In the Blink of an Eye

I’ve always considered myself to be part of a strange in-between sort of generation. I was born in 1961, so I was too young to be part of the sixties and too old to be part of Generation-X. There was no cause that my generation was excited about. We were at the tail end of the baby boomers and the start of the me generation.

The music my friends and I listened to in high school was the stuff playing on the FM stations, not the top 40 disco that was popular. We listened to rock and roll from the late sixties and early seventies, as if we were disappointed in what our own era had to offer. Most of my high school friends got married and had kids right away and those that went on to college were intent on professions most likely to guarantee the highest income possible.

I don’t remember any artists, poets or saints.

I went into the Air Force when I was nineteen. I was in the San Antonio airport, waiting to get on a bus to basic training when all the television screens went live to New York City. It was December 8, 1980 and John Lennon had just been shot. It was the quietest I’ve ever seen an airport and it seemed that the world stood still.

I took it as an omen.

President Reagan was sworn into office the following month and when I think of my thirteen years, seven months and twenty-three days as an airman, my time was defined by those Reagan years.

I’m a cold war veteran.

Lots of people I’ve met over the years have been surprised and occasionally stunned to discover I was in the military. I guess I don't seem like someone who would have enlisted. They see what’s happening in Iraq now and they wonder why anybody would enlist.

I wonder the same thing.

Those were different times. People like me joined the military because we didn’t have a lot of other options and it was a way to pay for college – at least that’s what they told us. There were guys who joined because that’s just what the men in their families did. There were guys who’d run into trouble and it was either the military or jail. There were a lot of us who didn’t know what to do with our lives. We just knew there was nothing for us where we were.

We never thought about the possibility that we could be killed. We talked about it now and then in hypothetical terms, but the reality was that we had a lot of years where the United States didn’t get involved in any significant military actions. Now and then we got reminders that life could be a little more dangerous for us than for civilians. There were terrorist threats and bombings, but that was the kind of thing that those of us in our twenties knew only happened to other people.

There was one thing we were afraid of that most people have forgotten and younger people never experienced. We were afraid of the Soviet Union. We were born afraid of them. It’s strange when I think back on a lifetime of that fear of the unknown and the idea that at any time, a global nuclear holocaust might happen and end life on this planet as we know it. Our culture was obsessed with the possibility.

I was stationed in Europe for the better part of the 80’s, and we couldn’t travel to Eastern Bloc countries. We had to report contact with anyone we ran into from one of those countries to the Office of Special Investigations.

Not much chance of that happening in those days.

I had just moved back to the states when the Berlin Wall came down. I couldn’t stop watching the news. I cried. I was jealous that I’d left too soon because I felt like I should have been there. I never believed it would happen in my lifetime and then it did. It seems like a nearly forgotten part of our history now, but to that point, it was the biggest thing that had ever happened in the world as far as I was concerned.

Everything changed overnight.

I never met a Russian until a year ago. Irina moved to Denver from Moscow six years ago. She’s twenty seven years old and after the first time we talked, I realized that she has no concept of how people my age were raised to think of Russians – well, we called them Soviets – and how her parents’ generation thought of us. We thought of the Kremlin and Soviets ready to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles at us and we thought of Soviet people standing in lines for toilet paper. I have no idea what they thought of us.

I watched our fifth year in Iraq pass us by with no end in sight and I wonder what event will mark the end of this for the generation fighting this war. I hope the day will come when those kids too young to remember life before the first Gulf War can experience the feeling I had when the Cold War ended.

It didn’t take long for us to forget about it, but it was a nice feeling while it lasted.

Here Comes the Sun!

Patry Francis had a great post about singing yesterday and today, on this first day of April with the Sun streaming through my windows I couldn't help but think of her. The sentiment of this song feels so significant with regard to Patry, where she's been and where she's going that I wanted to post a video of it to share with everyone.

Naturally, I was looking for something Beatles or George, but something made me watch this one.

I think this musician is fantastic and on a site dedicated to the pursuit of my literary dreams, I thought that posting this particular rendition of the classic song was especially apt.

Books I Read in February and March 2008

The Fourth Watcher, by Timothy Hallinan is the second in a series set in Bangkok. Travel writer Poke Rafferty and the cast of characters I became so fond of in the first novel, A Nail Through the Heart return in this crime thriller when a ghost from Rafferty’s past re-enters his life and places his new family in danger. Tim continues to astound me with his deft handling of multiple story lines and with his interesting and nuanced characters. I again found myself drawn into the underworld in Bangkok and I continue to learn bits and pieces about eastern attitudes and culture. The Fourth Watcher has a scheduled release date of June of this year. Yes, that’s right. I had an Advance Reader Copy (ARC)! I had two back to back business trips while reading The Fourth Watcher and took every opportunity to flash my ARC around and show it to people so I could tell them that I know real, live published authors and only very important people get to have an “unedited proof”. I showed it off to Patti on my trip to San Antonio and she was appropriately inspired by the coolness of it all. Or at least she humored me.

Gang Leader for a Day, by Sudhir Venkatesh is a the non-fiction account written of the decade this self-proclaimed “rogue sociologist” spent conducting research in one of the most infamous public housing projects in Chicago. Venkatesh became acquainted with a gang leader and his associates, as well as an intricate cast of characters that included prostitutes, Chicago Housing Authority building managers, Housing Police, clergymen and tenants. The book reveals a fascinating picture of the hidden economy and organization found within a society immersed in urban poverty. This was an impulse purchase from my local independent bookstore. I was trying to understand gang culture and I thought this book might provide some insights. This was a fascinating book and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of a world most of us know very little about.

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee. Coetzee is a Nobel Prize winning South African ex-pat who has been living in Australia for a number of years. To call this novel bleak would be an understatement. I wanted to read Coetzee because I kept running into references to his work. He’s undeniably a gifted writer and I found this novel, set in post-Apartheid South Africa disturbing, to say the least, but also strangely compelling. I’ve got another Coetzee novel on my TBR stack and I’m sure I’ll want to read it before the year ends.

The Double Bind, by Chris Bohjalian. Two things led me to this one. The first is that it was a selection from the Odyssey Book Store signed first edition book club that I belong to so it was already in my TBR stack. Then I read an interview with Chris Bohjalian at The Writers’ Group blog and he was so charming, I wanted to read the book, and I’m glad I did. There are a number of elements that make this an especially innovative novel, but probably the biggest is the incorporation of characters from Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby. A very interesting premise and an ending I didn’t see coming. Warning: Ello, I’m talking to you – do not read the last few pages of the book until you get to them or you’ll ruin the book for yourself!

Torch, by Cheryl Strayed. I first read about Cheryl Strayed at Kate Hopper’s blog. I subsequently ordered the “Best of” collections in order to read her essays and liked them so much that I ordered her debut novel, Torch. The book follows the path of a family in a small town in Minnesota from the terminal cancer diagnosis of Teresa through the year or so following her death. The separate journeys through grief for Teresa’s husband and two children are genuine, honest, painful and at times, funny. Strayed is one of the most honest writers I’ve ever read and her prose is simple and beautiful.

The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall was a recommended read from The Electric Orchid Hunter when I posted my January reads. The nice thing about book recommendations from friends in the blogosphere is that it’s pretty easy to guess whether or not you’ll like the types of books they do by looking at their profiles. The EEO has several books that I loved listed, so I was anxious to read this one. You either love this type of book or you don’t. It would be easy to pigeon hole this with the growing category of stories that begin with a young amnesiac trying to piece together his past, but that would be a vast oversimplification. This book is Memento meets Fight Club meets the movie Jaws, taken to the next level and all written in flawless prose. Still confused? It’s part sci-fi, part literary thriller, part love story, part adventure story. I really enjoyed the book and expect to see a lot more from this talented English writer.

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard. I picked this up because how could I not? I’m a sucker for books about reading. Somewhat tongue in cheek at times and occasionally a little heavy handed with references, Bayard’s assertion is that one doesn’t need to actually read a book in order to have a good grasp of it and in order to intelligently discuss it. In fact, he goes so far as to say that reading the book may even be an impediment to doing so. He refers to the “collective library” and our own “inner library” and the significance of understanding where a particular book fits in the collective library. It was a pretty good read, but I’d only recommend it to the nerdiest of book nerds.

Meyer, by Stephen Dixon. Somewhere I stumbled across an online article about Stephen Dixon and his latest novel, Meyer. Dixon has written close to thirty novels and has been described as “a hipper Saul Bellow”. How could I not be intrigued by that? Dixon writes the kind of novels that I love, but that a lot of people do not. It’s difficult to describe his style and rather than try, I’d recommend the article I’ve linked to. Meyer is about a writer enduring an episode of writer’s block. He explores a series of episodes in his life and imposes a series of "what-ifs" that change the outcomes and give him story fodder to consider. I often say that I’m tired of novels about writers, but the truth is, I can’t seem to resist them. I’d almost describe what Dixon does as experimental fiction.

My TBR stack continues to grow at a faster rate than I’m able to get through it, but so far I haven’t found a twelve-step program for what ails me. What’s always is a surprise to me is what I’ll read next and I wonder if anybody else is as flaky about this as I am. I have TBR books piled on top of book cases in my office and I tend to stack a half dozen of them on my bedside table. These are the primary candidates for what I’ll read next, but I won’t always even stick with these. I guess it all depends on what I’m in the mood for when I’m ready to start a new book. Before I started Meyer (the last book I read), I literally lined it up with Saturday, by Ian McEwan, The Fall of Rome, by Martha Southgate and How the Dead Dream, by Lydia Millet and re-read all the book jackets before I chose Meyer.

Before I start the next one, I’ll glance over the entire stack and then at the short stack on the bedside table, but I have no idea what I'll start.

What was the best book you read recently?

How do you decide what book to read next?

And a final note: Don't forget to celebrate National Poetry Month!