In 1968, The Velvet Underground finally found a large, mainstream audience during a performance on the Lawrence Welk Show.
With all this self-absorption I’ve been going through since the Edgar nomination, I thought it would be good to point to some things other have done, things that have stayed with me. I want to start with a rolicking rollercoaster of a thriller called
Beneath a Panamanian Moon
As some of you might suspect, I ran across this treat because I’d bumped into Mr Terrenoire through this site and his own. Since I’m a slow reader who’s too distracted by his own writing and the television, it took me a while to get to the adventures of John Harper. I’m glad I finally did.
When I started getting into spy fiction, I thought the only way to go about it was the Le Carre way—that is, with heft. It’s a bleak world, and let’s not pretend anything different. Then, in recent years, I ran across Len Deighton, whose Harry Palmer stories (in both film and fiction) were a laugh riot. I remember reading The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, wondering, “How the hell does he do that? How does he mix the danger with the hoots?”
I ask the same questions here, because David Terrenoire is clearly Len Deighton’s heir, with less recipes but more music and ass-kicking. And just as many laughs.
I could swim every day, and I worked out with weights, and even did a little kickboxing with a few of the Washington wives, but jogging was as enjoyable as being run over by a bus full of Promise Keepers. I didn’t like it.
For fun, Bardot & Gainsbourg’s “Comic Strip”.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
Among her weekend round-up of interesting links, Sarah pointed to this article at the Globe and Mail, reviewing Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America by Andrei S. Markovits.
Jeffery Kopstein’s review is very much worth a read, and very interesting to those of us from the States living in Europe. While the focus of this book is Western Europe’s thought, even here in the east one runs into the knee-jerk anti-Americanism the book describes.
Of course, the reasons are sometimes different. Like, in Novi Sad, tough questions about my country often surround the NATO bombing campaign that plagued that city for many days. Tell someone that “those were NATO planes, not just American,” and you get one of those looks that suggests you’re the most naive child they’ve ever run across. That, or a bald-faced liar.
Now, I can understand this kind of anti-American feeling. Bombs are bombs. Even when the recipients of those bombs were (and many of the people I know in Novi Sad were) actively anti-Milosevic and agreed with the aims of those bombs, one doesn’t always agree with the methods. But the kind of anti-Americanism described in Uncouth Nation, Kopstein points out, goes beyond disagreements over US foreign policy. It becomes a cultural disdain.
In a fascinating twist, Markovits highlights the gradual transformation of European anti-Americanism after the Second World War from an ideology of the discredited right to one of the anti-imperialist left. As magnanimous as the Americans were in Europe after the war, cultural dependence on the United States elicited a deep and abiding resentment. It became the source of all of modernity’s evils. Longer working hours, “publish or perish” at French universities, the dramatic increase in lawsuits and the prestige of “L.A. Law” lawyers in Great Britain, reality TV (which, in fact, originated in Europe), even the dominance of black over brown squirrels in German parks, are seen as evidence of a pernicious “Americanization.”
Central European UniversityGeorge Sorosopen societyOpen Society Institute
Survivor
And then there is the anti-Semitism. In what is surely his most controversial chapter, Markovits draws the connection between European anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. He maintains that the old and discredited anti-Semitism of the European right has migrated to a new anti-Semitism of the left. …
… The issue is not capitalism but ethnic identity. The left accepts Jews, but only on the condition that they shed their Jewishness. In a moment at once self-revelatory and accusatory, Markovits writes, “Indeed, the Left always reserved its universalism for the Jews while applying the legitimacy of its identity politics to all other nationalities.” Anti-Zionism and the demonization of Israel have become vehicles for the reintroduction of anti-Semitism into respectable European conversation, especially since the Six Day War in 1967. The syllogisms are simple enough: Israel commits atrocities. Why? Because the United States lets it. Why? Because guess who controls the United States? You got it: the Jews.
the review
…Can one be a good Canadian without being anti-American? Five years after I returned to Canada, my conclusion is that it’s not easy. As the torturous conversations over what it means to be Canadian have shown, the efforts often yield modest results that promise little in the way of shoring up the Canadian nation-building project, at least in the short run. It’s much simpler to say, “Whatever else we may be, one thing we can agree upon is that we are not those silly Americans.”
But this is lazy nation-building and works only at the expense of sustaining the community of free nations of the West. Perhaps none of this would really matter if the Americans didn’t care about what others thought of them. But they do and always have. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1835: “The Americans, in their intercourse with strangers, appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise.”
I just handed the copy-edited manuscript of Victory Square to my friendly neighborhood Hungarian Fed Ex man, and it’s beginning its two-day trip to New York. Like many of the previous copy-edits, I had to rush my way through these, clocking 100 pages a day to make my post-return-to-Budapest 4-day deadline—even so, it’ll arrive a day late.
Luckily, it was a clean manuscript, with occasional exceptions. I tend to overuse conjunctions at the beginnings of sentences, particularly when I’m on a roll. I get inconsistent on things like capitalized nouns, and in one chapter the Russian character’s name is different than it is the rest of the book—he went through one of those last-minute search-and-replace name changes that didn’t quite take. And of course I sometimes get historical names and facts completely wrong.
But it’s out, gone, and I won’t see it again until the proofs arrive—those big pages with big margins and, in the center, the text as it will appear in the final book. Those are nice. I really like classy typesetting.
By the time I get hold of these later versions of what I once knew only as a Word file on my computer, I’ve gained a little distance. Months have passed, and I’ve become more excited about that next book, which, theoretically, will blow the previous one out of the water. Then I sit down and read the manuscript, full of colored-pencil scribbles someone else made, and start to see it for the story it is. Not just the sentences that could’ve been structured better, or the poor word choice, or the lack of description in this or that scene—I start to see it as, hopefully, the reader will—as a story unto itself, disconnected from those months of hard work and unbearably early drafts.
It’s as if the story’s no longer mine.
During the more exciting sections, I even asked myself, “What happens next?” and occasionally surprised myself with passages I’d forgotten. A few times I fretted for characters’ fates, and sometimes thought, “Wow, where did that come from?”
Each evening, my girlfriend asked the same question: “Is it still good?”
I shrugged, nonchalant. “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I think it is.”
However, there was something in the manuscript to back up this opinion. The copy-editor, among the general notes s/he scribbled on the front page, added, “And thank you for writing such an enjoyable book!” This has happened only once before, with my first book, the oft-nominated one. So does that mean anything? Probably not, but it’s nice anyway.
At this point, though, the book is beyond repair—that is, I can’t rewrite it anymore. What’s done is done. However, my trepidation is stronger this time around, because this is the finale to my series. In this book lies the final chance for my series to achieve mass market success, and this was something I was aware of during the whole composition.
If this book does remarkably well, there will be a natural resurgence of the earlier volumes’ sales. But if this book does poorly—does, for instance, the kinds of numbers Liberation Movements has been showing—then the whole series will fade slowly away. Everything really does hinge on this last book, and there’s no longer anything I can do about it.
But really, that’s the good news. Because we all need to be stopped at some point and told to just give it up already. Either by our editors or by the simple need to get that on-delivery check from the publisher. Otherwise we’d be like Professor Grady Tripp, writing and editing for years without ever really knowing if we’re making the story any better.
Besides, if you don’t let the present one go, you’ll never know how great that next one is going to be. And that just might be a damned shame.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)
Those who already know him like Olen Steinhauer’s work, which has been compared to Philip Kerr’s and Alan Furst’s. I would agree with that second comparison - he is a similarly dispassionate writer. And after reaching mid-way through book - the first I have read - I was glad to have made the effort. Switching between short chapters, multiple points of view, and two time streams took some effort. Try it. I found it paid off.
some reviewers
In some ways, given his unusual name, Olen Steinhauer’s publishers might do better to change his biography - he lives in Hungary, but he is a transplanted American. THE ISTANBUL VARIATIONS is so amoral, and so steeped in the attitudes of the police of the communist eastern block, that readers might think they were reading books written there too, if the back blurb did not give the game away.
* * *
Liberation Movementsdo
Kevin was kind enough to notice a 4-point list over at The National Review, under a pleasant bash of bestselling authors, on pop-fiction “Diamonds in the Rough Who Deserve to be READ”. It includes not only me but that bearded Scot Stuart MacBride (with whom I chatted at Harrogate), Steve Hamilton, and George Pelecanos (who I watched from a respectful distance at Harrogate).
It’s a real honor to be put in such company, and to be included in such a short list in this major magazine, but the opening statement in my mention was a surprise:
Conservatives should be lining up to purchase the work of Olen Steinhauer.
Today is Serbian—or, put better, Orthodox—Christmas. Like many other Christian offshoots, the celebration is on Christmas Eve, with fish soup (and my 6-hour Neely’s Wet BBQ ribs, as well as my attempts to make James Bond’s Vesper Martinis for the family) and here, the laying of hay and sticks all around the house. (I suppose this is an approximation of the manger, but I haven’t gotten a straight answer on that yet.)
One difference is that children go door to door with a memorized poem/chant, and like a no-costume Halloween, they get oranges and nuts for their troubles. Otherwise, it looks a lot like the Christmases I grew up with in Virginia, with the ornamented tree and presents and too much food (with Serbian food, that’s something to be happy about) and drink (ibid) and lots of relatives. What I mean to say is, it’s a fine time for all. Everyone’s feeling close and warm, and even optimistic about the coming year.Star Wars filmss A New Hope
Star Wars bedsheets
story behind the movies at Wikipedia
Joseph CampbellMonomyth
Hero with a Thousand Faces
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Star Wars
Star Wars
Vespers
In the morning I’ll be heading out of the country, and for the next couple weeks will be a little more out-of-touch than usual. Since I’ll be in Serbia, I’ll have the bonus of an extra Christmas—a Catholic one with an ethnic Hungarian family, followed by an Orthodox one (January 7) with an ethnic Serb family. (Funny how, while avoiding both forms of the faith, I gain the benefits of both!)
Anyway, to all our readers and even those who avoid this corner of the ‘sphere like the plague, have a good time. Use your chosen celebration and the New Year (again, I get two: the Eastern Orthodox one lies on January 14!!!) to keep track of where you’ve come from, and where you’re headed. I know I will.
Keep it real.
(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)