A Nice Review of My eBook Newmanesque

At one time I wanted to make a living as a short story writer and novelist. Unfortunately, I also had to put bread on the table for my family and there was no assurance of success in that compartment of my life. 

I do feel a measure of pride for many of the stories I've created, though I also have a few regrets, primarily two. First, that I didn't try harder to get my work published in journals. Second, that when I finally decided to publish my stories in a set of three eBooks, I rushed it and failed to take my time in the proofing. 

The feedback on my stories has made me feel they deserve a wider audience. Hence, I'm thinking of assembling an anthology along with a few new stories I've written since publishing these in 2011. 

I suppose there's a third regret gnawing at me on this particular title. I called it Newmanesque because someone said my stories seemed Kafkaesque. 

If interested you can find it here on Amazon. 

THE REVIEW

If “The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection,” as Michelangelo said, then it seems writers and artists must constantly strive toward perfection to engage in “true” art. It’s a never-ending struggle, and a struggle captured in Newman’s stories, particularly “The Unfinished Stories of Richard Allen Garston.” The protagonist, John Urban, struggles to regain his voice as a writer. In an effort to recapture his muse, he stumbles upon the almost mythical Richard Allen Garston and his collection of unfinished work. The story’s excellent pacing and poignancy evoke The Dialogues of Plato or the Book of Job. Our lives are like stories, Newman seems to be saying, and in the end, one character strikes out to finish his while the other doesn’t. What will we do?

“A Poem About Truth,” a shorty, punchy story, shows us the process of creating art, in this case a poem written by a French chef, can elicit derision and scorn from the world. Those who don’t understand the truth mock the chef’s work and relegate him to history’s shadows. Art (truth), however, outlasts its pallbearers and lives on. It offers a nice balance placed between two longer stories in the book.

"Terrorists Preying" may be the crown jewel of the book. Its bleakness and modernity seem to fit an age such as ours. The story seems to be attempting to answer the age-old question, What is Art? Les Garnet provides an answer many won’t like. Yet, can an age that rejects moral truths really condemn Garnet? Who are we to define what he’s doing as anything less than art? The story shows, intentionally or not, that we may not be able to begin to answer the question without appealing to fundamental moral principles many of us are loathe to entertain. The story ends as Mike, Les Garnet’s old acquaintance, prepares to paint his masterpiece, as it were. Do we cheer him? Deride him? Read for yourself and see.

This is a nice collection of thought-provoking stories worthy of appearance in any literary journal. My only criticism is that Newman should include more stories in the book. I highly recommend the book.

Dear Reviewer:
You are correct. There should have been more stories. Thanks for the kind words.

Related Link
Eight Books by Ed Newman

Flashback Friday: The Nose

This is a short story I wrote in 1996. It is one of a half dozen original short stories in my second volume of short fiction titled Newmanesque. If you have a Kindle, the booklet is 99 cents. If you have KindleUnlimited it is free.

 

"The fear that I may start screaming... the fear that I might betray myself and tell everything I dread, and the fear that I might not be able to say anything, because everything is unsayable..." ~R. M. Rilke

The Nose

The sizzling energy in the crammed little bar began to unsettle him. He wondered why he ever said he would meet his friends here. 

 
Still worse, they were late and Ted's brain started running on the hyperactive groove that, once out of control, left him terrified and unsettled.

But Ted Krueger had a mind game he played to help him gain control of himself in these situations. He’d focus on an object, enabling his thoughts -- which at this point were so numerous and random that he felt overwhelmed by them -- to narrow their scope. In this way he was able to harness them and feel he had some measure of control over himself.
 
He held the view that though feelings were nebulous and impossible to direct, with a great effort of will thoughts could be managed and coerced, and that one's feelings would eventually come into alignment with the thoughts that preceded, and stirred, one's emotions. His feelings of terror were often so immense that only a more immense distraction could deliver him from being tyranized by his fears. Hence the game.
 
This mind game would lead him into a place removed from himself, a mental space where epiphanies occurred. That is, the game produced profound illuminations at critical moments in his life, which he believed to be metaphysical insights, powerful and humbling. It filled him with a sense of awe and gratitude.

He knew that he’d created the game out of necessity as a means of holding on to reality, to keep from flipping. He took no credit for it. In fact, he knew that everyone played games of some kind or another to stave off boredom or reduce the intensity of disquieting anxieties, and that this was nothing more than his own way of keeping control. In this regard he was quite self-aware and not really so odd, or so he told himself. 

May 6, 1994. A Friday night. His friends had wanted to hear a band at Mephistos, a small night club that recently opened near The Wharf. Too much was already happening in his head even before he entered the room. Ted carried an enormous amount of responsibility at the office and when he left that evening he carried it with him. There were unresolved personal conflicts as well. Mind overstimulated, he seated himself against the far wall, the only table available.
 
The band was on a break between sets. To calm himself he sought out an object for contemplation. His eye traced the the outlines of edges, spots of reflection on tables, a glint of glass, the flutter of a bow, radiation from the neon, loose change, a laughing mouth, five fingers, a shred of napkin.
 
At last his gaze fell upon a nose. It was, as he later recalled it, the plainest, most ordinary nose, with no distinctive features whatsoever. It was a universal nose, not belonging to the young woman who wore it, but representative of the archetype nose, of unknown origin, any nose. And at that precise moment it seemed as perfect an object for contemplation as any he had ever devised; unassuming and indistinct (where does a nose end and the face begin?), yet specific and focal.
 
He took hold of it in his mind, plotting coordinates for this object that he might track its movements through space and time. Sixteen inches from the tabletop, 46 inches from the floor. Six feet from the window. Moving back and forth two or three times in a slow arc, dipping downward and then swinging back up into a fixed jutting motif, the nose began to take on a life, to become an entity. And this pleased him, for he knew the game he played with himself, and it required a certain mental dexterity to create an object of contemplation toward which he could remain indifferent.
 
So he studied the nose, contemplated it generously, and reflected upon the whole meaning of noses.
 
He thought about noses in general, how they come in a wide variety of sizes and shapes, though for the most part human noses have a set of common characteristics. Chief of these are the two holes which enable humans to breathe and to smell, the raison de tete for the nose's existence. 

 
He thought, however, that a hole in the center of the face could serve this function just as well, and he wondered if the primary reason for a nose's existence was not its utility but rather its aesthetic quality. One need only glance at a naked skull to see the hideous condition noselessness evokes.
 
Noses are deceptive, too, he reasoned. They appear substantial. But this, he conceded, is illusory. The solid bridge is a cartilage that passes itself off as bone, is in fact no bone at all.
 
He recalled to mind the history of his own nose. How strange to think that at a certain point in time there was nothing there at all, and then, a tiny pinch of tissue which emerged to become the mutton of flesh that was distinctively his the rest of his days. How tiny it had been the day he was born!
 
He thought of the nosebleeds of his youth, the difficulties he endured as a compulsive nose picker, blistering sunburns, sniffles, sneezes, congested nasal passages, irritating nosehairs.
 
All the while his vision remained unwaveringly fixed on the nose across the room. For all intents, he reasoned that if the universe were infinite, that is, if space extended infinitely in all directions from any point in space, this nose could as easily be considered the center of the universe as any other point.
 
He thought about the immensity of space, and was captured by the immensity of his thought, which seemed to orbit about this very present truth, as did the fly which now seemed to hover momentarily before the woman's face.
 
She swept her hand through the air, but missed it.
 
He had forgotten his friends now. He had also forgotten his terror, had successfully calmed his soul. Though the band had reconvened, he no longer heard the music. His vision remained focused, undistracted by the movement, the shadows of bodies rising, sliding, staggering, sauntering, gliding between the tables, moving about the room which had itself become a swirl of shadow.

From a deep part of him there emerged an anticipation. Here, this very night, he would experience a new sensation, something unique. The notion came from deep within while he watched the drama of the fly. For the fly had returned and hovered briefly again before alighting, and at the instant of contact.... It was the last thing he remembered.

Awakening in the emergency room at Somerset Memorial Hospital, he heard voices, saw only light and experienced extreme anguish in the region of his face.

"What a mess. How did it happen?"
 
"Some guy flattened his face."
 
"Prepare an operating room."
 
"The cartilage has been shattered and pushed up inside his skull."
 
"He's coming to."
 
"He's lucky."
 
"He has no idea."
 
"What'd he get hit with? Looks like a flatiron."
 
"God, he's a lucky bastard."

"He had it coming they said."
 
"Nobody has this coming."
 
"He was staring at some guy's wife."
 
"Poor kid."
 
"Can you hear me, Ted? Ted? We're going to have to operate. If you can hear me nod, all right? Ted? Can you count backwards from one hundred. I'm going to count and you count, too. One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety eight..."
 
As he drifted off under the ether he recalled from somewhere fragments of a poem. "For there is a boundary to looking.... Now the work of the eyes is done." Then he began to dream.

___________________
copyright 1996 ed newman  

Liz Mills and the Nobel Prize

Last Saturday's Nobel Prize ceremonies reminded me of what a big deal this honor really is. This was the first time I watched a Nobel Prize ceremony, though not the first time I heard a Nobel Prize speech. Years ago I borrowed from the library a recording of William Faulkner's acceptance speech for literature. I don't recall what he said, only that the whole time he spoke it sounded like his dentures were loose. Maybe it was just a clicking sound in the microphone since he wasn't really that old at the time. (EdNote: There is a YouTube video that poses as Faulkner delivering this speech, but which is an actor with a Southern accent imitating the great literary figure.)

It was interesting to me how much controversy there seemed to be with the selection of Bob Dylan for this year's prize. Perhaps it's in part because the prize received more widespread coverage than in recent years due to the fame of it's recipient. Upon his selection there were complaints that others were more worthy. Why wasn't there more controversy over the recent selections of Imre Kertész, Gao Xingjian or Elfriede Jelinek? Probably because of the nature of popular culture which has taken little note of the goings'-on in Stockholm for quite some time.

Last week I posted here the Award Ceremony Speech and Mr. Dylan's Acceptance Speech, both of which I found inspiring. What I never saw before is that you can now, because of the Internet, you may travel back in time and read all the other acceptance speeches. What an elite collection of literary titans has been assembled here. Solzhenitsyn, Boris Pasternak, Jean-Paul Sartre, Steinbeck, Hemingway. And how varied their speeches, as disparate as the writers themselves.

When I was a younger writer I tried to imagine what I might have said were I to give such a speech. I may have been stimulated by a hilarious Chekhov story On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco. Or maybe... Well, who knows. If I rummaged through my drawers I might find that speech some day. A far more interesting pursuit would be to scroll back time and read some of the speeches of previous winners. I'd encourage you to do that some winter evening if you're snowbound or have nowhere to go.

* * * *
Somewhere around 25 or 30 years ago, when I was attempting to make a name for myself as a short story writer, I wrote this very short story with an O. Henry-style twist ending. The Nobel Prize is a feature of the story, so I thought it suitable to be shared again here.

Liz Mills

"Will you remember me when you're famous? I know you won't."

"How could I forget you? I can't even imagine it." Steve Lawrence had been showing Liz his sketchbooks when she said this. She saw an unusual strength in his work, and a unique style that transcended what was trendy and fashionable. For a young art student, he had been incredibly prolific.

"Someday you'll be famous and I'll be just one more girl who foolishly threw herself at your feet," she said.

He laughed. He had enjoyed her immensely. She was delightful, funny, thoughtful, profound, and incomparably sensual. He affirmed it repeatedly. He would never forget Liz.

The following semester, when Liz dropped out of the university and went to Mexico, Steve became involved with Stephanie Bond with whom he remained involved for two years until he met Gloria, which wrecked things with Stephanie, but that was O.K., until Gloria went off with his friend Chuck. For a while, after he graduated, he dated several girls at once until he moved in with Marianne, whom he later married.

Over the years his career path was equally circuitous. Political activist, social worker, kitchen help, janitorial work and a cabinet manufacturing position all helped pay his bills until he got plugged in at the ad agency. Minneapolis agencies had just begun to get the attention they deserved and his was spotlighted frequently as a national trendsetter. Awards followed along with much success.

In his twilight years he received numerous lifetime achievement awards for his creative work and accolades from around the globe for his "World Peace Through the Arts" initiative. Two presidents entertained him in the White House and as an ultimate grace he was nominated for, and received, the Nobel Peace Prize.

read more

If you have a Kindle, or like reading eBooks, this is one of a half dozen stories in my eBook Newmanesque. It's 99 cents, fwiw.

Meantime, enjoy your day and --if you're here in the Northland-- stay warm.

A Poem About Truth

May 18, 1944. At Hitler's war conference he is told that the enemy has carried out two spy operations during the night on the heavily defended French coastline. At one place, near Calais, German troops have found an orange peel, an empty flask and a shovel lying on the beach. Years later they would say that they also found a landscape painted on driftwood, a finely crafted homemade flute and a dagger. In the estuary of the river Somme, two British commandos were discovered in the late afternoon. "They came ashore in a rubber raft," General Jodl, chief of Wehrmach operations, tells Hitler. "They claim to know nothing."

The scene changes to a French restaurant once frequented by Napoleon. The restaurant serves excellent Italian fare. Three nights have passed. A stout German woman makes pasta in the kitchen. Two French chefs argue about how to make croissants. They are smoking cigarettes and sipping wine. They know that Hitler is a madman, but it does not affect their cooking. The taller chef, thinnest of the two, is also a writer. At night he composes poetry in the same way that a garden produces flowers. The effect is dazzling. His mother also was a poet, as was his grandfather. He does not believe in war or death. He is restless, anxious about love, and lives alone. If he had a lover, he knows that he would write less poetry, since he writes only to fill his piteous empty hours. When he reads his poems, he cries, then burns them. He is brutally honest with himself.

The following evening he overhears a Nazi under-lieutenant commenting on Britain's secret operations. He seizes the opportunity to become part of an adventure. He never again sees his home. Later that night the chef is captured in a forbidden zone near the Seine whereupon he fakes an English accent and says he is a spy. He is blindfolded and driven to a chateau where he must stand before Rommel. He makes up a story about a wife and daughter in Britain. The details are vivid, but Rommel loses interest and orders him to be shot. That night he writes a poem about the event and leaves it in his cell. The German officer who reads it laughs at the insipid rhymes and melancholy metaphors. He shares it with his friend who notices that the word "mayhap" is misapplied and that "appenage" would have been a better choice of words than "freehold."

By week's end a hundred eyes have beheld the poem. Many jokes are made of it. Heinrich (we do not know his last name), a company agent from Stuttgart, makes a copy of the poem and translates it into German. In the translation he improves the meter and resolves the problematic third stanza. He sends it to his mother who does not understand it, but keeps it in a small wooden box on the bureau next to a framed photo of the Führer.

It is possible the original poem is still in existence somewhere, but no one knows for certain. My cousin, who married a German woman, says that her father saw the poem, the original version, and remembers that it was called Truth Is A Fire That Burns. We do not know if this was the same poem, or if he saw the poem at all. After the war many German soldiers say they saw the poem, and many more say they made copies of it to send to the Fatherland. We know, of course, that most of them are lying. Over the years versions have appeared in journals, some superior to others, all of them improvements on the original. I have seen it thrice in English literary journals -- once, I believe, in the Antioch Review, though it may have been one of the other college publications that begin with the leter A. Someone told me that it has been translated into 57 languages. In Thailand, the mountain peoples now say that it is the Word of God.

No one remembers the French chef who gave his life to produce the poem. His unknown name has been swallowed up by history, but his poem lives on in human hearts.

Translated 8-22-98
E. N.

A Poem About Truth is one of the stories I posted on my original website in the 1990s.  The story owes its existence to the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, whose work I had been captivated by for many seasons. Several sentences employ devices that could be labelled Borgesian. The story was included in my short eBook titled Newmanesque, which is available on Kindle.

Free Friday: A Book for the Beach

Theoretically it’s summer, which means it might be time to get your summer reading list in order. If you like physical books and enjoy turning pages made of paper, guess what? We’re working on a way to have all three of my current volumes of short stories and The Red Scorpion available in print along with the eBook versions on Kindle.

Personally, if you allow me to be Frank, and not Bob or Jack, I really do enjoy my Kindle when travelling. And until their available in print, we’ll be making them available Free on Fridays for the next couple months, one each week.

This week, N&L Publishing is offering Newmanesque. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “What should I read next?” this might be a good place to go. It’s not a long book and I promise that at least some of the stories will be entertaining.

Here’s what a reader of my stories from Portugal wrote about these stories:

“My very first impression is that there's a certain style in some ways similar to Franz Kafka which is good and intense… very mysterious for one doesn't know where the whole thing is going to go, but is sure that there's a message to be captured from the many moments stated in the short sentences that are all poignant to the story. Perhaps what I want to say is that I feel the work to be extremely existentialist in a serious way and not in an ironic one, best portrayed by Sartre. Also, there's an enormous spiritual and ethical awareness in the writing which is not directly implied in Kafka's work but if one reads him under the light of the Jewish religious upbringing he had like Harold Bloom pointed out, one will find it there, something that is completely ruled out in Sartre's views. Newmanesque is slightly more lyrical or poetic if you will, but carries that acute seriousness and extreme loss of hope and faith (common to Kafka) only the author gives it a try in explaining it, be it searching for religious/spiritual arguments or other authors’ references which I very much sympathize with because it becomes a "loss of hope when hope is not all lost." In this regard Newman achieves something great for the stories are open cycles (not dead-ends like Kafka), they become allegories, which by definition are circles constantly closing and opening on themselves, matching Borges here beautifully.

“I also like very much how he builds the stories to show the two sides of the same coin without being preachy or moralist, again this duality which has been around since the beginning of time, is explored in a very simple and engaging way enabling us to breathe and reflect when needed; for although the stories are of an existential character they are mostly of an extrovert attitude, in the sense that the reader understands what the character is feeling by what he says and not by some introvert description of how he feels which is extremely liberating and contemporary, reminding me of Eco in some ways and of Plato's simple dialogues full of meaning and hidden messages.”

Here’s a link so you can download today. If you need an app to read it on your computer or iPad, it’s free and available on Amazon.com as well.Oh, and if you like, please feel free to add a review. That would be most welcome.

MEANTIME, if you’re reading this here in the Northland, there are some cool things to do this weekend including art openings at the PRØVE Gallery and Ochre Ghost where some cool new work by Oakley Tapola will be displayed. It’s also the third evening of the DuSu Film Festival with films on the silver screen at both the Zinema and Teatro Zuccone.

The Writings of Marcel Duchamp

“Can one make works which are not works of art?” ~Marcel Duchamp

An education begins with an introduction to the basic building blocks of any field. In fifth grade we have enough understanding to grasp the reality that in history there is both a recent past and an ancient past. We learn about the main events, the big events that changed our world. It’s all about times and places and dates and circumstances. All this history gives us a foundation in order to later comprehend the ideas behind the events. What moved these men to do the things they did that so shaped the future they had as yet not seen? Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon, Marx and Engels, Lincoln, Lenin… What were the ideas that so impelled them?

Art history is no different. Our training in the arts may begin with learning about the basic materials and tools artists use and principles about color, line, perspective. The next level includes becoming familiar with the artists, the times in which they lived, the work that they produced. Whistler, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Dali, Rodin, Mondrian… Each has a style, and each a place in the grand scheme of things. But so often we simply stop there. We learn that Dali did melting watches and works that were weird, and that Picasso painted the Guernica as a statement about the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. But what were the ideas that impelled them?

Many artists have left behind not only their art, but also writings about that art. Kandinsky wrote, among other things, a book called Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Paul Klee left us his Pedagogical Sketchbook. In my hand is a book titled The Writings of Marcel Duchamp.

Duchamp, whose Nude Descending A Staircase created a sensation when it was painted in 1912. His Urinal, a shocking piece of found art when first shown, has been proclaimed by some as the most significant piece of art in the 20th century. Duchamp’s work foreshadowed the conceptual artists and happenings which would catch up to his ideas a half century later.

This blog entry is a review of The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, edited by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. The cover of the book features Duchamp’s "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even" which is on display in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The piece, sketched in 1913 and produced over a period of many years, ended up getting cracked on delivery. It is a large glass and therefore fragile, but substantial enough to withstand the shocks it experienced, as we ourselves often are in life.

The first portion of this book of Duchamp’s writings is about this piece, also referred to as The Large Glass, and I feel confident in saying that the multitude of meanings contained therein are completely veiled to the one who has not taken the time to access his notes on the project.

Something of a flow chart is here on pages 20 and 21 with some of the following text inscribed in boxes: Motor with Quite Feeble Cylinders, Wasp Sex Cylinder, Cage (contains filament material), Desire-Magneto, Capillary Tubes, Architectonic Base for the Bride, Oculist Charts, Oculist Witnesses, Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries, Water Wheel Mill, The Milky Way, etc. etc. The notes are full of playful suggestiveness and eroticism, even when there is nothing really erotically charged in the piece itself to the uninstructed viewer.

Duchamp’s experiments with chance are equally fascinating. The chapter on his 1914 Box begins with the Idea of Fabrication. “If a straight horizontal thread one meter long falls from a height of one meter onto a horizontal plane distorting itself as it pleases and creates a new shape of the measure of length.” Many of the notes are incomprehensible, and others impishly humorous, perhaps not unlike Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

The various elements of the Bride Stripped Bare include notes on dust breeding, sieves and funnels, pistons, weights, waterfalls, and the famous chocolate grinder. “The chocolate of the rollers, coming from one who knows not where, Would deposit itself after grinding, as milk chocolate… The grinder is mounted on a Louis XV nickled chassis.”

More than half the book deals with The Large Glass. The following section of the book deals with Duchamp’s transformation into Rrose Selavy. (eros c’est la vie) Much of this chapter is in French and the reader is encouraged to look elsewhere for more about this segment. The Man Ray photo of Duchamp as Rrose probably says enough. Much of the chapter includes explanations of Duchamp’s wordplay in his notes. Straight translation fails to convey the subtleties.

The following chapter is an essay titled ‘The Great Trouble With Art In This Country,” a portion of which details how Nude Descending a Staircase was not influenced by Futurists like Severini but was more about deconstructing forms, as the cubists were doing. “Reduce, reduce, reduce was my thought,” Duchamp explains, along with the comment that his aim was increasingly inward as opposed to external. Nude Descending a Staircase, which is also housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, proved to be a necessary stepping stone to The Large Glass, and like a series of concentric circles rippling outward from a stone plunking into a pond, so the chapters of this book constantly reference this formidable piece to which Duchamp devoted nearly a decade of his life.

Bottom line: many artists from DaVinci to Dali were also writers. While it’s true that spectators can interact with a work of art without knowing anything beyond its shape, line, form or substance, we are much enriched if we also take time to read artist statements and the essays, books, letters they have left behind.

For what it’s worth… In the late 1980s I wrote a short story that was influenced by Duchamp and the gradual shift from visual arts to the minimalism and the conceptual presentation of ideas. Later, Terrorists Preying was translated into French in the 1990s and was ultimately included in my 2011 volume of short stories titled Newmanesque.

Illustrations
Top right: Hermeneutic Circle by Eris Vafias, used with permission.
Lower right: Abstract Fragment by Ed Newman

You Can’t Always Know Who the Good Guys Are

After a tour of duty in Afghanistan, former rock star wannabe Vin Sarno returns to his Savannah homestead to figure out where he wants to spend the next chapter of his life. Shortly after returning home he decides to kill time by helping with his father’s “Ghost Tour” business. Doing midnight walking tours through Old Savannah brings back memories of Kabul, including a bad experience with some real spooks he encountered during a short prison stint in that shattered land.

You Can't Always Know Who the Good Guys Are is journalist Gerald Flanagan’s first novel and once it gets going it’s a riveting nail-biter. The pace at first feels like the angst of an existential stain squeezed from an over-sized abscess. But once Flanagan paints the setting, the story is a runaway train and though you’ve been down this track before the only thing you know for sure is that your hero will never be the same.

In the midst of everything is an unrequited love with ambiguous possibilities. Aliyah is the daughter of a Taliban chieftain who finds it impossible to believe Sarno can bring her the deliverance she so longs for from this insane life she’s endured. There are few places on earth where it is more difficult to be a woman.

Flanagan, who served as an embedded journalist in the Iraq war also lived in Karachi, Pakistan and Kabul where he reported on the hunt for Osama bin Laden for two British magazines and the Washington Post. With ease he paints the scenery which serves as backdrop for the story.

The Savannah portions of the book have just enough levity to release some of the tension readers will experience. The graveyard and ghost stories that have become entertainments today contain kernels of horror that find echoes amongst the Taliban. The manner in which the author takes the impossible and convinces readers that it is probable is quite astonishing.

Perhaps at the root of the story is Sarno's pain at knowing that his future with Aliyah can never work out, and that the entire mission of his life has been an epic struggle in futility. Nevertheless he knows no other path.

What I like most about the book is when Flanagan causes the story to intersect with real events, including when Pat Tillman was killed by "friendly fire" and the first attempt on Osama bin Laden near the caves below the Khyber Pass. The net result is to create the impression that this fictional adventure/drama may actually be a true account of events that journalists are restricted from writing about.

Ultimately, if you can't find the book at Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble, the reason might be that this review is itself a fictional review of a fictional book. If you like fiction, especially the kind where you have trouble discerning the line between real and improbable, you may enjoy my own books of short stories, especially Unremembered Histories and Newmanesque.

In the meantime, have a great weekend. There is always more to look forward to. And tonight, if you're in Duluth looking for something to do, visit Beaners Central to hear singer/songwriter Caitlin Robertson perform at Seven. Heartwarming music, and good java for a cold January night.

Unless otherwise noted, all paintings and illustrative material at this site has been created by Ennyman.

Paranormal Activity

Last night while driving home after dark I saw a row of lights overhead that seemed to be hovering. It was an airplane slowly descending for the airport nearby. But it seemed to be going so slow it was startling to me that it kept huffing forward and didn’t just fall out of the sky. I know from my travels that there’s a huge amount of mass there with all the metal and luggage and people on board. How do planes stay up there like that? Actually, it’s just a matter of physics… which most of us hardly understand so that ultimately becomes a matter of trust when you're one of the passengers.

The same with ocean liners and cruise ships. Look how massive these things are, yet instead of sinking they float. How does that work? The answer again is physics.

We don’t really have to understand physics to appreciate its benefits. Air transportation, cruise ship vacations, space travel… the scientists of our world have done the hard part, and we just appreciate the outcomes.

There are a lot of mysteries in the world. Why is some matter alive and other matter not? Where is the line between living and non-living? Even simple things like intelligence… where is the line between thinking and and non-thinking beings? For example, humans have a brain, so do dogs, and on down the chain till certain living creatures seem non-thinking but react to stimuli.

What about black holes? Who can understand that mystery? And all the mysteries surrounding UFOs. The stories are endless. What do all those testimonials of inexplicable lights amount to? What’s really under wraps in Area 51?

When I was a kid my grandmother had quite a few books about some of these things. There was one called Stranger Than Science (or something like that) which I read more than once. It had stories about mysterious sightings that were explained away as swamp gas and other natural phenomena, but came with too many unanswered questions.

My grandmother’s interest in these things was in part due to an out-of-body experience she’d had while on the operating table after a stroke. She hovered over the room and watched what she believed was twenty minutes of a surgery, doctors and nurses animated and fully engaged. The experience led to a quest which included read books outside the norm by people like Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and the Edgar Cayce Institute.

While in college she and I used to talk about these things in great detail. She shared with me papers about the remarkable mysteries of the Great Pyramid and stories about research that the Soviets were doing on psychokinesis, mind over matter.

These were undoubtedly some of the reasons I became interested in paranormal activity at an early age. What were the limits of mind power? How much have we lost through lack of its exercise?

I myself had an out-of-body experience once in which I, in an inexplicable way, was transported to another part of the campus when in college and overheard a conversation. I've known a few others with experiences not possible to explain with our normal scientific approach to things. Crackpots? I don’t know.

Anyways, these experiences and others which I don’t have time to detail here are part of the background for many of the short stories recorded in my two volumes of short stories titled Unremembered Histories and Newmanesque. There’s more to life than you can probably imagine. Modern scientists spend lifetimes trying to grasp it. Instead, I point to the cloud of unknowing and invite readers to climb the stairway. Or something like that anyway.

Make the most of your day. And take a minute to see if you can lift something heavy with your mind.