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This blog will twist and turn because I have too much mentation floating about with regard to trains.  Several commentators have observed that the Holocaust is synonymous with the scheduling of trains during the Nazi era. Cattle cars shuffling along track for hundreds of miles and depositing Jews into death camps was a daily fact. In fact, if I have my history correct, Hitler gave these cars rail priority over the shipment of armaments.

Recently, after some consideration, I’ve decided to change the cover of The i Tetralogy. I discussed this with my son who is a graphic designer and artist as well as my fiance, Jane, who wrote the introduction to my book of short stories. At the moment I thought a photo of railroad tracks which my son took some time back, with the help of photoshop and all that jazz, might serve as a new cover.  We would change the color of the cover, perhaps brown, and “skeletonize” the tracks so that they appear to be lethal, mysterious, if not deadly, an abstraction. Jordan will cogitate over all this and surely come up with an original cover; it is becoming a family tradition for him to do the covers of my book.

In the Tetralogy I spend not an inconsiderable time describing the train set that Gunther, the Nazi guard and tormentor, sets up in his home. The train set is a layout of a Nazi camp he once ruled sway in. The trains are HO scale and are Marklin. Marklin trains are a world-class train company based in Germany. They are the American Lionel, if you will. I remember ordering the Marklin catalog in which they described at least five historical periods in which Marklins were produced, the cars, the scenery, the tenders, and all the rest. I teased out what locomotives and what cattle cars –or freight, would be used to carry Jews and other victims to the camps. I found it “amusing” that the years 1939 to 1945 were either not discussed or described. Orwellian, to say the least. Having operated trains as a kid in addition to doing this research for accuracy, I then created a narrative about the trains Gunther used in his dank and despicable train set, a grotesque remembrance of things past. The description of the train set has several pages to it and becomes part and parcel of Gunther’s sons childhoods. No one knew in the family what the real intent of the layout was as he went about disguising it; in short he got off on it.

Looking back at it now, I realize on several levels I was digging as hard as I could, using imagination, whatever skills I had as a writer, to dwell in his heart of darkness. The Marklins allowed me in. As i said at the start, I will twist and turn as this goes along. When I was about to be bar mitzvahed, my mother cooked all the food for the event as we were not well to do and catering was out of the question. Parallel to this is that I had a Lionel train set, the three rail track which always looked unrealistic, the classic figure eight layout with a locomotive and tender and, I believe, it is 54 years ago! three pullman cars. It was the kind of set that you placed a pellet into the smokestack and it did emit an acrid, still sweet to my memory, smoke from the stack. I had some kind of tower with a plastic globe about it, when turned on and warmed up,  consquently turned casting its glow across the tracks. It was a shared train set as my two uncles, Bernie and Seymour, made it a tradition to purchase a new car or freight each holiday season, which in those days for Jews was Christmas. Jews only got their bonuses on Christmas. You had to experience this set with the lights off. If memory serves me right, certain accessories like station crossings, long gone from memory now, alas, had red bulbs that glowed in the dark, bells and whistles, no pun intended. It was thrilling.

Realizing that the cost of the bar mitzvah was shy necessary funds, my father took me aside and asked if would I mind if he sold the set to raise money for the ceremony. It was the 50s, a time of repressed feelings and little straight talk. I acquiesced without a word, so passive was I. As I wrote elsewhere I gave up something that I cared for so much for something else that I did not care for that much. In retrospect my father should have dug ditches to Newark from Brooklyn to raise the cash. Oh, the historic ache. My son Jordan has shared with me how upset he was when his mother disposed of his Hans Solo Millenium Falcon that he had admired as a young boy. Not quite the same thing. The train set of that time, of my time, had signifcant emotions attached to it. I most likely would have kept it until this day and passed it down to my son or daughter, for I am that kind of person. Not nostalgia, not sentimentality, but remembrance, for I was a child who noted the changing of the days by the objects in my environment, the seasons, the unique or not so unique toys, the Spaldeen, the Rawlings mitt and the Raleigh three-speed English racer — I got that for my bar mitzvah.

And now to recrudescence, that which is latent now becomes manifest. Since 2001 when I came upon the n scale American Orient Express  train set put out by the European Arnold/Rivarossi firm, I have been feeling the need to get back into trains once more. In the last month the infection has spread as I am surfing the net about n-scale trains, manufacturers, articles, what are the best trains, what are the best books to read. Decisions and decisions. The funny thing about getting into train sets is that you need to hold your breath and not rush in — very difficult to do. Given my Art Deco and Art Nouveau sensibility, I am taking my time and enjoying the evaluating of this train versus that one; I live on ebay as a break from writing. When I see it, I’ll buy it. In any case, what are we to make of all this — Holocaust and trains, trains of my childhood and now trains of my final childhood? What is the compelling, almost gravitational pull that these moving trinkets hold on me, down through the years. It is not by accident that I write about trains in the Tetralogy, for I describe these demented layouts with a passion. Is it displacement? No psychspeak, please.

It is just curious, oh is it curious, what time, latitudinal time, time that circumnavigates ourselves as we choo choo to our end and here would be the appropriate place to cite a poem, a Nazi poem! that appears in the book.

 Page 221 from Gunther’s Lament

When I hear in mind the choo choo, I call out Jew Jew . . .

Choo-Jew. Choo-Jew. Choo-Jew.

When I see in mind the cattle doors unlock, I hear again

in mind — Moo-Jew. Moo-Jew.

Moo-Jew. Moo-Jew.

As the train wheels clackety-clack away, the fraught engineer

takes a swig of his whiskey, for the trip is filled

with Jew offal and the keening of Jewesses.

I hear once more the sweet mechanics of repetition.

Trains ran on time, trains were time, the mechanical

marvels that rode on rail and gave us all time not on

a dial, but the latitudes and longitudes fo tracks

piercing time, clocking it off station by station.

Choo-choo Jew. Choo-choo Jew.

Time brings everything.

The fires in the Catalinas are better contained now, no new flareups that I can see. Smoke channels upwards here and there, but not the darkened clouds of a week or so ago. Containment, then break-out, then containment again. People began to be disappointed in the language chosen to convey the situation to Tucsonians. Fire is feral — and amoral. The first great blaze of my mind was in Disney’s Bambi. The forest was in flight itself as fire swept through the landscape. The sizzling, the crackling, the virulent hissing of this animated fire brought fear. We don’t know what fire is, like the burning bush in the Hebrew Bible that is aflame but not consumed. It is a mystery. Here I am as close to our ancestors in caves who somehow tamed this beast without understanding what it is; I still don’t get it. Man’s mastery over things, machines and objects in this world is an eely one, for we really do not understand what it is that we have mastered.

No slave owner understands his slave, no lord understands his serf. We run, control and operate machines technically, but we are as ignorant of them as early man was of fire. What shall we call this phenomenon, this process, this happenstance in which human beings run this world in a way far removed from what they actually know? Driving a complex machine as a car can be done with little if any knowledge of the physics and chemistry involved. As a metaphor it bespeaks the way we live our individual lives, for we are far removed from them as well.

In short, we don’t know, we don’t own, we don’t grasp, we don’t understand who we are, much less the objects in oour environment. What a concept to grasp, what a concept to internalize, and what are the consequences of it all? When I reach out to butter toast, so much is involved in this “simple” act that it befuddles the mind. Yes, I will butter toast. I know toast, butter, knife, how to spread butter and how much to spread to satisfy my eyes and taste. All this I know and can do. In reality, I am a technician, a hit man in a way. I practice and live in programmable ways. I am rote. I believe the real meaning of things and our relationship to them is as mysterious as our connections to the concept of a god, or our relationships to our psychological selves as well as our relationship to our bodies. Even if there were no mind-body split, even if we believe both are an undivided, integral wholeness, we still have no idea of what it is all about.

We live in a body that rules us, that masters us, that we really cannot alter — blood pressure, sight, panic attacks. We do not inhabit the reality of who we are because who we really are — bodily, emotionally and so on — runs by itself, without much conscious help by us. We lease our bodies for a life-time. All that we are and all that we do is randomized and run by no one. Turn a rock over. See a worm there. prod it with a twig. No meaning, no why, no reason –just life of a kind. The difference between a worm and man is that the worm has no self-pretensions. The fact that a worm has no awareness does not make it less. Man lives his life pretending that his awareness makes him significant. It is a grandiose self-lie. Awareness make us aware that we are an evolutionary wink in time, if that. No great shakes.

To be aware is to know on some levels that the difference between man and worm is miniscule. Man has pretensions, a worm does not. Perhaps evolution may eventually reverse itself and run backward, from awareness to unawareness like the worm. Perhaps a state of unawareness is preferable, for it is much like death, and we all return to that.

When I see my fellow human being, I feel an unawareness meets an unawareness. We are so blind!

I’ve decided to blog this query written on 19 August 1990. Of course, I will change the credits and tinker here and there; however, other than squeezing it tighter, I like it. Having just completed a major revision of the book, cutting about 12 pages and revising sentence by sentence, I will now let it “rest,”  as they say about steaks on Top Chef. And then with fountain pen, I am a retro kind of man, I ‘ll edit it once more. Jane will compose an introduction to it and I’ll self-publish the book — three books since 2005, not bad. And then I will go on to my science fiction fantasy which is juiced with Freud and Krishnamurti — see “Covenant” under Pages to read the opening chapter which was published in a major science fiction magazine.

SOJOURNER is a completed manuscript of historical fiction. Set in California during the emigration of “coolies” from China ro work on the transcontinental railroad in the 19th century, it reflects a part of America’s ethnic history which is not commonly known; however, such a sojourn for the main character, Ah Ling, becomes more than a litany of atmosphere, event or ethnicity.

Perplexing issues of meaning, risk, change, seeing, “being” as opposed to “becoming” are the essential motifs of this novel — how does one set about to consciously change? how does one see, free of societal conditioning? does choice bring conflict and, if so, is it best to be conflict-free or choice-free? et al.

Beginning in China and ending in the mountain ranges of California, SOJOURNER explores the inner development of a young peasant farmer confronted with issues of self and significant other. As he slowly awakens to the fact that he has been asleep in life, we share his rising expectations as he examines how to be in time, how to live in the here and now, to rejoice in living, free of all internal and external authorities. Consequently the novel attempts to develop how one goes about acquiring meaning.

Interpersonal and philosophical relationships are explored within the novel. No time is spent in disquisition upon life’s problems, but they evolve from the very actions Ah Ling sets into motion. Ah’s inner shifts and slides into newer levels of awareness are depicted as well. All this is within the context of a narrative which involves two cultures, an emigration and existence as a coolie working on a railroad. SOJOURNER is based on documented events and secondary sources. The manuscript is 194 pages.

As to my own expertise and background, I . . .

I’m at poolside now, late into dusk. In the distance an immense cloud is above the Catalinas. It’s as if a big fist gave a shiner to the sky. A covey of birds, new to me, strut linearly about the pool, mother and chicks. Offbeat bird sounds punctuate the lambent air, now warmly cool. It is quiet now, a stillness, except for outdoor compressors kicking in to cool the interiors — machine hum. A bird spits across the sky like a thrown lance. Swallows are above, or are they bats? In any case, this Jew is out of here.
Safely ensconced, I’ll continue. I can’t wait to meet up with my first scorpion. Woody Allen, I am not. But why is that Jewish stars never ward off vampire bats, and why did a Hungarian Jew, Bela Lugosi, become the bloodsucker par excellence. What I love about the movies are often unintended subtexts. The bi-sexuality of Garbo and Dietrich, Randolph Scott and Cary Grant, and Tallulah Bankhead are delights. Only in America can a gorilla climb the Empire State Building in search of cross-species sex and have his cock and balls airbrushed out. No wonder he was furious with those bi-planes. And I don’t want to get started on Pinocchio’s nose. Aladdin warming up his lamp, and a tranvestite wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. See Betteleheims’ The Uses of Enchantment to get the low-down.

Most of all, most of everything, reduced to barest essentials are openings, portals, holes or entries — from Alice in Wonderland to Italian arias, to Martin Luther’s thunderous constipation. Shit or sing, that’s what I say. We are primitives, animals –never forget that, and that is all right, just get it! It is reductive, I agree, but so endlessly interesting to contemplate, so on target. Leave it to American science to label the creation of the universe as the Big Bang. Oh, the market economy lives. We even hype creation, tacky, tacky.

Derek Alger, editor, Pifmagazine.com (see links) and Mayra Calvini, author, at Blogcritics.org/ have put up two interviews with me. Alger worked me on the phone and we chatted for about an hour as he endeavored to get a sense of who I was as a person and as a writer, much the same thing. In fact. Calvani reviewed Down to a Sunless Sea for blogcritics and then requested an interview which I did through email; her questions were sharp and I had to keep it under 2,000 words, answering the minimum of eight questions. Later on she attached two questions which she was particularly interested in having me answer.

A significant amount in both reviews are personal feelings about childhood and interests as well as my self that you, reader, may find of interest given all the blogs that have come before this. i find it flattering, of course, to blather about one’s self,  still having that residual left over from teaching which requires performance art, if not hambone.  Given that my relatives on my father’s side were in vaudeville (grade D acts — get the hook!), it all comes easy for me. However, with the armamentarium of teacher, writer and therapist, I am loaded for bear, and at this juncture in my life, I have garnered sufficient knowledge, perhaps some wisdom, to share. One of the perks of getting older.

If you are a writer reading these blogs, you can detect that I go about marketing like mercury rolling across tile, beading up here and there. The interviews can now be used when I do mailings or I need to reference an editor to writerly interactions I have had. And the secondary gain (shrinkspeak) has occurred: two reviewers now are willing to read my earlier work, to wit, The i Tetralogy. And now I am planning to come out with a second edition of the Tetralogy with another cover. I will add two or three pages of quotations in the front of the book; I will delete a preface which has rarely if ever been commented upon, and correct two minor typos. The beauty of a print on demand book is that you can do all this relatively quickly and without signifcant costs. My son will do the new cover which will not have swastikas on it. I agree it is jarring — but that is its intent. Now I’ll have Bambi on the cover, exuding unconditional love for all. Thank god for the stag in that film or Bambi would have been venison.

I have met with my publisher, Wheatmark.com, to discuss how to take my literary efforts which have been reviewed terrifically well and make them more public. I will get back to the writers in blogspace to share what I have learned.

I have been away from blogging because I am now deeply into rewriting, rather editing, Sojourner, my historical fiction about a Chinese who ventures to California during the Gold Rush. It is a philosophical quest that he is on.  I wrote it about the age of 40, while teaching in secondary school, raising our children and feeling as if I was spent as a human being. Schools are deadly for students and teachers. There is a death pall that imbues the environment with the sense that all here is a holding action. Is it not?  So, the novel reveals my discontent, a need to find purpose and intention in this world. I never did escape that Parisian sewer, but I did continue to write to express myself; I wrote for me, not you, the reader, a very telling difference. It has serendipitously helped me from selling out, kissing up, and all the rest. The previous blog declares that I am not for sale. All the while I taught, I wrote, and I went back to school to become a psychotherapist which again was a latent need to understand my self. I practiced as a therapist and felt redeemed. At last my gravestone would not say teacher.

I am getting to my point. Mayra Calvani, an author and reviewer, just reviewed Down to a Sunless Sea on 10 June, at http://blogcritics.org/. The last three paragraphs of her review are of particular interest. She offered me the opportunity to be interviewed and sent me an extended series of questions to answer; I had options and no more than 2,000 words. It too would go up on blogcritics. A day later she emailed me, saying that “I was wondering if you could add these two questions to the other bunch.”

Here they are: In your collection, you use various writing styles for the different stories. Was this a conscious decision? If yes, why did you decide to do it this way? Or is this because your style has changed with time (I read the stories were written over many years). The second question: Your collection offers readers a dark glimpse into the troubled mind of the characters. What’s in the mind of the author? (this is a kind of a fun question — you can be witty).

I’ll  comment on all this here since I am preparing to respond to her questions. I believe that I wrote in order to make sense of my life and situation. Have I accomplished that end? After four decades I can say that I have made some headway, but existentially it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, Ilsa. I write to “soothe” myself and the terror of existence itself. We face two questions: life and death, and they are fierce deities. I imagine to make sense is to give order, to be rational. After the Holocaust, that is a farce. The species is brain dead. And if I make sense, it is only for me. The surprise of all my writing is that I don’t take it too seriously — the grubby writers who want to be stroked, the writers who huckster their works, the unkind editors who are eunuchs and latently jealous of their writers and so on. I have removed myself from all that years ago. I kiss no ass. When I am asked about writing, I offer this suggestion: go into the woods with a bottle of Mazola oil and anoint yourself a writer and go forth from these woods and into the cities and spread the word. I am compelled at times to write but the folly is in feeling that it does good. It is really my patrimony, given to my children. I don’t care about you or readers, other than the fun it provides when reviewed or a nice comment about the book. I am greedy about life while I have it, not greedy about my books, except as an extension of who I am and that gets awfully murky.

How do I persevere? How do I go on? How do I handle what appears to be depression, despair or moroseness? Are you kidding me? You go on. I don’t feel the former. I just see. You may see differently, of course. I see the existential uselessness of it all as soon as I interact with the next human being. Matt, you are Timon of Athens, Moliere’s Misanthrope, whatever. Not at all. Your mental snares are not for this game fish. So I will get on to the questions in another way.

Many of the short stories were written to express states of my emotions and often the style of the story was not a conscious choice. I was learning, I’m self-taught, I was experimenting. I wrote about the illness of my daughter, of the death of a cousin at an early age, about Juan Peron after reading an article in the paper about the desecration of his tomb. Argentinians are into death. I just followed my fancy. I never went for a MFA (argh); I never took a course except one which I quickly left, the lecturer needed to be adored. I tried my hand at a novel, Sojourner, and rarely did I have a story published. I tried science fiction, and Gruffworld is the product of that and is the next book after Sojourner. I was rejected so many times that I developed the arrogance which said — your loss! Obviously I have been proven right. And that feeling lasts as long as a Kathy Griffin orgasm.

The stories, of course, are me, interests, concerns, some trauma as I experienced and turned them into stories so I could digest who I was in transit. I read that Kafka would meet with some cronies, read his short stories to them, and that they’d often laugh. I got the sense that he was having bizarre fun as only a genius could. I don’t think he took himself too seriously. Amazing how much shellac we apply to his works and others.

In my collection of short stories the deviant and damaged are me in my many selves, and are not my many selves. They are my perverse imagination, my projections and fantasies and the question posed must go largely unanswered. What’s in the mind of the author, as I look back, as I reflect, is also unknown to himself. Indeed, that is a major “theme” in my efforts. Without being unduly harsh — Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin.

Cinderkeys’ response to my blog about Nameless and his radio show is under comments. I am open to other commentary. I cannot go through this world looking under rocks or for hidden meanings. However, given that Nameless was in possession of a 60 word summary of my book, its cover, and the Q&A I supplied, I feel or sense his annoyance at a latent level, and I have heard that annoyance before and it erupts whenever Holocaust is mentioned. I will not split hairs over whether or not it is a cause. You can offer balm and ointments, you can bring to it sweet reason (it is non-existent) or existential “coolness,” but I see something else and it is not pure of heart.

All this needs an introduction. Nameless writes: “I am pleased to report that I have concluded arrangements to become the host of an Internet network radio interview program designed exclusively for authors, and I would like to invite any of who who would like to schedule a 15-minute interview to contact me . . .  I will respond with a note giving you complete instructions, and scheduling will be done once you have fully complied.”

Interested, I queried. An additional letter advised to follow six steps; some are 1) a list of 8 to 10 questions you would like to have us ask, and a concise answer to each one. This is the most critical request, and read it again for its full weight. At first I was confused. Why have me pose questions and then answer them for you? We go on. 2) a small .jpg image of yourself (head shot preferred); 3) a smalll .jpg image of your book cover. Here I forwarded a jpeg of the cover of The i Tetralogy, which has swastikas on its cover; 3) a short (60 words maximum) summary of your book. He knew full well the book was about the Holocaust. These were the crucial questions.

As you can imagine, I spent some time on the questions, in all seriousness and with care.

I received this email in response,  irrelevant portions deleted. “. . . I did review your questions, though, and I wonder if you could possibly re-work them more about positive things. The ones you framed for me are quite confrontive and challenging. The purpose of the program is to give other authors good information that that they can use as they build their books and marketing campaigns, while what you suggested feels to me more like an emphatic and almost argumentative justification for your writing. It is all right to have a ’cause,’ and we can discuss that, but I’d rather be talking for most of our 15 minutes together, about how you function as a writer — your habits, your triumphs, your problems (not with subject matter) but certainly with plot, story arc, organization of materials, research and such other items that trouble so many writers everywhere . . . .”

In an earlier letter I advised him that the book was about the Holocaust. Apparently, the Holocaust is a “cause.” Hmmm. Well, I’m not in Shoah business. If I had known he wanted snowball questions, I probably would have pitched a few to him. Clearly he has his agenda and it is rather shallow. I did not ask for an analyis; he had never held the book in hand which might have been his first task as an interviewer — too busy, I imagine. Here is my answer.

Dear Nameless, the questions come from the autobiographical essay at the end of the novel; it has been published separately as an individual essay, to my surprise. So, others think differently than you do, and have a different point of view than you have. I am not into “causes,” to say the very least; it is a very false assumption. The topic is a difficult one and I have no need to “sweeten” it. I don’t believe my task is to serve other writers. Perhaps iif you had sketched out, as you have here, what you wanted I could have responded differently. (I have been interviewed before) PIF (online) Derek Alger, editor, will publish a major interview this June. However, I don’t think this will work simply because we approach it so differently. “Confrontive and challenging” –I consider that a compliment. I will decline. I do, however, appreciate your efforts.”

His response: “Thanks anyway.”

What I should have said is — Fuck you, you hustling little shit . . .  Next time!