I wonder at the source of inspiration.

And in this, I am not unlike every other person who presumes to compress a week’s worth of intellectual power into a scant 10 paragraphs. Or a year’s labor on a novel into three quick nights’ reading.

Why sometimes, the words tumble out faster than my keyboard can catch them, while at others, the yawning silence and my stiff aching fingers combine for a stunningly inactive interlude. Inactivity of the immediately forgettable sort.

But the peripherals of those sans inspirational interludes are sharply drawn. Everything is sharply drawn save what requires it. The ring-fingers ache from bones broken long ago in a well-remembered football game in 1983 and a rugby match in 1987. Both in Germany, and both on those typically wintry cold, frosty teutonic nights.

My cleats found uncertain purchase on the frozen ground, my hand stabbed out to fend off a block, and it was snapped sideways as I went down. I stood up, looked at it dumbly, my breath coming in labored puffs of white. I grasped the finger and snapped it back straight.

Yes, there was a snap.

Not quite straight. It still sits slightly askew. It ruined my salute.

The other finger, other hand. Snapped as well in like-fashion, caught in the terrible synthetic mesh of some unknown brute’s jersey in Frankfurt. Now, these wretched fingers ache when I least expect it.

We seem never to notice the absence of pain, you know. I appreciate that absence more and more as the pain comes more frequently. Those slightly crooked, slightly aching ring fingers serve to remind me of frigid German nights, back during the Cold War, when our enemies were clear-cut, ideologically despicable and yet rational. And they strutted about in the open, medals on their chests and stale ideology on their lips. Those were Francis Fukuyama days.

Fukuyama was the philosopher who famously proclaimed the “End of History” in his 1989 essay of the same title, positing that we’d reached the triumphal era of liberal democratic capitalism, and that all competing ideologies had been defeated.

He was wrong, of course, and it was Sam Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” model that more clearly defined the new era, predicting the rise of radical Islam and the increasing divide between the democracies of the West and the theocracies of the Middle East and Asia. Sam is a distinguished professor of politics at Harvard and the advisor to my own PhD Chairman/advisor, and so I am biased and the lineage is something I’m proud of, having not much else in which to exhibit pride. Save my kids.

And so I type with aching fingers, the fingers I used to slip comfortably into the handle of a mug of Guinness Stout in the Speakeasy pub in West Berlin, raising that dark brew to my lips more times on more nights than was prudent in the fall of 1983. But what does prudence have to do with a young soldier in a foreign land, given to profanity and fisticuffs borne of too much testosterone and not enough common sense?

The British did not like us, you know.

British soldiers were given to a drunkenness and brawling unlike any other people I’ve witnessed, surpassing even Russians. Perhaps they recruit their soldiers from the winners of the brawls at their famously violent soccer matches. Surely it is best to have them on our side in a fight against a common enemy. I just want them pointed in the right direction.

If I could crack the knuckles of these aching fingers, perhaps I could relieve some of the stiffness and I could eke out a few words of merit. I used to take a blade of grass in these same fingers, a proper sliver betwixt my thumbs.

The grass would act as a reed, and I could pipe a tune through the little gap formed by my love mounds pressed together and my fingers steepled. The blade had to be appropriately thick and long and the angle had to be exactly right . . . otherwise, how could the music possibly be sweet?

I could play auld lang syne, piped between my thumbs, and did so many times, but I recall a particular time at a UNC versus University of Virginia baseball game, lounging on the grass outside Boshamer Stadium, watching the game while lying in the hot sun, rays scorching my untannable body, empty beer cans scattered around the small coterie of fraternity brothers as we popped the tops on full ones. But that was years ago and years ago, when gasoline was still cheap, the girls’ smiles were genuine, and I worried not at all about tomorrow.

Years ago and years ago

We worried about nothing, except who was next on the basketball schedule and how to get tickets. Elvis was in the midst of his comeback, Earth, Wind and Fire was a young band on the rise, all of the Beatles were still alive, and Coors was a hard-to-find gourmet beer. My fingers certainly didn’t ache. And cholesterol wasn’t in my vocabulary. And life was ridden hard on the surface, a desperate race to prevent even the hint of a root taking hold.

Roots mean responsibility. Ties.

Investment in people, places, things. Screw all of that and pass me another Old Milwaukee.

So I fret over inspiration and wonder at its source. What compels us to write and what propels our fingers across the keyboard in patterns of words that purport to mean what we think, what we imagine, what we dream?

You know, it’s never as good on the page as what’s in the mind. That, at least, is my experience. A tremendous energy is lost in the translation in spite of our best efforts to contain it, to bottle it, to keep its power on the page in all its blazing glory.

I cannot write fast enough to capture these ephemeral thoughts that blaze across the mind, crackle wonderfully, and then are gone before they can be corralled. And so, only a portion of the energy is bottled. Just a bit, if we are lucky.

And sometimes that is enough. Maybe not tonight, but sometimes.

Perhaps aspirin can help these fingers tonight, for the ache is about to win this round and cast me, mercifully, off the keyboard.

             Quite often now – surely far more frequently than in early years when I dwelled in wiseass territory – I count my blessings.

            What blessings might those be?

            Immersion in a sparkling diversity every working day.  Tickled by the delights of a thousand different worldly combinations of cultures and milieus, served to me daily. 

           Others have it worse. 

           I sat passive in a car recently, precious minutes spent precisely as I chose to.  Slumped in the driver’s side, idly tapping the pearlized paint on the car door. Waiting in a parking lot.  A sunny day, shiny heat, but not unpleasant.  Nothing to recommend it either, save that the sun’s position along the horizon that day was marginally farther along than the day before . . . but not as far as ’twould be the next.

            A brief wait.  For a beautiful woman.  That self-same sun glinting off her blonde hair, the breeze catching her locks.

             Brief, indeed, but a wait long enough to peer at and ponder a law office up on the second floor of a ruddy brick building.  And I did ponder for a moment or two the fate of the person or persons in that office.  A lawyer “practicing” law.

             Locked into a life of repetition and ritual.

            Money, yes.

            Satisfaction?

            Perhaps.  Who knows? 

           But a day like every other.  Formulaic.  Familiar scenarios changing only in their mundane particulars.  Cramped.  The same people.  Cutouts.  Problems.  Role-playing.  Deadening.

           Maddeningly the same.

           A dulling, yet compelling psychological stimulus to act strangely.  Yearning to burst out, to shatter the golden shackles, to act . . . ignobly.

           But . . .

            A turn of the key, the engine rumbles low and smooth, and the formulas vanish, replaced with an insistent wind in the hair and a feeling of gratitude . . . even relief.  There but for the grace of God . . . 

            I toil in the second-largest metropolis on the east coast . . . a city of seven million, the home of Rocky and of Liberty.

            In the office next to mine is a fabulous marketing professor by the name of Masaaki.  Japanese, quite obviously.  In the offices on the other side are Arvind and Ram, colleagues of Indian descent, brilliant in their fields.

             I step out of my office to grab a bite at one of the many kiosks lining the main campus thoroughfare.  Walking out of the building, I hear strange-sounding, lyrical African tongues, Italian, Polish.  Students all.  Music pulsing on a spring day, echoing off the buildings, the contrapuntal rhythms of youth.  Do I fetch fruit from the Vietnamese kiosk . . . or a sandwich from the one run by Jon the Serb?  Or veggies from the Turks?

             There is always at least one Mohammed in each of my classes.

              This semester, I have two in one class.  One from Jordan, the other from Bangladesh.  Increasing numbers of students from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Bulgaria.  Two from Albania.  The Chinese, Japanese, and Indian cohorts are always large.  Closely followed by the Vietnamese and Thais.

               Jin is an interesting young man . . . Chinese, but grew up in South Africa and is a citizen of that country.  Speaks perfect English and has fantastic potential for a sharply defined personal comparative advantage.

               Ali is from Sudan.

               Muhammed from Mali.

               Asmaa from Morocco.

               And a smattering of Americans.

               This is diversity.

            This is true diversity of the kind the purveyors of the new appropriateness did not have in mind when the word became politically charged.  In fact, my university has been rated the nation’s Most Diverse Campus by the Princeton Review.  Only in such a place can someone fluently bilingual yet feel inadequate among the multilingual and talented.

            I testify to that diversity.  And to that talent.

            What does it mean for purposes of this space?

            Just this.

            The percussive effect on the soul of such a rich mix of cultures and peoples, all bright and inquisitive, all ambitious and energized, all intense and poised to hurl themselves onto a world that has no clue of what’s in store . . . well, how to measure it?  How to describe the pressure, the charge, the unharnessed and unruly dynamism?  How to measure it as compared to what would have been had a different environment prevailed in the similar time period.

            And, of course, there is the issue that every person forms a distinct portion of every other person’s environment.  So when we talk about a diverse environment’s impact on students, we are essentially talking of the students’ endless interactive impacts on each other individually and on themselves in the aggregate.

           What does it mean to learn in such an environment as opposed to one where, say, a brown face makes only an occasional appearance and a foreign accent is an aberration?  Or in an environment where there is homogeneity of one type or another, where white faces, yellow faces, brown faces . . . where beautiful lilting accents are a rarity? 

           To meticulously mix metaphors, this yeasty, electrical atmosphere is apparent to me, but strangely not to many of the students themselves.  This congeries of cultures is just the way it is.  It is not viewed overtly as an advantage or disadvantage, I think, but just a reality.

            For me – and for anyone who seeks engagement with life – it is a nirvana of sights, smells, exotic delights, and meshing of intrigues.  It is a seething, almost alive feeling of anticipation.  You cannot underestimate the potential intellectual energies of 34,000 college students massed in one place, dedicated (presumably) to learning, and unbearably optimistic about what they will do with themselves in the coming days, months, years.

            Such an atmosphere is enlivening to the inquisitive mind.  It is the antithesis to ritual and routine, formula and fatuousness.  It is the wellspring of creativity, the beating heart of innovation.

            The problem, for young people, is to reckon up their luck.  Their incredible luck at all of this. 

            I’ve reckoned up my own, and my cup runneth over. 

           A hundred story ideas beam out at me every workday.  I see a hundred stories in the faces of students, gathered together by a self-selection process that yields a sublime combination of careful selection by major, age, and interest . . . but random according to who actually shows up in the group I face each day.  I gain inspiration from the lifeforce of a hundred, and yet additional hundreds.

            Another day begins in several hours.

            I’ll drive into Philadelphia, but I’ll not complain at the cost of the gas. 

           I’ll celebrate life’s bargain that conveys me, personally, across an urban expanse to enjoy the delights the world has to offer, concentrated within the confines and shelter of a great university. 

           And when I get a moment to catch my breath . . . I’ll chronicle one of those stories.

                Or cracking open a Faberge egg to find what’s inside is far more valuable than what is glittery and sweet on the outside.

                Or . . . after a long spell of grappling with nothingness, of putting down laborious word after laborious phrase . . . finally bursting into the open with passage after passage of stuff that we think is grand and sweeping and mind-changing.  Like a dam breaking, if only for a spell.  Like the allies breaking out of hedgerow country.

                Okay, no one is breaking Faberge eggs . . . just notional eggs.  The point being, of course, that writer’s block is not real.  It is a conscious decision not to write what we think is good stuff.  I love that feeling of hitting that gusher, that well of black gold that bubbles up and froths, when you can’t get the words down fast enough.   But . . .

                . . .there are those other times, far more frequent times.  Those times when pulling the words out is excruciating.  But to carry one of these horrid little metaphors forward, if I do not hit a gusher, then I certainly do not a hit dry well.  There’s always something down there.

                Try this.

                Type a quote.  It doesn’t have to be an enduring quote, a quotable quote.  Something you heard on the street.

                “It was so loud, it made my ears itch.”

                “All those people up in New York on the streets . . . like maggots.  I couldn’t stand it.”

                And go from there.

                One of my favorite quotes is this one that follows.  I use it in speeches and I cite the author often, although he is not its originator.

                “Conan, what is best in life?”

                “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women.”

                I love that snippet of dialogue.  Now I know that it wasn’t the author Robert E. Howard who came up with it, nor was it Oliver Stone and John Milius, two outstanding screenwriters.   It was Ghengis Khan  . . . or according to some unknown chronicler, it was.

                But what description, attitude, power.

                And what a vehicle for launching into a speech, providing a metaphor for . . . well, for most anything.  It’s an attention-grabber, and it serves to introduce people to Robert E. Howard.  I can vouch that people sit up for it, whether the topic is human resource management or stamp-collecting.

                Of all the quotes I might have reached for, that one always circles back around to me for some reason.  Its barbarism, tinged with fantasy, has tickled my fancy for more than two decades since big Arnold played the Sumerian.  His best role, in my opinion.  He was born to it.

                Now, I admit that the quote itself does not give rise to anything in the mind, perhaps, other than a visceral negative reaction, a sneered quip: “anti-intellectualism of the worst sort.”  For me, it gains what power it might have from the mental remembrance of that evening long ago when I finally saw the barbarian sitting stolid and cross-legged – simple in his thinking, eager for bloodlust, a killing machine, and a showman for the masses.

                The smell of sour sweat, well-worn leather from animals unmentionable, a gourd filled with viscous foul-smelling liquid, obscene “trophies” from conquered opponents, feathers and bones and rotting flesh.  Shiny oiled bodies.  Steel glinting in firelight.

                Tales of conquest.

                Words to quicken the blood of even the most staid of human resource managers.

                Perhaps not the most uplifting of words and phrases, but words to lead the mind and fire the imagination.  Words leading to better words . . . and still better words.   And so I type a quote, and I think of that quote, and I ponder the source and the circumstance.  And I let the words flow.  And soon, the dam breaks, and I have something of worth if not worthy.

                Hmm, perhaps not today.   But usually.

                Try it, and let me know how it works for you.  Here’s one:

                “And in the morning, I’ll be sober.”

Words are the stuff of power.

Anyone who works with words for a living knows their power.

Well, let me issue a caveat. Anyone who works with words ought to know their power.

But of course, ensembles of words in various stages of undress are not necessarily created equal.

Pause

You choked on that for a moment, didn’t you? Maybe reread it to give it a chance, and then rightfully scoffed. It has a sort of squinty-eyed surface profundity that dissipates within seconds. Hot air. Such is the power of words, a power that is amorphous, deceptive, difficult to master, if it is at all possible to master.

One man who understands words and their majesty and their subtlety, certainly far more than do I, is our own Rick Steinberg.

Rick’s work is tremendous. To steal a line from Leonard Bishop, his sentences “stink with power.” Sometimes raw, sometimes untamed, always alluring, never dull – Rick’s graces us with his fine-edged scalpel each month, and the emotions cascade from the screen.

It is a beautiful thing to be moved by words. And it is a high compliment, indeed, to hear such praise. I never do. Rick hears it often, I am certain. Rick creates moving passages, assemblages of words describing scenes in such a high-toned style that I could never attain.

And so I learn. I learn from all of my compatriots here at Storytellers.

I fervently believe that it is necessary to respect words and their function. To understand the visceral strength in well-structured phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that hang together seamlessly in such a tight formation that a reader cannot imagine them written in any other way.

While teaching writing is not my primary function, I do provide fundamental instruction of a Strunk and White nature so as to raise the bar to an acceptable level. Before you eye-roll at me for such a rudimentary approach, let me assure you that today’s undergraduate students desperately need the salving coolness of William Strunk and E.B. White. If only for clarity, concision, and pith.

And for the pleasure of the book, for it is a minor joy to read. And to reread.

Many young people – not all, but enough to take note of – want to be creative and innovative, to think outside of that box we always hear about. I note that they must first understand the box and what it contains before they might profitably “think outside” of it. Because likely what they consider fresh and new and sparkling has been done before.

They must understand how words fit together to convey ideas, notions, fact and fiction. They must understand the communicative function of words as well as their evocative power. They must recognize tendentiousness masquerading as neutrality, entire social, political, cultural arguments embodied in single phrases – sometimes single words. They must recognize sloganeering in their own writing and arguments or face being caught short when challenged on their own lack of depth or understanding.

Example?

At the risk of agitation, or perhaps guaranteeing it, let me take a detour into the realm of the classroom, where words that characterize well-hashed issues can come freighted with all kinds of baggage.

Certain phrases can embody entire arguments.

“Widening gap between rich and poor” has become a kneejerk pejorative. Regrettably used more frequently by young people these days, supposedly identifying a “problem” that must be corrected, and never pausing in their feverish idealism to recognize that the gap between rich and poor is always getting wider, regardless of whether an economy is strong or weak.

The proper question to ask, I think, is “is everyone getting richer and better off than before in a dynamic and thriving economy?” or is the situation one in which the poor are getting poorer with no chance or even hope of improvement? These are two quite different situations, conflated by the slogan “widening gap between rich and poor” trope.

Single words sometimes embody entire arguments, relieving the user of the burden to make the point of the begged question – in my own bailiwick, “sweatshop” is one such politically and socially freighted word. As in the “debate over sweatshops.” In my classes on Globalization this “debate” is addressed forthrightly.

But in its proper terms and in its proper context.

I must tell you that the preening certitude of a young person posturing against “sweatshops” is a sight to behold. No gray area, no moral conundrums, as clear-cut an issue as anyone could imagine that puts one on the side of the angels, because who other than an evil exploiter could possibly take stand for “sweatshops?”

A part of me envies that kind of hard-boned simplicity borne of shallow naivete.

Hand in hand with “sweatshops” is usually a mention of something called “cultural imperialism,” which is merely a pejorative reaction against the introduction of goods and services and ideas into modernizing societies. Such “cultural imperialism” involves an attack on the “traditional way of life” and local culture. In my lectures to Russian students in Izhevsk and in Ufa, Bashkortostan, I meet this kind of attitude quite frequently, as if someone is compelling locals to drink Coca-Cola, smoke Marlboros, wear Italian shoes, or dine at Chinese restaurants.

The call for preserving “traditional” ways of life smacks of condescension of the worst type – it is, for example, an attitude that suggests that locking subsistence farmers in their pristine “traditional” circumstances as delightful subjects for picture postcards from exotic places is a positive.

Some students are angry and somewhat confused when it is noted that all that is being offered is a choice – to work as one’s ancestors did, ankle-deep in dung-filled water of rice paddies, or to work in a new factory, earning more money in one day than the traditional villager might ever seen in a year.

A choice, that’s all. An alternative. “Exploitation.”

Some people, professional activists among them, just don’t like the choice being offered, even as earlier there was no choice, no chance for improvement.

And rather than offer their own range of additional choices, they harass those companies that provide economic opportunity, a chance for a better life. The chance for newly empowered local workers to earn beyond subsistence wages, to then spend money at the kiosks that quickly spring up courtesy of entrepreneurs who instinctively know how the market works. The chance to utilize the new roads built by the foreign company as part of infrastructure improvement.

And so, in my classes, I refer to Nike and other firms that manufacture abroad as establishing Economic Opportunity Centers throughout the developing world, enlarging the range of economic choices open to local workers.

Some students express a kind of confused wonderment that local factories contracted by Nike (Nike does not own them) could in any sense of the phrase be called Economic Opportunity Centers. But, in fact, that phrase is more accurately descriptive as to what is actually happening when it is compared in many cases to a subsistence farming economy that it augments. Nonetheless, the point made, we shift to compromise language of a more neutral cast – Nike and many other companies that contract manufacturing with local producers are engaged in Economic Activity Abroad.

Whether that activity is in some abstract sense “good” or “bad” depends upon whom you ask – an activist sitting in an air conditioned Washington office, hands steepled, giving an interview to National Public Radio on the evils of Globalization . . . or a young foreign worker, who now has a choice and a chance to work indoors, to earn more money than before, to better his lot and that of his family.

A choice that earlier was not available.

If we then proceed from less politically charged (or at least less tendentious) premises, we can then begin to understand the actual dynamics at work, building from the ground-up. Usually, at the end of the discussion – which is usually vigorous give and take among my students—there emerges an understanding that economic activity abroad in the form of contract manufacturing has both positive and negative aspects.

Now, I have dipped into the hot, turbid political waters of Globalization only because that happens to be the topic at hand for me now, daily. And I have roamed a bit in this essay, but the theme that runs through this essay, I think, is the power of words – to persuade, to deceive, to communicate, to obfuscate.

Regardless of one’s opinion of the issues I surfaced here to illustrate the theme, I believe that those in this forum recognize more-so than most this incredible power of the medium in which they work. And whatever conclusions my students arrive at with regard to the debates at hand, they will have at least been exposed to the power of expression and the subtlety of language.

Words are the stuff of power.

The urge to be a “travel writer” overcomes even the best of us at times — of this I am convinced.

Call it the urge to “travel write.”

I like to believe that I overcame the urge many years ago, purged of the urge, as it were. Purged of it by the recognition that the sights, sounds, smells, and exotica of a foreign land fall inevitably flat, given that such writing is invested with our own egos, which are often wrapped into the mix of sensory stimulation that translates so poorly onto the page.

I recall my own painful efforts in this regard–enamored of expatriate work of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the like.

Undergraduates, of whom I have written often, are most afflicted with the hubris endemic to “study abroad” programs. They return from their sojourns burdened with the obligation to share their perceived unique experiences.

I recall one young man in particular, an undergrad at Duke named Ed, who was possessed of a fired passion for the mundane, blandly expressed. And a proclivity to write only in the first person, except when he was writing about himself in the third.

I suppose it is a burden that each person must shed or outgrow on his own. I hope my own burden has been shed, but these next few minutes will determine that.

So, with my throat duly cleared and the readership duly caveated, let me share my own travel experience with you, even as I pen these words on a legal pad.

I wish that I could say that I am feverishly scribbling at a table in a smoke-filled cafe brimming with sultry women, hushed conversations among swarthy hulks, and the strains of minor-key music . . . but no.

Instead, I sit at a leisurely breakfast buffet, prepared to a menu that sits astride East and West — Russian pancakes, scambled eggs, fried mushrooms, sosinki, and such like.

For a brief spell, I chat with a businesswoman, a Russian married to a Dutchman and the owner of a juice distributorship in the Netherlands. Tatiana is here on a business trip and laments the fact to me that: “Perhaps the way Russians do business is exactly opposite to what you teach.”

“Hmmm. What do you mean?” I ask.

“I am trying to be polite,” she says. “I mean corruption. My company does not give bribes and that puts us at severe competitive disadvantage.”

With an invitation the company in Holland, she bids goodbye.

A pleasant interlude, given that my senior professor colleague and I are still reeling from the time difference and travel fatigue that goes with moving point-to-point in Russia, particularly in the provinces.

We arrived in Moscow via Delta Friday a week ago, then the next day continued our journey by train to the city of Izhevsk, 900 kilometers to the east. An 18-hour overnight train ride through Kristal’nii Gus, Nizhny Novgorod, and Kazan could sound exotic, I suppose, but I resist the urge to travel-write and say only that the restaurant car was warm and inviting and the Vodka smooth.

In Izhevsk, the nine-hour time difference began to take a terrible toll on two poor academics allergic to meetings and yet forced to meet repeatedly in a disciplined schedule doubtless designed by the re-employed directors of the Gulag Archipelago.

Meetings with faculty, with the Minister of Economics of the Udmurt Republic (a burly Russian, which is not necessarily an oxymoronic trope), with representatives of a heavy machinery and metallurgical trade show, and with some of the nicest, warmest people on the face of the earth, we concluded our time with a 2-hour return flight to Moscow in a Tupolev-134 and a 1-hour cab ride in a Peugot.

Today, we concluded meetings at Moscow State University and with the president of the Hayek Foundation.

This is a schedule to be envied, I know. Tomorrow, it’s the embassy. And the Chamber of Commerce.

And what is the point of all this?

Possibilities.

Opportunities.

Personal relationships.

I tell you, getting from one place to another is utterly exhausting. And one does not get full sense of the word until one is exhausted — “utterly.” Getting these words onto a computer and launching them to you has a grinding adventure in itself, one that I will disappoint you by not describing, I’m sure.

So, lest I disappoint further, I will briefly — only briefly — mention the leggy and booted blonde prostitutes populating the hotel lobby couches, cigarettes dangling from full, pouty lips. They of course hold interest only as they are participants in a niche pleasure market for tired businessmen, a sad commentary on the human condition. Transactions appear brusque, businesslike.

And quick.

Again, the point of it all? How does one communicate the alien character of a society that superficially resembles ours in so many ways, and yet, under a thin patina, is so radically different?

The pitfalls of Russia are many, especially as there is an ingrained proclivity to deceive Westerners in ways great and small. This tendency to deceive is embodied in the well-known phrase “Potempkin Village,” in which a facade is presented to the West… and is often accepted as reality by us.

I do not condemn Russians for this tendency. It is information, description, nothing more. Neither good, nor bad. I merely describe it as a reality that is well for a Westerner to know. For self-preservation, if nothing else.

Ah, Regina approaches.

Regina is a dark-skinned asiatic, her skin ruddy and beautiful, hair braided into long and thin strands. She worked in Canadian television for a while. She aspires to be a film director and next year, she begins a special program.

Reality or facade? Hmmm.

So, having violated my own introductory dictum with regard to travel-writing, I offer this excuse, that I am ensconced in Russia, I have an essay due today, and this is coupled with a highly cultivated sense of obligation to my fellow writers.

So, you see, I have turned my literary sin into virtue. I do it for you, not out of vanity or self-congratulation.

One learns lessons hard — but wisdom gained through experience is often the most highly-prized.

Obviously, I have not enough experience, and I have not learned the lesson of “travel-writing.”

And so I travel write: “Sosinki are delightful Russian comestibles, link sausages steeped in grease and whose spices hint at socialist revolution, proletarian sweat, and the raucous speeches of a Lenin outraged at the people’s suffering.”

Isn’t that great stuff?

What a grandiose metaphor! And I fear that it is far too grandiose for the subject to which it is harnessed.

Especially as I am a quasi-neophyte in attacking the subject matter . . . which is why I wait for a glowering Zeus to nod at me.

But soon – very soon – I can write authoritatively on the world of academic publishing.

Soon. . . but not yet.

Right now, I wait.

I wait for the sign from on high.

I wait for word that my manuscript may continue forward after being vetted by the high priests of my academic field.

I wait for Zeus’s Nod. Or simply a raised eyebrow. A subtle gesture. Some sign that the gate is lifted and my manuscript may pass through.

Academic publishing. A kind of genre.

What a snoozefest for a group of horror writers.

The process is somewhat different than that of fictioneering. I’ve gone that route, albeit unsuccessfully. Two unpublished 185,000-word novels in the ’90s cured me of any visions of a Clancyesque lifestyle . . . and the truth is that I never would have completed either of them except as they served as my means of procrastination to prevent me from writing dutifully on what would result, eventually, in a two-volume 623-page dissertation (with another 50 pages of tables and documentation).

Actually, I came within a hairsbreadth of novel publication at St. Martin’s back in ’97, but there’s a cliché about “close” not counting, and I’ll not repeat it here.
And, for the record, let me acknowledge all of your robust headshaking about these extravagant word-counts I cranked out. Duly noted and inscribed in the high tome of excess verbiage.

I stand chastened.

Which brings me to non-fiction. To be precise, the world of “academic” publishing.

Research.

Rigor.

Relevance.

It is a world with its own rules. Its own clique. Its own mystique.

A world of “fruitful results,” comprehensive literature reviews, “especially rich” data, and “research programmes to be pursued.”

Surely, much of the process, mechanistic as it is, is the same with all publishing. Authors write, agents sell, editors edit, printers print, bookstores sell.

But academic publishing includes an extra step in the process.

Academic publishing includes the process of “peer review.”

Anonymous colleagues – qualified, one hopes – take first crack at your manuscript. It must clearly pass muster before a university press will give it due consideration. Yes, it’s necessary . . . but it is also tedious and daunting.

And that is where I sit now, awaiting word to be passed along from these anonymous peer reviewers about my manuscript. Thumbs up or thumbs down.
Then, and only then, can the process move forward in the more routine fashion of which we are all familiar.

Ah, yes . . .

The book?

Its working title, sure to be changed, is The Empire after Putin.

Yes, it is exactly what it purports to be. I am considered by some, not without reason, to be an “expert” on certain aspects of Russian business and society. I brought that keen acumen to bear on a research project that purports to be predictive of Russian political and economic behavior.

Surely a valuable contribution, eh?

A book that predicts the behavior of those unpredictable and inscrutable Russians! And just as Putin is stepping down. What a marketing ploy . . . if it were to be published prior to the March 2008 Russian Presidential elections.

So, friends, I face now the duel challenge of anonymous “peer reviewers” and a race against the clock to get my book into print so to keep it timely.

I will keep you posted.

Let’s hope my next column is a lush paean to the academic publishing process, basking in Zeus’s approval, and not one that simply transmits the single heinous word:

REJECTED.

What books do you choose to read? And which books do you like to read?

Which books are you driven to read?

There are differences, you know.

If the question comes up, most often people ask me what books I like to read.

Now, they ask this question for assorted reasons. Either to shut me up from my latest soliloquy on product differentiation . . . or as a casual pleasantry. What a great conversation-starter! And more revealing of character and taste than the average person might apprehend.

But for this purpose, I accept the question as a genuine request to discover what I think are the kinds of books and stories I find most instructive for my own writing. What do I consider a good story?

Well, first let me confess.

Let me confess to you a problem that I know is shared by many booklovers.

So many books infest my shelves that, when I finally get an hour or so of quiet time, and I can pick and choose to my whim . . . I am paralyzed. So many choices, and the selection of a single book means rejection of all the others, some possibly more worthy of attention. That is the perpetual conundrum.

So I usually nap.

Or I visit the bookstore to purchase several more great books for later reading. For the arrival of that glorious moment when I shall have the time, endless time! Rather like bookworm Burgess Meredith in the classic Twilight Zone episode as he stacks the hundreds of books he’d like to read on the rubble-strewn steps of the public library after a nuclear holocaust. Finally, he has the time.

But here is a minor paradox.

When I do read a good yarn, I find that I will go back to it and reread it. Caress it and wonder at why I thought it so grand to begin with. It is akin to the man who finds a great restaurant and a great menu item and begins to settle in comfortably, as with a comfortable friend. It doesn’t mean an aversion to the new and different . . . it means appreciation of the old and proven.

So I reread old favorites. Even as I know what will happen in the stories I read. I am fascinated at how the story unfolds, at how the author moves events along, striking a balance among all the essential elements of storytelling.

With that as the obligatory throat-clearing, let me share with you two of my old favorites. They differ vastly from each other in important ways that will be obvious, but they also resemble each other in the fundamentals of good storytelling.

The first book is The Spike, a cold war thriller published in 1979. I’ve read it five times in the past 28 years.

Authored by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss, The Spike is considered by some in intelligence circles to be the finest novel in the cold war CIA vs. KGB genre.

For me, it is difficult to define the particular attraction for me of this story, except to note that it has all of the elements of a good novel – a compelling lead character with strong beliefs and who changes dramatically as a result of powerful events, colorfully described. The novel has a supporting cast that is diverse and well-drawn. The stakes are high.

The novel is also obviously political and, on the extreme political left, it was considered “McCarthy-esque disinformation.” Methinks the storyline simply cut too close to home for the progressive tastes of Alexander Cockburn and the folks at the Covert Action Information Bulletin. In fact, having served in Military Intelligence for eight years, I know it cut close to home in certain respects.

But then, what powerful novel doesn’t have an agenda, political or otherwise?

Most stories worth the telling will call out folks who don’t want the story told, whether fictional or not. And The Spike hit a nerve with people who saw themselves limned with what might have been uncomfortable accuracy. As the bad guys.

And so it stirred considerable debate.

There’s an analog in the world of film, although much of the cold war fodder was anti-Washington and against the “Military Industrial Complex” labeled by President Eisenhower and conceptually fleshed out by C. Wright Mills.

Dr. Strangelove, Seven Days in May, Failsafe, Wargames, The Day After, Red Dawn, and The Day After Tomorrow…. Evil and one-dimensional military types, the exaltation of technology over human control, and thinly veiled portrayals of real-life folks.

Good yarns all, and yarns that angered certain constituencies with political proclivities differing substantially from those of the films’ themes. Nuclear Armageddon makes for epic storytelling in the military-industrial-complex-meets-the-disaster-movie genre. [In the aforementioned Twilight Zone episode, no such political theme is discernible . . . simply the despair of a single man and his struggle with the aftermath. An episode I plan to enjoy again.]

All of these films stirred and stir debate on the discrete issues, of course. And that is what The Spike did in its time.

In fact, The Spike performed the same vital function as did the books Failsafe, Seven Days in May and, a decade earlier, Graham Greene’s The Ugly American. Each took a point of view, and you were bound to agree or disagree with it.

Perhaps the edginess of The Spike, then, was its attraction for me, as well as its sweep, its multifarious characters, and the tremendous stakes involved.

But I mentioned two books that I enjoy rereading. The other?

John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra.

O’Hara’s is decidedly different.

Appointment’s portrayal of the class structure in 1930s America and the ugly sinewy strength of some class mores is, I think, brilliant. But this has been said by more able writers than I.

For me, the strength in O’Hara is his powerful characterization, particularly of the self-destructive protagonist Julian English. The sense of presence, the sights, the smells, the sounds are all original and compelling. It rivals The Great Gatsby in its capture of an era and the human behavior that is channeled by the quirkiness of a cloistered environment.

O’Hara’s characters are introspective, and yet their introspection sometimes has a hollow and self-deceiving quality . . . as does our own ersatz introspection at times. We recognize ourselves, and this recognition is uncomfortable. I suspect that there are times when we believe we’re being brutally honest with ourselves, and yet we’re truly only trying to convince ourselves of our worth, our good motives, our essential goodness.

Deep thinking can be confused with revelation. Deep thinking can obscure and blind us as well as it can reveal to us. Deep thinking is not necessarily honest thinking.

And this is what O’Hara portrays so well. At least, for me, this is the received wisdom.

Quite obviously, The Spike and Appointment in Samarra are two entirely different books, equally attractive to me for overlapping reasons.

Both share the quality of great story and compelling characters. But one is introspective, involves the fate of those in a small town, and is bound temporally by several weeks… the other is sweeping, event-oriented, involves the fate of nations, and stretches over 15 years.

Both books offer the novice writer magnificent instruction in how to construct scenes, how to transition between scenes, how to handle character description, how to deliver backstory, how to craft crisp and spare dialogue. It’s all there… in both.

In fact, what a method to “learn” how to write, if such a thing is truly possible. Certainly craft is apprehensible, and I find these two books – even in their extremes—valuable in that respect.

Oh if I had the ability to write both types of novel! Failing that, they are
books I will re-read.

But not today, and doubtless not tomorrow.

For there is no time.