled with ammonia, nozzle adjusted to ’stream,’ will stop most any animal dead in its tracks.

The best safety measure, I found, was avoidance.

In March 1989, I was parked in a picnic area in Cross Plains, Texas, enjoying a quiet evening, when the woods were suddenly full of pickup trucks and sedans with throaty mufflers. I had no interior lights on, and when the vehicles began circling my truck, I pulled the window curtains closed. The vehicles kept circling, counterclockwise.

From one of them, a young voice: “There’s someone in there, so wake up, you old bastard.” From another, “Pervert.”

This mini-Nascar event continued for 10 minutes, then the vehicles sped away, the reason for their departure no more apparent than for their arrival. Even if I could have called the police, they wouldn’t have had time to get there. And I shuddered to think what would have happened with a gun involved.

After a polite interval, I also drove away, well out of town.

Parked later in a less-public thicket, I pulled out the Bible and did some reading. Nowhere did I find words like “old bastard” and “pervert” shouted at strangers.

Then I thought about TV evangelists in that Bible Belt, and it occurred to me that they’re sort of the junk food of religion. I guess you could argue that a glazed doughnut or a greasy hamburger is better than starvation, but I wondered. About the additives and their poisonous effects. Because I felt I had just witnessed some of them.

Then I wrote a long letter to a friend. I did that a lot. No PC, no word processor, just a small manual typewriter. No Wikipedia, just a Webster’s dictionary and a Bible.

It was a different world, one that a cell phone from today would have evaporated. It was a world of isolation, a quality I still value. It has helped me discover a lot about myself.

– Sid Leavitt

Here’s some domestic wisdom I’ve acquired over the better part of seven decades. In fact, it’s not just some, but pretty much the sum total of my domestic wisdom:

Easy brown rice in the microwave: You need only a 2½-quart plastic container with its lid, plus a plastic lid from a much larger container. Put the larger lid downside up in the microwave, put two cups of washed brown rice in the container, add 5½ cups of cold water, top the container with its lid, also upside down, and set the whole thing on the larger lid in the microwave. Cook on high for 35 minutes. The smaller lid, since it’s only sitting loosely on the container, will allow steam and water to bubble out of the container, and this moisture will drip into the larger lid, keeping the microwave clean. This technique makes perfect, just slightly toothy brown rice¹.

Economy wine cooler: Buy six commercial wine coolers in 16-ounce plastic bottles with plastic screw caps. Drink the wine coolers at your leisure, saving the bottles and caps. Then buy a box of really cheap wine (I like the whites) and several 2-liter bottles of flavored seltzer² in the supermarket brand, which also is really cheap. Chill the wine and seltzer, then refill the empty bottles each with 5 ounces of wine and 11 ounces of seltzer and recap. (Each six-bottle refill uses one 2-liter bottle of seltzer. Tidy, huh?)

Decaffeinating: Sciatica acting up? Doc sez cut out the caffeine? Naw, go only halfway. Make coffee with half regular, half decaffeinated grounds. It’ll all taste regular, and your leg won’t hurt so much. Same with your diet cola. (I know it’s diet because if you’re reading this blog, you’re smart enough to know that the sugary stuff will really kill you.) Buy the cola in 2-liter bottles, half of them caffeine-free. Fill your glass (or one of those refillable wine bottles) half and half. You’ll feel better.

Perking up whites: Fill a 2½-gallon plastic bucket with water, add ½ capful of chlorine bleach, then fill your liquid detergent cap with detergent, pour it back in the bottle and swish the cap in the water bucket to add just enough detergent to it. Use the bucket to soak whites between washloads, several days if possible. Particularly good for cotton underwear.

Clean shave: Use antibacterial hand soap. Soak your face (or other part to be shaved) with warm water, then rub in hand soap until heavily foamy. The store brand soap is cheap — much cheaper than that shaving cream in a can — and after shaving, your face will be unusually clean with a light fragrance, sort of like baby powder.

Dental hygiene: One word — toothpicks. We don’t use them enough in this country, probably because it’s still considered crude to use them at the table, especially at a restaurant. But who cares when you end up with fewer cavities? In Europe, the Swiss have added a plastic toothpick to their famous army knife.

Handy fasteners: Again, one word — wood spring clothespins. Perfect for reclosing bags of chips, cookies, frozen vegetables, whatever.

Royalty of fasteners: Velcro, duct tape, Crazy Glue. They’ll hold anything together — the latter, I have found, including your fingers.

Cheez-its: Crumbled, they make everything taste better — veggies, casseroles, even cereal.

Speaking of cereal: Soy milk tastes better on it than regular milk.

Leave the leaves: Don’t rake in the fall. Let the leaves stay through the winter. But rake them as soon as the ground thaws in the spring. So much easier dealing with wet leaves. Experts say this is the absolutely worst thing you can do, but in regions where the lawn freezes, the grass protects it. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking with it.

Domestic tranquility: Every day, find something you like about your spouse and mention it to him/her. Do this more frequently if it doesn’t seem like sucking up, which could raise spousal suspicions. Also, always be very careful writing about spouse, particularly on the Internet and especially WSSOS³.

Latest wisdom: And, oh yeah, something I learned very recently: Not every random thought leads to a good blog post.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. White rice? Forget it: There’s no reason to eat white rice instead of brown rice.

2. Southerners and Midwesterners: You may have to use flavored soda water instead. It’s nowhere near as good as seltzer, but hey, that’s life in the belt.

3. When Spouse is Standing Over your Shoulder.