Easter on Skopelos, the “Mamma Mia!” Island

In celebration of Greek Easter this weekend, I decided to post the following short chapter from my 2011 nonfiction book, “Aegean Dream.” This chapter describes the Easter we  were part of when we lived on the tiny island of Skopelos–the real “Mamma Mia!” island–in 2007. Χριστος Ανεστι!

Truly He is Risen!

Easter was rapidly approaching. Church steps were scrubbed and cleaned, and fresh coats of limewash applied. Bells pealed. Masses were crowded. The larger churches had been holding daily services during the week leading up to Good Friday. There was such a sense of excitement and anticipation in the air that at times both of us wished we were believers, so as to more directly experience the joy in the air.

Not wanting to miss the Easter celebrations as we had Carnival, we asked Sofía and Rita what the schedule was.

On the Thursday evening, they explained, each parish’s ceremonial bier would be garlanded with flowers by the girls and women of that parish, in preparation for Good Friday, when the Christ-effigy was taken down from the cross and placed within the coffin before being paraded through the streets.

Good Friday was a day of mourning. The very devout ate only sour foods, in memory of Christ’s being given vinegar to drink. The evening procession was the big event of the day.

“The next evening,” said Sofía, “at the Saturday night Mass, all the lights except one candle on the altar are put out. Then, one by one, everybody lights their candle from this one. It is incredible to see this. They carry the lit candle home, and make a cross with the smoke over their front door, to bring them blessings for the rest of the year.”

Linda asked if it was all right for foreigners to participate. “Yes, Yes!” said Sofía. “Come at seven-thirty. We will have aperitifs together, and then we go.”

Katerína, the Frenchwoman who worked at Gorgónes and who had hooted with laughter at my attempts to translate my website into Greek, had warned us about a language pitfall specific to the season. In Greece you grow used to replying to greetings with the word epísis, meaning ‘you too’, or ‘and you also’. But on Easter Sunday, and for days afterward, it was traditional to greet everyone with the words, Chrístos anésti, Christ has risen.

“So in my first year,” she said, “when somebody said to me, ‘Chrístos anésti!’, I would reply, ‘epísis,’ the normal answer to a greeting in Greece. People were shocked, even angry, because I was saying ‘You also are risen!’“

“So what’s the correct form?” said Linda, when we’d stopped laughing.

“You must say, ‘Álithos anésti’, which means, ‘truly He is risen’. Telling someone they too have risen from the dead is not considered polite!”

 #

We arrived at Sofía’s house a little before seven-thirty on Good Friday, had a Campari and soda, and strolled together to the church. The night was cool and clear.

Several dozen people were already gathered in small groups on the large terrace outside the building. Inside was a press of people, beyond which we glimpsed a mass of flowers covering the top of the bier. The moody owner of the pharmacy on the paralía (shoreline) was on the steps; Alexándra Tsoúmas was coming out as we entered the church.

Once inside, we discerned a distinct current among the crowd, a circulation toward the bier and then back toward the entrance. As we approached, I saw first Sofía, and then Rita, dip forward. They were kissing the brow of the Christ-effigy in the coffin.

Linda, who was ahead of me, didn’t miss a beat; I followed her example. I leaned into the cave of flowers, and for a second entered another world, a place of bright, sweet-scented blooms and the warm candlelight dancing on the olive-skinned face of the Savior.

We lit our candles and joined the growing crowd outside. The candles came with little plastic guards to keep the flame from blowing out in the breeze. Rita and Sofía met friends, some of whom they’d not seen in years. We chatted and watched the crowd.

A little before ten, the bier was brought out from our church as the head of the procession arrived. The procession had started at the parish farthest from the paralía. As the first bier and the priest of that church arrived, he was greeted by the priest from our church, litanies were exchanged, and the procession moved on. Ten minutes later, the next bloom-bedecked bier arrived, and the process was repeated.

The flowers, the incense, the liturgical chants by the light of hundreds of candles, the faces recognized as the entire village flowed steadily past like a great, slow river, the knowledge that we were witnessing a ritual unchanged over centuries: these were the invisible cables that bound this community together. Witnessing it, I felt a great peace, a comforting sense of security and permanence. It was beautiful.

When the final group had paused and moved on, the bearers of the bier from our church followed and we all folded in behind. An hour had passed since the first bier’s arrival. The night had become crisp, and we were glad of our leather jackets.

We flowed down the narrow streets toward the paralía, borne by the current of villagers carrying candles. Nearby was Lázaros Tsoúmas, CEO of the Próton grocery, walking solemn-faced with his children. The procession was hushed. It was, I remembered, a day of mourning.

As we arrived at the last small church before the paralía, the procession ahead began to dissolve as if by unspoken command, breaking into small groups that trickled away without fuss. “We can leave our candles here,” said Sofía, pointing to the interior of the little church. Other people were doing the same: the small space pulsed by the light of hundreds upon hundreds of half-consumed candles, its saints staring out of their icons among a sea of rich wood and glinting gold.

“Shall we go to Ánemos and get a drink?” said Rita. We were more than willing; it was eleven-thirty, and there was a general movement toward the paralía and its bars just one street down. Both of the big ferries that served the island—the G&A Lines Jet Ferry and the Hellenic Seaways Skiáthos Express—were moored alongside one another in the harbor, something I’d never seen in the off-season: the sons and daughters of the Spórades had returned to spend this most important of all holidays with their families. Above the giant, dark opening of the loading bays, the red digital banners that usually displayed the ferries’ sailing time and destination glowed with Easter greetings.

The bars were doing a roaring trade. Ánemos was packed, so we settled ourselves at a small outdoor table. I saw the owner of Omorfiá, one of two high-end craft stores on the island, a place where we both hoped to place our products, sitting with a group of friends. A few minutes later Kákos, our lawyer, walked by. Rita greeted him by his first name; he acknowledged her without stopping.

We sipped our drinks and took in the atmosphere. People kept stopping by to greet Rita and Sofía. There was merriment as friends and relatives who hadn’t seen one another since the previous year became reacquainted. The day may have been one of mourning but, as after any funeral, celebrations were now appropriate.

By one-thirty we’d begun to feel the cold. Rita, with her twenty-year advantage over her Mom and ourselves, was just starting to liven up and was ready to party. There were men out there, and the night was young. We gave her a farewell hug and accompanied Sofía to her door on our way home.

Greek Orthodoxy, Linda and I agreed, was a religion we could live with: big on ritual and eye candy, party- and alcohol-friendly: a faith wherein both Saturday night and Sunday morning could coexist.

 #

We’d arranged to join Rita and Sofía again the next evening for the Saturday night mass; but Linda, who is somewhat allergic to pollens, had broken out in an alarming rash and was feeling awful. We called to apologize and spent a quiet evening at home.

Next day, Easter Sunday, found Linda on the mend. This was fortunate, since Spýros and Mára had booked us several weeks earlier for the big Easter feast at the kalívi (country cottage). We’d had several other invitations—from Tákis, Vasílis, and Apostólos, the neighbor above our workshop—all of whom were grilling lamb and hosting large gatherings. We assured them we’d at least stop by late in the day if we had the steam left.

But how to dress? It was sunny, and there was a good chance we’d be outdoors. But in the past we’d more than once found ourselves underdressed for an event, so clueless were we about the social protocols of this land. Given the importance of the day, we decided that casual-smart—slacks and dress shoes for me, a crisp dress for Linda—would be appropriate. Best to err on the side of elegance.

Strátos and Anna picked us little before noon. We arrived to find several people already seated outdoors in the small meadow by the chicken coop. A long wooden table had been set out, flanked by two long benches and an assortment of chairs. A little distance away, Spýros was turning a spitted lamb over a fire, while Dimítris, Anna’s employer, likewise attended to a goat; on the same spit, a dark, sausage-like mass three feet long was sizzling away. Spýros had started the cooking a couple of hours earlier, and the meat was about halfway done.

We were hugged by all those we knew, and greeted with expressions of Chrístos anésti, which we countered with the requisite and traditional password álithos anésti. We were grateful we’d been coached in this beforehand.

Everyone, except for a small old gentleman and two black-garbed, elderly women we’d never met, was wearing jeans. We were seriously overdressed. And it was warm here on the southerly side of the island. Shorts would not have been inappropriate.

We were introduced to the older guests, who turned out to be Dimítris’s parents and aunt, and to his two sons. The sons could not have been more different. One was round and flabby, with long, frizzy hair tied back in a ponytail, and owlish eyes behind alarmingly thick glasses; the other was a small bull of a man, with hard, close-set eyes and a distinct aura of menace about him. Father and sons owned a car hire business as well as the ACS courier agency where Anna worked. Another couple, friends of Strátos’s, had come from Alónissos for the day.

Linda had baked chocolate chip cinnamon rolls for the occasion, and these, along with our bottle of premium red wine, were whisked off to the kitchen. I was handed a glass of the usual thin homebrew, and took a turn cranking Mr. Goat’s spit. Between the greasy smoke and the occasional spritz of goat fat, the smart clothing was a wasted nicety. But it was pleasant to sit in the spring sunshine, smelling wood smoke and crisping meat. Spýros and Mára had once more made us feel like family. We were very blessed.

The sausage-thing was first off the spit. By now everyone was hungry, and lightheaded from the wine and sun. “Koukourétsi,” announced Mára, with her usual enthusiasm, sliding three thick slices of the stuff onto our plates. A casual question confirmed my suspicions: we were being served the organs and innards of at least one of the spitted beasts, and were left in no doubt that this was considered a great delicacy by everyone present.

With the notable exception of foie gras, I’m not a fan of organ meats: haggis, brains, tripe, kidneys, tongue, blood pudding—all deserve a polite but firm no, thank you in my book. And now—oh God!—how was I going to get out of eating this stuff?

But with our dear hosts sitting so close, and Mára clearly eager to see our faces light up as we sampled this treat; and Linda encouraging me to ‘just try a bit;’ and the admittedly mouthwatering smell coming from my plate as, fork poised, I tried and failed to find a graceful exit from my predicament; and the undeniable fact that it looked pretty much like a dark and lumpy version of cotechíno, a variety of cooked salami served in northern Italy which was, face it, one of my favorite foods on Earth…

I cut off a piece and popped it in my mouth.

Bit down on it, ready for a quick swallow if the taste proved unmanageable.

To my great relief, it was rather like a salami of some sort, albeit a very complex, nuanced, and distinctly liver-flavored member of the family. But it wasn’t bad, and I was able to muster appropriate sighs and moans of delight without feeling too false about it. Mára and Spýros beamed.

Salads came, along with beans, slabs of féta, olives, and more sour, wine-flavored liquid. Before long, the lamb arrived. Spýros and Strátos set it down at the end of the table in front of Mára, and slid out the skewer. Mára made a couple of big incisions, plunged both hands into the steaming carcass, and began to tear off big hunks, piling them onto our plates as we handed them down the table to her. She was chuckling. We’d never seen meat served this way at a dinner party, but at least it must be tender.

They set the half-emptied lamb on the table not far from Linda, the ghastly remains of its face, complete with pointy teeth and cooked, milky eyeballs, facing us. We tried not to look that way.

The meat was excellent, at once more fatty and gamey than any lamb we’d eaten in the past, with the spiciness you’d expect from a flock whose diet included wild sage and oregano. Happily, Mr. Goat never even made it to table, so stuffed was everyone by the time it was even mentioned. This was a good thing, since neither Linda nor I are fond of goat.

The sun grew hot. Dimítris sat to our right, one of his sons beside him, one facing. He spoke some English, but insisted on making us work hard at our Greek. I liked the man: he was charismatic, with a gentleness that belied his dark, weather-beaten exterior. He liked to laugh, and it was clear he thought Linda a good sport as they bantered in Greek. I was proud of her: my wife had proved herself courageous, adaptable, and wonderfully crazy. Not for the first time, I could hardly believe we lived among these extraordinary people.

The chocolate chip cinnamon rolls came and went, along with coffee, and the party began to break up. The remaining few of us adjourned to sit at a table in the shade of the house. Linda and I excused ourselves and took a stroll up the lane and back, admiring the nearby kalívis and olive groves. Many of the houses still had working wells complete with iron bucket and crank, and I was unable to resist lifting the lid on one of these and peering in to see my head silhouetted against a perfect disk of deep blue in the blackness some twenty feet below.

We returned to find a neighbor had arrived, a loud, fat man who’d clearly drunk more than was good for him. In an aside, Mára let us know she wasn’t pleased at the man’s arrival, and it was easy to see why: he’d monopolized the conversation and showed every sign of going on for hours. Spýros saw me watching and did a surreptitious eye-roll to indicate his own feelings, but our hosts were too polite to interrupt their new guest.

By now it was evening, and when, a short while later, I asked Strátos if he could give us a ride home sometime soon, he and Anna seemed happy for an excuse to leave.

Mr. Goat, all wrapped up in yards of tinfoil but still on his spit, stood propped against the front door frame, ready to ride back to the Balabánises’ in the back of the pickup, where I imagined he would end up in the freezer.

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The Lockdown of Boston

“The return of terrorism to the U.S.”, was a phrase used on NPR today, as the city of Boston was literally locked down by the authorities.

The return of terror? Two young nutcases with low-tech bombs?

I don’t for a moment want to minimize the horror of what happened in Boston. Moreover—as an Englishman who lived in London all through the murderous IRA terror campaign of the 1970s and 1980s—I’m relieved to see just how robust and solidly the people of Boston reacted to the event. My personal fear when the bombing occurred was that, just like after 9/11, this media-saturated nation so unused to terrorist attacks on its own soil would go into a tailspin of fear, bringing the fragile economic recovery to a screeching halt. Instead, Bostonians were out on the streets the next day, laying wreaths at the bomb site and vowing not to be cowed.

Today, the streets of Boston are deserted except for thousands—no exaggeration—of heavily-armed police, FBI, and other authorities looking for the surviving mad bomber. A major metropolitan area locked down to find one nineteen-year-old.

I usually don’t believe in second-guessing police and intelligence forces—they have a phenomenally difficult  job to do, and typically do it pretty well. The decision to lock down the city, shut down transport (not to mention cutting off cellphone service immediately after the bombings)… I can’t imagine these decisions were made lightly.

On the other hand, I think we might consider whether this isn’t (i) overreaction, and (ii) a sinister, Orwellian glimpse of a post 9/11 security state in full action.  My point being that this is one individual at loose here, not a platoon of terrorists. One kid—admittedly armed and desperate, possible even carrying explosives—but still, one kid.

What kind of message does the willingness on the part of the authorities to shut down a city to hunt down one single person send? We can glimpse some of the reasoning: doing this might save lives, prevent a hostage event, make it much harder for the killer to flee…but still, is this a proportionate reaction? Or does it project an image of hysteria, amplifying an already tragic event and—with the all-too-eager help of the news media—turning it into a full-blown national crisis which will rock the nation’s already-fragile psyche? Now this precedent has been set, we can expect it to happen again.

I read not long ago that one of the morbid calculations that regulatory bodies have to make is the dollar value of a human life—a necessity when trying to decide whether to, say, build a pedestrian overpass, ban a chemical, etc.; in short, a cost-benefit analysis. Just a few years ago, that figure—the dollar value of a life—had been determined at around $8M; with the recession, it’s dropped to something closer to $6M, I believe.

Now let’s consider what it costs to shut down a city like Boston for a day. The business and production lost, the damage to personal incomes, etc. I can’t imagine it’s anything less than many billions of dollars. So in terms of pure cost-benefit, locking down the city seems a non-starter.

I can only think, then, that this has been done for two reasons: first to reduce the chances of the killer getting away to as near zero possible; and second, to send a message that the authorities will stop at nothing to catch anyone who commits an act of this sort.

These last are very powerful arguments, and I both understand and applaud them; I know for sure I wouldn’t ever want to make a decision like that. Still and all, I can’t help but feel that it sets a terrible precedent and—worse—underscores the idea that we’re all in danger, all the time, now that “terrorism has returned to the U.S.”. I think the authorities over-reacted.

If terrorism is ever to be defeated, it won’t be because of the application of overwhelming force by the state: it’ll be by people, by individuals, by every single one of us refusing to be cowed, refusing to live in fear. If they blow up a plane, get on a flight the next day; if they bomb a subway car, get on the subway; if they destroy a building, rebuild it taller, and don’t be ten years over it. And let’s stop dignifiying them with the name “terrorist”—these people are, and have always been, mad bombers, no more.

Terror is a state of mind.

An Even More Inconvenient Truth

Have you seen the short, unsensational YouTube video with the graphs of wealth distribution in the US, comparing what Americans believe the wealth distribution is, what they believe it should (in fairness) be, and what it actually is? You should: it’s both eye-popping and sobering, and I’ve linked it at the bottom of this post. For the moment, the takeaway is that one percent of the population owns fifty percent of the nation’s stocks, bonds, and mutual funds—effectively, the nation’s wealth, and, more importantly, the tools to greater personal wealth. The figures are verifiable, and almost five million people have seen the video.

It’s no secret that the middle class is shrinking and doing less well. Nor is it surprising: in a society whose economic model resembles nothing so much as a wealth transfer system for lining the pockets of the rich and near-rich, and where democracy is patently and unashamedly for sale, the American rags-to-riches dream, though still attainable, is only going to work for a tiny minority. For the rest, it’s the soup kitchen or multiple part-time jobs, with few or no benefits.

There are, at present count, somewhere around 600,000 homeless in America. To house them all in “efficiency units,” small but well-appointed 200- and 300-square-foot housing modules of the sort now being built for real rents in places like New York and San Francisco, could probably be done for around $35Bn. The cost of one and a half Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, that’s really not a lot; in fact, a few of the very wealthiest Americans, certainly any pair of the first ten or so, could cover the whole sum and still have enough left over to live beyond most people’s wildest dreams.

Stay with me, because this isn’t about the anonymous homeless multitude: it’s going to get personal. I’m going to be talking about you and me.

Unfortunately, the ranks of the homeless in the US (and elsewhere, for that matter) are likely to grow rather than diminish. Despite the delusional optimism of articles like the recent one in the Huffington Post which suggests that the post-war/baby boomer generation is about to reshape the social order, when you’re playing against a stacked deck the chances of that happening (without violent social upheaval, and none of us wants that) are close to zero. Instead, as this generation enters what would once have been the Golden Years—now more like the Tin Years—a society that promotes eternal youth and beauty is going to have to deal with the grim reality of its aging population.

Consider. A large proportion of the boomer generation, the 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964, has nowhere near the savings to sustain them, even if they don’t require expensive healthcare—which a great many of them will. Ask a financial planner today how much you should have set aside for when you retire, and they’ll tell you anywhere between one and two million dollars.

Million?

Yes, million. Because whereas we once had the decency—thanks to widespread smoking and simpler medicine—to keel over within a decade or so of retirement, we boomers are living an average of fifteen years longer than our grandparents. To make matters worse, those of us who don’t have savings or families that can afford the $4,000 or more a month to park us in some generic assisted living facility are, to put it mildly, in trouble.

This is a crisis as serious as any asteroid strike or tsunami for those affected—and that’ll be tens of millions of people in the US alone. Vast numbers of people are living on razor-thin safety margins, and their kids are likely doing even worse. Unless you’re one of the dwindling group who’ve carefully set money by and own a good home, had the luck to father a doctor, have a USPS pension or one from the golden age of GM, and aren’t bankrupted by healthcare costs before Medicare kicks in, well…as entitlement programs begin to pop their rivets under the strain of a huge demographic bulge—the majority of whose constituents suffer at least one chronic disease—your future is looking rocky.

I know, this is a grim topic. But it’s important, not least because the vast majority of us will be affected, but because there’s so damn little straight talking about it. Nobody wants to look the issue in the eye, let alone do anything about it.

And it gets worse.

However unhappy our circumstances of our dotage may be—and I truly hope they aren’t, and that your sunset years are happy ones—the combination of a predatory healthcare system and the tyranny of people who think their beliefs and moral values trump ours conspire to deny us even the degree of compassion we afford our pets, namely a gentle, painless exit. Unless you live in one of the very few places (such as Oregon) where you have at least a notional right to death with dignity, you’re stuck with being kept alive by heroic measures long after your sell-by date whether you like it or not. Don’t assume that your DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order will make a damn bit of difference, either, because the realities of the ER are such that unless it’s waved in the doc’s face by a firm and clear-minded friend or relative, you’re going to be kept alive whether you like it or not.

What’s to be done? Well, you can vote, for one thing. You can lobby, write your congressperson, and make your voice heard. You can talk to people and spread the meme. If you’re a writer, you can write about these issues*. If you have some savings, you can consider getting together with a few friends or couples, pooling your resources, and buying a large house, even setting up some sort of elder commune, and taking care of one another, an idea whose time has certainly come and which, correctly planned and executed, can offer a viable model. But whatever you do, don’t just put off thinking about this stuff because it’s unpleasant.

I wish you well. I wish you a golden old age surrounded by loving family and friends, in a better world. It could happen. But it’ll only happen if we have the will to bring it about.

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The video of US wealth inequality can be found here. Watch it.

*My own thriller/adventure novel, “Sutherland’s Rules,” despite being a rousing, upbeat romp, features older protagonists dealing with their own declining years.

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The Samsung Galaxy S4: A Brief Rant

The Samsung S4? I can’t begin to fathom why anyone would get so excited over a telephone.

I’m sorry, a device. I know it’s so much more than a phone, that it’ll work as a TV remote, respond to crazy air gestures, possibly even tell you your weight and fortune. But it’s a gadget, people, not the Second Coming.

So while 600,000 Americans are homeless; while the Middle East inches inexorably towards a meltdown that will affect us all; while the sequester that nobody wanted but the public couldn’t be bothered to wrap their heads around begins to squeeze jobs, lives, and institutions; while bankers who should be rotting in prison get fresh bonuses and are once again happily dealing in collateralized mortgage obligations (which everyone has mostly forgotten about despite the fact that they brought about the recent Great Recession, and no, there never were any real regulations passed because the legislators are all in the industry’s pockets anyway); while all this goes on, almost half a million Americans watched Samsung’s online product launch event.

Are we insane? Oh, yes.

We’re insane because we use phrases like “sports hero;” because we spend $4 on 500-calorie desserts disguised as coffee drinks; because we allow the food, banking, and so many other industries to largely police themselves; because we think nutrition is complicated and, besides, refined, prepackaged garbage tastes better; because we think a global population of 7-going-on-9 billion people is okay;  because we think celebrities matter; because we surrender our privacy and freedoms to politicians who keep beating the War on Terror drum; because we continue to reward aggressive alpha male behaviour and inflexible thinking at every opportunity; because we think the arrival of yet another ephemeral bit of electronic wizardry is an event of vast import.

Oh yes. We’re insane.

The Last Post

All good things come to an end.

In the eight months and 48 posts since I started this blog, we’ve had some fun together, and hopefully I made a few people think and sparked some good discussion. But as I prepare to publish my novel, Sutherland’s Rules, begin work on the next, take Panverse Publishing to the next level starting with six new titles in 2013, all while still having a life… well, something has to go. (This blog won’t be deleted, though, so archived posts will remain available).

It’s also becoming very clear to me that the world simply doesn’t need another writing blog. That said, for those of us who are writers, there are a very few writing blogs that I consider absolutely indispensable, and which explore the craft at a level far beyond the mundane. These are:

• Janice Hardy’s ‘The Other Side of the Story’
• Kris Rusch’s ‘Business Rusch’
• Dan Simmons’s ‘Writing Well’
• Juliette Wade’s ‘Talk to YoUniverse’

My most heartfelt thanks to all of you who’ve visited, read my posts, humoured me, commented, joined in my contests, etc. I’d love to stay in touch with you all and know what you’re up to, so please join me on Twitter (@Dario_Ciriello) and/or friend me on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/dario.ciriello).

Finally, I’d like to tell you a little about Panverse Publishing and my plans for it. Please bear with me a few moments, since, writer or reader, you may hear something to your advantage…

PANVERSE PUBLISHING is a critically-acclaimed small press dedicated to publishing story-rich work by new writers and established professionals. Stories from our anthologies have received several award nominations, including a Hugo and Nebula, and won the 2011 Sidewise Award; my own nonfiction title, ‘Aegean Dream,’ was the #1 nonfiction book on Greece on Amazon UK for 14 weeks this summer.

Starting now, Panverse will not be limiting itself solely to short fiction or Science Fiction and Fantasy titles, but will instead be publishing long form fiction (novels) for a broader audience, as well as some nonfiction.

Panverse will be publishing, both print and digitally, new voices telling unusual stories. Agents and publishers are taking no chances today, with the result that some extremely gifted new writers, and many established writers whose stories don’t fit the formula- and category-obsessed market, are unable to get published. At Panverse it’s story first and foremost. We believe readers are smarter than the publishing world generally gives them credit for, and that they read across categories and enjoy work that doesn’t conform.

Our books are beautiful. One of my core values is that a book–whether print or electronic–should not only contain good writing but also be a thing of beauty, meticulously crafted and attractively packaged. Panverse goes out of its way to find the best artists and the most striking cover art.

As of now, Panverse Publishing has four titles scheduled for 2013, and we will be announcing plans to open to novel submissions in the near future.

I’m in the process of entirely rebuilding the Panverse website. Once the new website is up, I’ll be posting details and teaser excerpts of upcoming titles, as well as author guidelines for submissions, along with royalty and contract terms and all the other good stuff. There will also be a Panverse Reader Club for those among our readers aspiring to become repeat offenders (think: discounts, prize draws, and much more).

Most of all, I intend to continue with Panverse’s original promise and mandate to put STORY front and center. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a boring book, and we have no intention of inflicting them on our readers! Panverse’s motto is, and always will be,

STORY. WONDER. THEY’RE BACK.

‘Like’ us on Facebook

Visit Panverse on the web

Want to be on the Panverse mailing list? No spam, ever, and absolute privacy: all you will receive are emails when new titles are released and notification of our (quarterly or so) contests and prize draws. Just drop me an email at office dot panpubs at gmail dot com, and you’ll be kept in the loop. You can of course opt out at any time.

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That’s all, folks! Thank you and Happy Holidays, and I wish you every success and happiness for 2013 and beyond.

Dario

In Praise of the Slow: A Meditation on (Free) Time

The first in a series of essays in which I air aspects of my own strongly-held, evolving, and sometimes contrarian worldview. Indulge me–this is about so much more than TV.

 

Fit the First

I hate television. Fortunately, my wife isn’t too fond of it, either. My dislike of the medium is so strong that I find it difficult to be in someone’s house with the damned thing on. It’s a social catastrophe, at once degrading conversation, distracting people, and filling everyone’s head with a stream of endless chatter, as if the chatter of our own minds weren’t already enough to contend with. The invasion of every public space—gyms, waiting areas, bars—by the plasma screen upsets and offends me.  Are we insane, that we allowed this to happen?

Why do I dislike the medium so much?  Let me count the ways.

First is the near-catatonic passivity of both body and mind that television induces in the viewer. Whereas reading or listening to radio or audiobook engages the imagination in active creation, TV puts those faculties to sleep and, I believe, dulls them by negative reinforcement. Worse still, since we humans are primarily wired for visual input, so that around 70% or more* of our sensory information comes through that channel, the images we see on television, especially those of high emotional content, such as soap operas, angry mobs, murder, mayhem, and political rhetoric, tend to slip past our conscious filters and embed themselves deep in our psyche. It promotes fear and perpetuates stereotypes.  Television is the perfect mind-control tool.

Other gripes, such as the low quality of most offerings and my monumental disdain for advertising, pale by comparison. Nor do I for a moment buy the defense that educational content such as the History Channel’s offerings or Sesame Street in any way redeem the medium: the former is padded and extended with useless filler and silly, unnecessary dramatization (read a book instead, dammit!), and the latter simply teaches innocent young minds that the idiot box is their friend and surrogate mummy.

So the fact that we’ve allowed the internet to be turned into something largely indistinguishable from television is—to my mind—a profound tragedy and an affirmation of our collective disinterest in any kind of societal growth. We are clearly not serious about building a better world or improving our minds and knowledge. We’d rather just watch YouTube.

Fit the Second

Although we have neither a cable nor a satellite connection in the home and we don’t stream, we do we have a TV, which we use to watch movies on DVD and VHS media. In recent weeks, we’ve been enjoying a run of classic and cult movies from the 1960s and early 1970s (many of these are part of the excellent Criterion Collection). I want to talk about three of these: Blow Up, Solaris (the Tarkovsky original) and If.

Apart from the power and heft of the films themselves, one thing that struck me in each of these was the pace at which people’s lives (I’ll come back to this shortly) flowed just two generations ago, and, not coincidentally, the depth in which our inner lives are examined in these three films.

Even though the lead character (played by David Hemmings) in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up lives life in what then would have passed for the fast lane, he doesn’t lack for down time. In the film, set in the swinging London of the mid-60s, Hemmings plays a young photographer who realizes that a series of pictures he took on a whim in a London park document a mysterious murder. When he tries to cut through the distractions and banality of the everyday and arrive at the truth, he finds himself thwarted at every turn until, in the end, the antics of the traveling mime troupe with which the film opens becomes a metaphor for our lives.

The 1971 film Solaris (at the time dubbed ‘the Russian 2001’) will, to some modern viewers, appear glacially slow. It’s not: although the action appears to unfold slowly, the film is so rich in psychological content and imagery as to almost overload the psyche and push it into overdrive. With its meditation on human relationships (do we love the person or our concept of that person?), our aggressive instincts, the relationship between reality and consciousness, and the vast barriers to communication with alien species, this film made me feel I’d come home, rediscovered what it is to look inside and dwell there, rather than feeling overwhelmed by the endless bombardment of external trivia.

The last of this trio, Lindsay Anderson’s If, stars Malcolm McDowell as an anarchic adolescent antihero who takes on the British establishment. Although the film mostly concerns itself with the regimented brutality of the 1960s British social order and its suppression of and reaction to non-conformity, the strong surrealist currents in this movie (as in the former), the transitions between colour and black and white, and the power of the film’s apocalyptic final scene (unthinkable in today’s fear-saturated sociopolitical climate), and above all, the absence of high-speed action and external momentum culminate in a psychic impact that—like the previous two films—makes modern attempts to do the same laughable.

Fit the Third

We live in a world and at a pace where the inner life and dialogue, as well as the flexing of the creative imagination at a level beyond the superficial, is both difficult and discouraged. Television—along with the internet, the smartphone, and all the rest—has replaced religion as the opium of the masses. As long as we have these things we trundle along, perhaps not happily but at least tolerant of all social and economic ills. It’s not inconceivable that we’re rewiring our neurons and building new cortical pathways in our brains to such an extent that we’ve begun to evolve into a new species of human.

I can envision a near future in which millions would accept, and even welcome, indentured servitude as a means of keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads; but if all TV broadcasts, networked media, and game systems were to break down tomorrow, I think our social fabric would disintegrate. I don’t believe that a generation of adults raised in daycare and suckled at the terrible altar of the glass teat could cope with being suddenly thrust into a situation where they have time and are forced to explore their inner space, to reflect and think, and to communicate with others on a level beyond the banal.

An elitist view? Judgmental? Perhaps. But don’t get me wrong: I’m no luddite. My argument is not with technology but with the way we choose to use it. Hardwired as most of us are for short-term benefit (the technical term is ‘hyperbolic discounting’), we seem to have a tremendous gift for turning powerful technologies into either weapons, tools of mass control, or time-wasting frivolities.

If you find it difficult or are too young to remember a time before modern communications technology had become a central part of our lives; a world of just a handful of TV channels with limited broadcasting hours; without email, smartphones, or even answering machines; a world with half the population of today, and in which a person with even a half-decent job could enjoy a good middle-class life; a world in which ADD referred to an arithmetical operation; a world in which we actually spent time with ourselves and our thoughts; try the following.

Take a weekend alone somewhere without your phone or laptop or any device, and where there is no television—don’t cheat. Try to go into nature instead of a B&B, or at least spend as much time as you can out of doors and away from people; if you can go somewhere remote, all the better. Don’t even wear a watch. I’m talking about being somewhere you can watch the clouds go by, or a stream flow, or ants go about their business, for an hour or more without interruption or the ability to measure time.

At first, you’ll probably be bored, maybe restless. You may experience anxieties. The time will stretch weirdly: an hour will feel like four or five. Note these impressions without feeding or buying into them.

Before long you’ll find yourself easing into an internal state, reconnecting with your inner life in a way that you haven’t in a long time. For those of us who are writers or artists, that’s the wellspring, the place it all comes from; it’s hard to create without having at least some contact, however imperfect, with that place. For those of us who don’t regularly go there, perhaps haven’t since childhood, this reconnecting can—and will—be an amazing, maybe transformative experience.

So humour me, will you? Try it out, then come back and let me know what it was like. It’s eminently possible, whatever your current lifestyle, to claw back your time and reconnect with your inner life. It might take determination and will, but it can be done.

And the first step is to ditch your TV.

* Some researchers suggest the number may be as high as 80%

Negativity and Truth

The brilliant and multiple award-winning editor Gardner Dozois once advised a group of aspiring writers including myself to “pay no attention to reviews,” and added that “the first thing a writer needs to do is develop a thick skin.” Now, ten years later, with a moderately successful book (Aegean Dream) under my belt and another one nearing publication, I see just how right he was.

A couple of days ago, googling myself and my book as I periodically do to see if there are any new reviews out, I stumbled on a thread in a forum for expats living in Greece. Curious, I had a look.

The thread began well enough, with the first poster plugging Aegean Dream, saying it was both a good read and should be required reading for those planning to uproot and move to another country. A few posts on, though, another poster, who was currently reading my book, had a harsher take, complaining that my naïveté in moving to Greece on the basis of what he considered minimal research was “grating” on him.

I’d come across a similar opinion—only much less tactfully phrased—some months ago on another expat forum, and for a moment, it stung. I considered a reply, then immediately set that idea aside. The thing is, that once you publish, or offer up any work, artistic or otherwise, for public consumption, you expose yourself. People have opinions. They have axes to grind and—like you—insecurities of their own; sometimes they’re right, and other times  not. In these particular instances, I told myself that (i) it’s always easy to second-guess others, and (ii) I actually agree with the poster, and address his very point openly about halfway through the book

Now, Aegean Dream is a nonfiction work. And—because of the still-present stigma concerning self-publication (I’m technically more ‘Indie’ published, since Panverse, though I own it, had published several volumes by others)—hasn’t had the benefit of a single traditional review despite the fact that it’s already outsold several Booker prize winners. All the reviews I’ve received are on Amazon, Goodreads and a few expat websites, and all are generally good, but not a single pro reviewer has touched it.

But if you’ve written fiction, and/or been traditionally published (as some of my own short stories have), you’re more likely to find yourself traditionally reviewed—and those reviews can be very tough, and will hit home. If you’re already insecure about your writing, you may want to avoid reading reviews altogether, or have someone you trust just pick out the good ones for you. If your skin is a bit thicker, you’ll probably decide that in the end these are just opinions and no more. A copy of that wonderful little volume, Pushcart’s Rotten Reviews and Rejections, can go a very long way to soothing a bruised ego at these times. And, of course, there’s always drink!

Once you’ve licked your wounds and run out of good Anglo-Saxon words to describe your detractors, the professional—and I’m assuming professionalism is what we’re striving for—response is to get on with the next book or story as if none of this had happened.

For me, the only thing that matters is truth. Your truth is the way you see life, your characters, the human condition, and all that matters is getting that on the page. You can’t control what people think or say, and that really needs to be secondary. Making money needs to be secondary. Your business—my business—is to tell the story without timidity or coyness. Timidity never won awards, nor did bland reviews. Some of the most successful works in the canon have been the most controversial and received as much vitriol as they have honey.

My own upcoming novel, Sutherland’s Rules, is one I expect to take a fair bit of flak for, though I hope that an equal or greater number of readers and reviewers will enjoy it. A thriller touching on issues including old age, sex, drugs, freedom, terrorism, and our modern surveillance society, it’s bound to hit some nerves. Should I care? No. I’m writing what I want to write about. I believe I’m writing truth, writing the world and my characters as they are and as it is. I told the truth from start to finish in Aegean Dream, and that truth included being entirely honest (which many reviewers have favourably commented on) about my own failings as well as detailing the appalling, toxic corruption that we encountered among Greek lawyers, bureaucrats, and even police in our attempt to settle in that country. I believe the main reason that Aegean Dream has been, and continues to be, successful is precisely because of that truth.

Negativity also comes at you from people, including friends and family, who don’t believe writing is a real job—and it may well not be for everyone: many will fail, just as they do at acting, accountancy, and the bar. I think the best way to deal with this sort of negativity is to allow it to temper and toughen you to deal with the reviews and criticism you’ll face when you’re published.

So work on that thick skin. If you must read reviews, make sure you have the strength and resilience to shrug them off and not let them sting for more than an instant. Write what you want to, not what you think the market, or your agent, or your publisher wants. In many cases, those things may well align anyway, so no worries—everybody wins. But if your primary concerns are people’s good opinions and making money, well, you’re probably in the wrong business.

Just Say No

After an unusually hectic seven straight days of nonstop work—CAD, writing, and some paid copyediting—I found myself so tapped out on Monday that I could hardly reason. When, lying on the couch in the late morning (there are some benefits to working from home), I reflected on my condition, I remembered the importance of continuously re-evaluating commitments and priorities.

I have friends—I’m sure you do too—for whom anything less than too much seems to be not enough. These people are constantly on the go, 24/7, afraid, perhaps, that they might miss out on something, or seize up if they slow down. Rather than sipping and savouring life like a fine wine, they seem to want to drink it down like water from a fire hose.

And then there are those people who seem unable to say no. These are often deeply giving, caring people, volunteering for this and that, espousing causes and helping others even at the expense of their own health and the wellbeing of their family.

I understand most of this. We live in a hyperfast, ultraconnected world full of distraction, temptation, need, social and peer pressure—and insecurity. Those of us fortunate enough to have jobs are working more hours than ever before, in many cases for less money; there are the phenomenal demands of children and their own activities, and a mass of good causes clamouring for support.

There’s a Chinese saying that goes, one lake cannot hold all the water in the world. You can’t do it all. You have to prioritise. You have to draw lines.

I’ve always been a little stingy with my time and energy, and I recommend that when you see the wall coming up, you do the same. Just say no. It’s okay. They’ll find someone else to help clean the beach or be the society treasurer. Someone else can usher at the kids’ school play. And however much they want to play baseball as well as soccer, unless you want your kids to be as tapped out and frenetic as you are, you’ll be doing them—and yourself—a big favour by drawing a line. When you exhaust yourself, you’re no good to anyone. Don’t even go to the edge. Just say no.

No is a really empowering word. Used correctly, it’s a kind word, and a thoughtful, even wise one. It’s survival. It lets you live to fight and win the next battle.

A lot of people seem to overload and take on more and more as some kind of validation, perhaps to bolster low self-esteem. Others might have an inflated sense of their own importance, like the workaholic middle manager who won’t delegate and can’t seem to trust anyone else to do anything. These behaviours are, in my opinion, inefficient and even unhealthy, sometimes to the point of pathology. We all need downtime, mental space, relaxation. Without enough sleep we become cranky and our immune systems begin to break down. The eventual outcome is often depression, ill health, or divorce.

Here’s what’s important: time with ourselves and with our loved ones; regular and sufficient sleep; good meals, eaten in comfort with family, not in the car or at your desk. Exercise. Time in nature. Please understand I’m not judging or preaching, but I think we sometimes all need to step back and remember we have choices. They may be hard, but we still have them. It’s easy to forget this.

So I cut out my Saturday blog post, because I realized it was pushing me to overload. I let go of my SF reviewing gig for Tangent (which I rather enjoyed) a few weeks ago because other things were starting to suffer. I politely declined to stand for the board of a new SFF society because I knew I couldn’t do it to my satisfaction without something else important (to me) suffering. I don’t play any MMORPGs anymore because I’d rather have the time in hand and I spend too much of my day at the computer anyway. My own physical and emotional wellbeing requires exercise and time spent preparing and eating good food. And by constantly reevaluating and making choices, when something vital does come up, I can not only say yes, but I’m whole and healthy enough to be both reliable and efficient.

The thing is, the people who are important will understand. They get it… and if they don’t, do you really need those people in your life?  I don’t like people who flake on commitments, and I certainly don’t want to become one of them. If I make commitments I can’t keep—to others or to myself—everyone suffers. Better to say an honest no to begin with. They’ll find someone else, or maybe even realize that they’ve taken on too much.

Just say no once in while, to yourself as well as others. You’ll be glad you did.

Arrgh!

WIN BOOKS!

Yeah, I know ‘Talk Like a Pirate’ day is over: the cry of angst in the title is due to my having got busy and TOTALLY FORGOTTEN that I’m now posting twice–Wednesdays and Saturdays–rather than just once a week! And it being halfway through Saturday and all, I’m moved to a simple solution: a random prize draw. By simply commenting below, you’ll be entered to win. There’s no catch, no spam. The prize:

1. A signed print copy of my popular nonfiction book, ‘Aegean Dream,’ the tragi-comic account of our year on the actual ‘Mamma Mia!’ island of Skopelos

OR (you choose)

2. A print ARC (Advance Reader Copy) of my upcoming caper/thriller novel, ‘Sutherland’s Rules’ (ARCs are expected out before year’s end)

Simply leave a comment below to enter; winner will be asked to choose which prize they receive. Priority postage included. The draw closes Wednesday September 26 at 0800PST, and winners will be announced here.

And there will be a new post that same morning 

What Ails Us

The recent senseless events in Aurora, CO brought home to me yet again the central irony that underlies the security of our society: that two of civilization’s greatest strengths—compassion and free speech, two noble ideals—are also our greatest weaknesses. And it made me turn again to a favourite play written 2,500 years ago.

The fact that I’ve taken very little interest (beyond the general facts) in the Aurora killings doesn’t mean I have no opinion. I have no need (do you?) to see rescuers carrying blood-soaked victims from the scene, or scenes of anguished, weeping parents and friends of loved ones, or to know the shooter’s background and what others thought of him. I know we seek out the detail, the minutiae, largely because we need to understand how and why these terrible, senseless things happen, why previously harmless people suddenly blow and slaughter random, innocent strangers; yet for me, the how and why seem terribly obvious.

But let’s look at the irony first.

The Aurora, CO shooter, like almost all these sickos, got exactly what he wanted: fame. He got it because the rest of us believe in free speech and a free press. The same holds true for terrorists—where would they be if the media simply ignored them? Powerless, since their power is rooted in fear. Similarly, terrorists use our compassion against us by taking hostages. When we place high value* on every individual life—as we do in civilized societies—they have us over a barrel. So although logic dictates that one should never, ever accede to a terrorist or kidnapper’s demands, we invariably (and often despite public denials by the authorities that demands were met or ransoms paid) do. Again, publicity pays a part, but compassion is the underpinning here. Because we place a higher value on a single life than people in many parts of the world place on a hundred, an entire nation’s foreign policy can be affected or its leadership toppled by fanatics on the other side of the world taking a few dozen hostages.

But whatever logic may dictate, humans don’t typically act on it, much less so where strong emotion is involved. Although simply denying extravagant publicity to terrorists and flashy mass murderers would rob them of a good deal of their power, I don’t expect it to happen soon.

So where does this leave us? Returning to domestic (i.e., US) violence, I don’t for a moment believe more stringent gun laws are the solution. They didn’t help in Norway, and the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan came within an ace of  killing thousands without firearms**. We could argue about smaller capacity magazines causing less deaths, but that doesn’t address the core problem, which is one of a very deeply sick society. Just two generations ago dynamite and fully automatic weapons were freely available in the US, and nobody went around shooting up cinemas or blowing up high schools. What happened? What changed?

For an answer, we could do far worse than look back 2,500 years to the great Greek tragedist, Euripides. Euripides was over 70 when he left the frenzied, disillusioned, war-obsessed city of Athens for the freshness and mountains of Macedon, never to return, and it was there that he wrote his penultimate and, to my mind greatest, play, The Bacchae.

For those who aren’t acquainted with the work, The Bacchae is overtly about the conflict between Dionysus, God of fertility, ecstasy, and wine, and King Pentheus, the arrogant and masterful king of Thebes. But for a deeper look, let me offer a few brief extracts from translator Philip Vellacott’s excellent introduction to the Penguin Classics edition:

The play sets forth two opposite sides of man’s nature. First there is the rational and civilized side, on which a large community like a city depends for its stability. Since Pentheus is a king, he is in Thebes the official representative of this side, which is concerned with law, the conventions of sex and property, the organizing of war. Then there is the instinctive side, which by its simplicity by-passes all the errors of rational man, enjoys the life of the senses without the ability or desire to analyse it…

When the civilized grows arrogant and masterful, it is betrayed from within by the bestial…

The ‘worship’ which the Greek Gods required  (…) was simply a recognition that they existed, that they were an integral and immutable part of human nature, of human society, of the natural world…

The Bacchae is—among other things—a demonstration that the consequences of refusing ‘worship’ in this sense to Dionysus are disastrous, since such a refusal is a denial of undeniable fact; it is a ‘condemnation,’ if you will, of intolerance, violence, and cruelty, all of which are generated when humanity tries to deny either of the two sides of its nature.

Does any of this ring bells?

In my recent 4th July post, ‘On Freedom,’ I wrote about the increasing and often petty limitations on our own freedom, such as not being allowed to enjoy a beer on a beach. In our earnestness to make our society ever safer, we continually tighten the restrictions on individual behaviour at the same time as we turn up the heat and pressure on everyone. Oh, it’s all well-meaning: we are compassionate, we want nobody to be hurt or suffer. So we legislate for every eventuality, and then look for more loopholes, and close those off. Public drunkenness makes us uncomfortable, threatens us, so we have rules against it; but soon those rules don’t seem enough, so we make more rules… and more… And like King Pentheus, the more rules we make, the greater our fear of and sense of threat at even minor infractions, until eventually, all of us feel penned in and unable to move, with all the safety valves shut off. Something has to give, and some people will blow—with sometimes catastrophic consequences.

In a conflict between a God and a king, who would you place your money on?

*     *     *

*someone recently calculated, using a complex and arcane procedure, that the value of a human life in the US is currently around $8 million.

**police found the cult had explosives, Anthrax and Ebola cultures, and stockpiles of chemicals to produce enough Sarin gas to allegedly kill  four million people