Tales Of The Tinkertoy

While writing Tales Of The Tinkertoy, I paid short shrift to political correctness and presentism, defined by Webster as An attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences or, as pundit Bill Maher puts it, Judging everyone in the past by the standards of the present. I found it difficult to filter my experience through a set of informal guidelines that smother creativity and distort reality. Better to rely on the good judgment of readers to understand things were different back then.

Tales Of The Tinkertoy tells it like it was. It’s a story set in its own time—the 1960s. If nothing else, it serves as a historical reference, allowing readers to compare the present to the not-so-long-ago past and to appreciate the ways we’ve progressed and the ways we haven’t.

It's in this context that we meet Gus Mazur, a young man who’s making the same mistakes you and I made when we were twenty-something. It’s the sexual revolution, a time when the uptight standards of the 1950s were turned upside down. Gus deludes himself into believing sex with liberated women will ease his frustrations about the compromises he’s forced to make at work. 

Ambitious, Gus has the brains to rise to the top of network television. Yet, as the only non-white producer at WBN, he’s ambivalent about an industry that values money over narrative, politics over truth. He chafes at being obliged to run civil rights and Vietnam stories that hide the truth from the American people. But the money is good and there aren’t that many opportunities “for someone like him.”

He tries everything short of a sex change in a frantic search for love. One woman is determined to set him straight. She gets her chance after Gus is waylaid in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention helping him piece his life back together.

I might write something stupid like, Don’t read Tales of the Tinkertoy if you’re looking for spiritual guidance or tips on meditation—as if I didn’t want you to make the journey, and make no mistake, kundalini is a journey. And Tales of the Tinkertoy is a chronicle of that journy.

Whether you relate to nonfictional or fictional forms, check out the six books I wrote on activating and living with kundalini.

 Tales of the Tinkertoy is different; it's a case study in gradual awareness. When you finish Tales of the Tinkertoy, you can always dig into my six books full of useful information about kundalini.

Right now, however, here’s an opportunity to follow a young man as he moves from the profane to the sacred, experimenting. The answers are not always in plain sight; so he learns to read between the lines. He backslides. His awakening hangs by a thread: will he find the Way? Will he take the path untrodden or will he remain tied to a life of materialism? Will he follow the breadcrumbs as the path widens?

I’ve been asked if it’s a kundalini book. I always reply it’s a kundalini inspired book.

AI to the Rescue

 Three weeks ago, I happened to catch a discussion about the paucity of audiobooks compared to their readable brethren‚ eBooks and Print books. The participants were deploring the disparity, at the same time they lamented the cause—the high cost of hiring a narrator as well as the cost of editing and mastering the recorded audio files. That, they said, would condemn audiobooks to limited numbers, and therefore a limited readership, a situation disadvantaging folks with vision issues.

A week later, I was updating one of my titles on Google Play when I spotted an addition to their interface: they were offering to convert my eBook to an audiobook, using, you guessed it, a digital voice. In other words, AI.

I couldn’t think of a good reason to NOT test this free offer. Nevertheless, being familiar with the digital voices used by Google Maps and iMaps, I thought I would probably be disappointed. Could their process handle dialog and tricky intonation? I wasn’t optimistic. Boy, was I wrong… The sample voices I listened to were amazing and the choice of voices—male and female, American and British, old and young—was astounding.

The conversion took less than thirteen seconds. My son, who’s into AI says the amount of processing power used in all AI applications—the conversion of eBooks to audiobooks being only one to them— is also astounding. He says AI is not only a toolset with an incredible future, it is an investment bonanza right now

As soon as the file was converted, it opened a studio interface for editing/correcting pronunciation. In my opinion, this interface was not quite ready for prime time. The whole setup smacked of Beta.

Shortly after this experience, I discovered a joint venture between Apple and D2D offering eBook-to-audiobook conversion. At the moment, their process takes place behind closed doors. Their digital voice samples, however, were indistinguishable from human voices.

This from the D2D website:

“Once your request is submitted, it takes one to two months to process the book and conduct quality checks that include file quality, content compatibility (i.e. no complex formatting elements, limited non-English words and phrases), and editorial review. Pre-orders are not currently supported.”

Even more recently, I discovered Amazon now offers a conversion process similar to Google’s, only more stable. A Beta, their editing interface is impressive as are their voice samples.

This impending proliferation of audiobooks will benefit 80-something readers and writers with impaired vision. More than the general readership? Who knows? It may take a while for cost and quality to normalize.

An interesting sidebar to the whole thing—purely a subjective impression on my part—is that many existing audiobooks have been recorded with inferior human narration. They can now be re-recorded with a much-improved narration. Yes, I’m saying that many of the human voices offered on the large audiobook sites are not up to standard, mainly because there is no standard. Ironically, AI narration will set a standard.

If I’d Only Written It When…

If I’d only written Tales of the Tinkertoy when:

• I was 19 (1957),

• Publishers were relatively genre-free,

• Page count was not such a big deal,

• I could fail and reinvent myself as needed,

• Reader’s tastes were more in line with my own,

• I was not set in my ways.

I sometimes find myself thinking: “If I’d only written my book in 1957, I’m sure it would’ve been picked up by a publisher or an agent.” When I return to my more reasonable self, I wonder if others have had similar thoughts. For example, how many eighty-year-old writers believe that thanks to one or more of these rationalizations, they have been denied the official status of published author?

When I come to my senses, I realize that these thoughts get me nowhere. Success in life is largely tied to timing. It never happened, and that’s fine. Sometimes I drop it; sometimes I go further, trying to understand the roots of my thinking—the tricks of the mind that lead me into desires and rationalizations, manifestations of the ego

The deeper I go, the deeper my writing. Nevertheless, one thing is clear: Tastes have evolved. And that’s why I started this blog: to rally people with similar tastes and their writings.

Simone de Beauvoir once called Stendhal and Joseph Conrad feminist writers. Add to that list Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), Henry James (Portrait of a Lady), and Theodore Dreiser (Carrie). Tales of the Tinkertoy carries on the tradition of these great minds. Where are the books from the spiritual progeny of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and John Fowles?
 

Wake Up Running

Ever Thought About A Career That Allowed You To Work Overseas?

David Egee had to wake up running to live his dream of working and traveling throughout the world. ADHD as a child, Egee suffered through many years of reading and writing impairment. "I was ADHD before the expression became a household word.”

Egee overcame this learning handicap to become the Director of the American Hospital in Beirut at the age of 35, dealing with such Middle Eastern luminaries as Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi. Later, working out of Dubai, he established hospitals throughout the Middle East (Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iran), just before the region exploded.

In the 1980s, he worked for Hospital Corp. of America (HCA) in England, setting up hospitals and nursing homes. When HCA bowed out of Britain, he founded his own nursing home company, eventually setting up and staffing over 50 homes in the UK.

From there, he went on to create and own a number of nursing homes in England, finally selling out at age of 68 and retiring with enough money to take care of himself and his family and live comfortably for the rest of his life.

"Thanks for sending me David Egee's book with the wonderful title, Wake Up Running...  I loved his honesty and the way the book is written — it is so direct and easy to read and it is fascinating to follow his (and Dale's) journey as decisions made, luck, and events take them so far from their beginnings.”

~ Brigid Keenan is an author and journalist. She has worked as an editor on Nova Magazine, The Observer, and The Sunday Times.

JJ Semple on David Egee’s Life Story

"David Egee's life story, Wake up Running, features so many remarkable accomplishments (overcoming ADHD; Middle East career in Libya, Kuwait, Lebanon at a time of international crisis; London-based, UK nursing home principal; Director of the American Hospital in Beirut; childhood in Newtown CT, 40 years before the infamous bloodbath) it's almost impossible to single one episode out. Nevertheless, his touching account of his father's death with dignity is the highpoint of the book for me. You can feel the author's emotions as he narrates an event that turns out to be an insightful forerunner for today's burgeoning call for greater tolerance of the right to die when and as one chooses.

"A marvelous memoir of an extraordinary life — from small-town America to the Middle East, idyllic Provence, and 'cool Britannia'! Both poignant and searingly honest — yet full of humor.”

~ John Andrews was The Economist’s most experienced foreign correspondent.

“David Egee's book, Wake Up Running is a blueprint that shows you how to work, travel, and live overseas. Is it easy? Having lived and worked overseas myself for many years, I know it's not. Part of it is luck, of which, Egee has loads. Everything from becoming the Director of the American Hospital in Beirut at the age of 35 to taking the last plane out of Lebanon with Italian embassy personnel when the Civil War got too hot.

Editions Tilleul author, David Egee's book receives favorable review in The Newtown Bee:

"Newtown resident and Egee family friend Bart Smith feels the chapters about Newtown 'could be of interest to people' who live in town, Mr Smith said. In his opinion, the author succeeded in completing his memoir, 'for the experience. He didn’t do it for money.'

"The job was especially challenging because Mr Egee is dyslexic. He said, 'And, I don’t spell well. It was a challenge, which is why I did it … I survived.' He said, 'My personality and ambition helped me immensely, and my father’s willingness to do whatever it took to get me educated.'

"Chapters in his book make clear the efforts and struggles spanning Mr Egee’s education."

"It wasn’t always easy. Egee faced political as well as social and cultural obstacles. One of the last Westerners to leave Libya after Gaddafi’s militia began hassling foreigners on the street, he was warned not to attract attention so he drove his newly purchased car to the airport, left the keys on the seat, boarded the plane and departed. But in spite of his vanishing overnight, the Libyan government continued to send payments to his company for a hospital he was never able to build!"

The Author on Newtown, CT in the 1950s

"I was raised in Newtown, CT, a small, idyllic New England rural farming community 60 miles from New York City. In the 1950s, Newtown was evolving into a residential and light industry area for middle and upper-middle class people starting new families. There were just enough rich upper class New Yorkers creating “second homes” to give the town an air of exclusivity. It was a Saturday Evening Post magazine-cover community with all the Norman Rockwell characters you can imagine, a far cry from the infamous Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that took place there in 2012, 76 years after I was born.

"David was the dumbest student we ever had at the school.”

"By my 3rd year in school, I began to realize that I was not the smartest student in the class. John Verdery, the headmaster of the Wooster School described my deficiency in his book, Partial Recall: The Afterthoughts of a Schoolmaster, 'David was the dumbest student we ever had at the school.’ This refrain was echoed throughout my educational career. Fortunately, Verdery believed in me as a person and acted as one of my mentors.

David Egee stands to the left of the Wali of Nizwah, surrounded by his entourage, 1970

“Later on, I consoled myself in the belief that you don’t need to be too intelligent to be educated, and you don't have to be educated to be successful. You just have to work harder and ‘Wake up Running.' I believe I was genetically attuned to challenges. Education was a challenge – a difficult task, but I got through it.

Three events made Egee's success possible

1. A casual visit to the American University of Beirut. The construction of a new 400-bed hospital funded by the US government. This would become a center of medical excellence, serving the entire Middle East.
2. The demand and price for oil throughout the Middle East. Hence, an unthinkable wealth became available for creating infrastructure projects all over the Middle East and North Africa — defense, education, and healthcare being among the highest priorities. 
3. The election of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her privatization of many infrastructures, including parts of the National Health Service. This allowed me to build and manage private, long-term healthcare facilities throughout England.

"I wrote Wake up Running because it was a challenge and because it was there to write. Once, after I finished telling my daughter about negotiations with Yasser Arafat, my experiences in Libya, and the day that Muammar Gadhafi distributed his ‘Green Book’ to every single individual living in Libya and announced that Libya was now a Jamahiriya (1), she asked me, 'Pappy, why don’t you write these stories down?’ "

The Saga: A Forgtten Genre

“I walk into the store. I cruise around grasping my cart as I do the remnants of my life—with desperation. I nod self-consciously to a half dozen doppelgängers who nod back as I pass by. Old men like me with bearded faces and faded dreams, inwardly tearful that life turned out the way it has. They’re good at keeping their resentments under wraps. Better than I am.”

The preceding paragraph has the stuff of a saga. Regret and yearning. There’s a past but not much of a future. It could be the start of a flashback. Or perhaps a new generation issues forth, the progeny of the family's lost sheep, a secretive sea captain last seen ferrying supplies to Chinese guerillas at the outbreak of WWII. Five hundred pages of a Bildungsroman whose defining characteristics I’ve patched together from various sources on the Internet. It’s defined as the kind of novel that shows a young protagonist's journey from childhood to adulthood at the same time it traces the character’s spiritual, moral, psychological, and social development and growth. The bildungsroman traditionally ends on a positive note, though its action may be tempered by trials and misfortunes as well as resignation and nostalgia. If the grandiose dreams of the hero’s youth are over, so are many foolish mistakes and painful disappointments.

The genre has fallen out of favor. Why? It just has—for several reasons:

• Attention span, evolving reader habits
  
• Page count: 80 somethings are used to longer books (sagas),
  
• A fascination with the dystopian,
  
• The favorable acceptance of eBook and audiobook versions, and yet traditional publishers and self-publishers like Amazon favor only a small subset of genres,
  
• The hairsplitting dissection of genres into a never-ending profusion of sub-genres,
• Subject matter.

There’s no point in lamenting, no point in trying to persuade younger generations that they should be reading Tolstoi, Dreiser, or Henry James, let alone Henry Fielding, Alexandre Dumas, or Thomas Hardy. That they might thrill to the fits and foibles of characters like Becky Sharp or Tom Jones is, for them, a non-starter. Those authors and their books are too far removed from the random access thought processes of the young. Sagas are too much like Romance novels with gout. They have a dulling effect on the quick minds of younger generations.

Where are the books from the spiritual progeny of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and John Fowles? They're here, all around us. They're alive and they're writing. But publishers are overwhelmed and they're only looking at certain genres.

Much better not to wonder and instead put out the call to those 60-80-year-olds who still read and are looking for books they can feel comfortable with. That’s the role of this blog: finding readers and writers who like to discover and discuss.

There is a solution; Books For 80 Somethings has found it and we will announce it in a future post...

Stay tuned. 

Sex In Books

It’s clear to me there’s a difference between books that are only about sex and books that contain titillating passages that contribute to or add to the narrative.

And yet, when some of my books that contain such passages are reviewed, they are criticized for too much sex. Which begs the question: What is too much sex? I cannot answer that question if only to note that the criticisms always use the same language. Coincidence? Hardly…

It’s like the word goes out and overnight opinion shapers are saying the same thing in the same way—sort of like the thought police setting the standards for what’s allowed and what's not. Reminiscent, no doubt, of a political party whose members go to bed after a day spent articulating very different opinions on a topic, only to wake the next morning espousing a word-for-word single opinion on the matter.

Funny how the word gratuitous always makes its way into the deliberations on sex in books. Just a coincidence? Why that one word and not one of its dictionary equivalences such as “lacking good reason?”

Why not plenty of good reasons? Why should a writer be so frightened of the norms, as laid out by the opinion shapers (the regulators), that they make it a point to avoid having their writing labeled gratuitous by watering it down? If writing is meant to stir emotions, why should stirring the libido from time to time be frowned upon, especially while the reader watches the arc of the various characters evolve because if it? It would seem that sex and the attitudes towards it would shape a character’s being as much as any other factor.

Oh, I know. In school, they taught you that a writer’s ability to stir emotions without being explicit is a writer’s greatest achievement. How come a book about a brain operation or a battle that contains explicit details might bring me close to upchucking is allowed, but sex between consenting partners is not? I’m not into rape, but one of my characters might be, which is to say that there are moments when graphic descriptions are in bad taste.

Where and when did the gratuitous label originate? In schools and universities, of course, in master’s level creative writing programs. And the attitudes learned in classes influenced publishers and agents who attended these programs. It’s the natural result of the hair-splitting effect of contiuously dissecting a subject instead of allowing free rein to explore it. In short, by not having enough substantive material to offer students, teachers have had to manufacture norms that actually steer students in the opposite direction. Want another example?

The lowly comma spice. Defined as “a grammatical error that occurs when a comma is used to join two independent clauses,” the comma splice is a favorite target of reviewers, even though there are times when a conjunction or a semicolon doesn’t work as well as a comma splice. I’ve been in writers groups where members love nothing better than to call out one another over a comma slice.

If Salman Rushdie or Stephen King submitted a book with lots of comma splices and so-called gratuitous sex, you wouldn’t hear a peep. The demigods of literature are above the norms.

Think sex in books is overdone? What about movies? They have moving images, sound effects, music, as well as words. Writers only have words, which seem to frighten the “regulators” more than anything else.

It’s just one of the obstacles an unknown writer must overcome.