“My greatest and yet most horrible gift is the selfsame one vouched Cassandra: I read the writing on walls waaaaay before the fact. I see, smell, taste what is coming. And I respond, react, acknowledge, notice, witness. Sometimes, I even get out of the way of oncoming buses.” Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Unable to reach the keyboard, T-Rex went extinct.

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—5/14/12—Recently, I tried to get a group of writers to pay for their own columns to be published on a weekly basis, to the tune of $7. per column.

I did not even insist that they pay, or publish, weekly; only that they send our mutual webmaster (the only one on our staff who is paid) $7. for each piece posted . . . whenever, whatever.

Paying off medical bills to the tune of $10. each month, I can no longer afford to carry a roster of writers, most of whom are better-heeled than I. As it is, as publisher and creator of this online magazine, I have never taken a penny for my own work as editor, which eats up a wide chunk of time every week. (Not to worry: I don’t see myself as angelic/deserving of kudos for this “work”—it’s just what I do, what I’ve done, since I could write. Write, edit; write, edit. It’s who I am.)

I was willing to write for “nothing,” and edit “for nothing” to produce “something.” (At least, I hope it’s been something, this now-two-year-old, online –zine.)

I built it and, amazingly, they came. Sometimes, a thousand “unique visitors” per week showed up to read some or all of what was on offer at WeeklyHubris.com.

Mirabile dictu. (Not that any of you reads Latin any longer. And I don’t blame you. Really. I admit I’m a dinosaur.)

For the past two years, my husband and I who, together, do not bring in $50,000. per annum, have paid to publish the work of an entire group of columnists. But now, it was, I felt, high time these grown-ups grew up, and dug into their pockets to help.

In response to my pleas, however, I got the most astonishing—to me, at least—array of refusals . . . IF I heard back at all. And some of these writers I have known for nigh onto 30 years.

No: they would not “pay to be published.” They had their scruples. If I would not pay to publish them, thank you, they would go silent, mute, after two years of developing a readership.

Does the adjective “gobsmacked” resonate with any of y’all?

After beating up the ones I know spend $28. per month—at the very least—on good bottles of wine, and after accepting the fact that I would never again communicate with the one or two I’d really given a shellacking via email, I began to think hard about why it is that I, at 60, get how things-in-the-arts have changed, irrevocably, over the past three or four decades; and why most of these other writers, my age or older—hell, even much younger—do not get it.

Be paid to write? Be paid to write essays? Be paid to write essays online? Have someone else carry you so you might be a columnist on an online –zine with thousands of readers? Perhaps, even, thousands of thousands of readers, given five years or so?

Nope, they said. We have to draw the line somewhere.

True, one or two had a think about it all, and came back to me saying they’d changed their minds. I rejoiced.

I rejoiced because . . . I hand-picked these writers for their unique voices, their unique styles, their unique messages. And I knew, if they did not, that several, perhaps all, of them would never publish, be published again, in their lifetimes, if they did not publish here.

They’re too idiosyncratic, too rarae a group of aves (Latin, again: sorry), to find perches, let alone paying perches, in the 21^st century. Frankly, in certain cases, they’re too old and way too White. Literally and figuratively. Like me, in some ways. But very, very, very unlike me in others.

My greatest and yet most horrible gift is the selfsame one vouched Cassandra: I read the writing on walls waaaaay before the fact. I see, smell, taste what is coming.

And I respond, react, acknowledge, notice, witness. Sometimes, I even get out of the way of oncoming buses.

In the early 80s, I taught myself word-processing, and then dragged all my (then) university students to the small screen and keyboard. I knew, by the mid-80s, that publishing, that books and periodicals and newspapers, as we had known them since the early 1900s, were doomed. Dodos.

I saw the Kindle coming. I felt the Nook approach. I heard Twitter tweet. In c. 1985.

And I also knew no one, but no one, was going to publish me again if I did not begin jumping up and down, screaming, setting my own hair on fire, hustling . . . creating places-to-publish out of thin air.

I published my first book of poetry—which sold pretty well in my tiny demographic—at the age of ten. In the interim, over the past 50 years, I have founded, on average, one publication a year; published one book a year. One of the publications I conjured out of thin air was a prestigious journal; one, a tiny community newspaper (which turned a neat profit); one, the first online guide to Greece; and one, www.WeeklyHubris.com, whatever it is.

The books—some 15 of them—comprise travel guides, children’s books, collections of poetry, and, finally, this year, an erotic novel. Some of my books were self-published through a press I founded and incorporated; most were published by “real” publishers; none has made me more than peanuts in sales (though that may change with the latest book: hope and idiocy spring eternal) . . . but being paid to write was never, as I saw it, the point.

As I wrote, this week, to one contributor: “Veronica, we live to write; we do not write to live.”

We write because we bloody well have to write. We teach, or care for patients, or work in a dentist’s office, or survive on our pensions, or play the trumpet, or outsmart the stock market . . . in order to write.

And, more and more, we must pay some price to write; pay to publish; pay to have our voices disseminated.

More and more, in the arts, that is the shape of things.

I also write for The Huffington Post’s blog. For free. Arianna read my memoir about Greece, and “hired” me: in this century, being hired, working, often involves no remuneration.

But hey, if readers, lots of readers read me, then that attention can only help my books, my various literary sites, my progress—till the grave silences me—as a writer.

How did one of my former contributors, one who won a fat little $$$ prize from WeeklyHubris, phrase her refusal to continue writing for free? Thus: “Like many ‘creative writers’ in our culture, I lament that what we do is regarded by the public, generally, as something we toss off in a couple of hours on a weekend, just for our own entertainment—and therefore no payment is needed. I have done most of my writing under that philosophy, and every year I pay out far more than I take in, to support my writing. It’s not that I can’t literally afford $7. a month, for your worthy effort, but in principle I just can’t do it. Not your fault.”

See, to me, to Cassandra here, that just seems so antediluvian (look it up).

This woman, whose voice is utterly unique—so very unique that, perhaps, only a handful of our readers could even perceive what she was up to, but whom I cherish like a three-winged-butterfly, will not, on principle, give my webmaster, Tim, $7. to put up a column a thousand unique readers will read. Readers she will, otherwise, never reach . . . because there are very few crazy people such as Yours Truly out here who “get” her.

On principle.

So . . . if you’re wondering why WeeklyHubris, which once comprised some 20 contributors now publishes fewer writers than the fingers on one hand, it is because most of us, most of them, have not faced the reality that arrived in the mid-80s and is now here to stay.

They’re still playing by the old rules when, in fact, it’s not simply the rules that have changed, but the entire game.

Going forward, the big TV networks will be gone, along with the analog newspaper, the literate and well-trained editor, the careful fact-checker, and most “real” books.

The world, as we writers knew it, is being pulped.

And here, for the curious, is what Cassandra predicts:

1) Readers of fiction, non-fiction and even hard news will get through a headline, a sub-title, and a lede; then, move on, UNLESS the writing is stellar (or the accompanying photo features boobs).

2) ALL of us will own a Nook or a Kindle, or whatever the next wave of i-thingies is named, within three years’ time.

3) Bookstores will continue to close. Even online bookstores.

4) As we have seen with The Hunger Games, “young adult fiction” will be, more and more, consumed by adults-who-really-cannot-read so-called “adult fiction.”

5) Only writers and authors and poets willing to work perhaps two day-jobs to support their filthy habit (writing) will rise to the fore. Self-published iBooks will become the fast track to publication and readership. Wait for agents to answer? Wait for a gaggle of 20-year-olds to reject your mss? Nope. Writers will write and hand their work over to their readers, sans middlemen.

6) If a writer is really good (and Boy, we had a few here at WeeklyHubris), AND has a great, free editor, AND a place to publish, he or she should get down on his or her knees to The Great God Pencil.

7) No one, ever again, will be permitted to rest upon writerly laurels. Writers will have to hustle all their lives (as musicians and actors and dancers always have). If they write/get out to readers one masterpiece, well, yes, they may dine out on that creation till death. But, for the most part, from the moment they sit down at the keyboard, till they draw their final breaths, writers will be acting like the ingénues of yore: hustling and clawing and climbing and hollering (and/or sleeping with the publisher).

8) Most writing, worldwide, is going to be more ephemeral than ever before in history. The exceptions to this rule will make all of us in the business catch our breath; weep; scream with envy and/or delight. But most, most, most everything will be here today and gone, forgotten, 10 minutes from now (like everything you posted or shared today on FaceBook).

9) Poets will always have their followings, and poetry may even flourish in this arid coming era. Whodathunkit?!

10) And last (because a list of 10 is all readers, self included, can handle): everyone is now a writer; considers herself or himself a writer. THAT happened in the late 80s, as well. And THAT single simple development turned the entire playing field upside down.

The writers among you, and former contributors to this –zine: please read just that list-of-ten again, and absorb it. If it doesn’t resonate, take a quick look in the mirror: you’re a T-Rex. Your arms don’t even reach the keyboard.

But, enough now.

Gentle Reader(s), it’s now on to the words of other writers. I know you’re insatiably hungry for “input,” though only capable of taking in mouthfuls at a time. So, hie thee hence.

But thank you, thank you, thank you for dropping by. In 2012, if you’ve made it to this final paragraph of mine, a true miracle has occurred. Look up in the East for a star!

Author Photo: Dionisis Tsipiras; Banner Photo: Doris Athanassakis

The Highest Cauldron

by Anita Sullivan

“To say how many green-greys there are is impossible.” From the Letters of Vincent van Gogh 

The enveloping medium of fabric: swathes the author navigated and resisted.

EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—5/14/121–I’m listening to Grigory Sokolov play Bach’s “Art of the Fugue,” which is like being present at the Dawn of the World and, for some reason, I think about how I always wanted to learn to knit, and never did.

These two things must be related; otherwise why would such a thought come into my mind?

The music is made of glass, it catches in my throat today because of all the things it is not: it is not plastic, it is not greedy, it does not want me to give it any money—the word is gratuitous. And I am so relieved that I sag back into the pillows on the sofa and cry. The grooves in my soul from this piece that I’ve listened to about 25 times in the past year, demand to be let out of their cages (I know, grooves can’t be in cages). Anyway, various metallic bars around the area of my stomach and lungs begin to loosen up. With some people, that takes alcohol. For me, it just takes a little Bach in the early evening, well played.

For one thing, it’s so wonderful to listen to something unabashedly complex again, after being clubbed on the head with the daily twigs and sodden noodles of mildly ugly, innocently simple stupidity. Here is the work of a fellow human being who drank and ate and breathed by deliberate choice from the coffers of the most ethereal and finely magnificent that the universe could possibly permit, and who then turned around and doled it out gratuitously—to us. To all of us.

Is this why I wanted my mother to teach me to knit when I was a teenager, so I would have something to do with my hands while I was trying to keep from going crazy with wild joy at listening to music?

My mother sewed very well. And unlike many women of her era, she had a Room of Her Own, small though it was. In the house where I spent my teenage years, her sewing room was a slightly swollen passageway between the dining room and living room, through which family members had to pass numerous times each day, holding our bodies stiffly vertical so as not to step on any pins or just plain disappear into a billow of material.

My mother relished fabrics. I often went with her on buying expeditions, and we would spend long afternoons strolling between bolts of cloth, each sending its seepings into the murky aisles like a kind of swamp miasma. I remember how colors could lurk and dodge, as they caught the corner of my eye everywhere I turned, even when I squinted and walked straight behind my mother, looking neither to the right or left (pretending to be bored), the colors would come out and make searing little imprints on my soul. “We’ll catch you later!” they seemed to be chortling and, sure enough, they have.

But I never learned to sew, much less to knit. My brain was just not cut out for this kind of work, and I guess my mother intuitively recognized this and therefore never tried to teach me, thus saving both of us frustration and disappointment. She sewed costumes for the local dancing teacher’s recitals. I remember numerous afternoons when I came home from school, her sewing space was full of giggling pre-teenage girls with various things sticking out from their small persons—like orange feathers, velvet cuffs, sinister black fedoras, dragons’ tails. She had a genius for tacking things together that didn’t require much fine stitching, and could be dismantled later without much trouble and packed away in a straw box for a different incarnation in some future performance.

Her sewing room was a blither of primary colors on those afternoons, I remember. But under her table and on the shelves and in bins along the walls was a secret bazaar of subtler hues. I swear you could feel the power of those cloths of many colors, gnashing at their bonds like souls in Dante’s inferno, wanting to pour forth and glare the world into cowering submission. I am grateful to my mother for making me aware at an early age of their powerful potential.

There was no room here for a civilized exercise like knitting. Oddly, my mother promised to teach me, but I’m not sure she actually knew how. She was given to larger gestures, to enterprises of verve and drama. She signed me up for piano lessons instead.

Photo by: Tim Sullivan.

“Writing is a form of self-display. Self-display of any sort appears to raise the level of dopamine in the brain, much as does the ingestion of food, the acquisition of money or a sexual act.” Sanford Rose

Dolors & Sense

by Sanford Rose

What really turns us on.

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—5/14/12—It’s the fault of the mesolimbic system.

That’s the part of the brain that controls the transport of dopamine—the feel-good neurotransmitter.

Writing is a form of self-display.

Self-display of any sort appears to raise the level of dopamine in the brain, much as does the ingestion of food, the acquisition of money or a sexual act.

So writing is bit like having sex. And, arguably, the completion of what one considers a good piece of writing is tantamount to orgasm, which will be the more profound the greater is the number who are perceived to have witnessed (shared, or experienced, etc.) it.

Reading, on the other hand, is not an unalloyingly pleasurable activity. It involves a cost in time and effort of concentration. Often, the time is retrospectively judged to be ill-spent.

If the writer feels a rush akin to orgasm on completing what is judged to be a good piece, the reader of same often can be pardoned for entertaining the sensation of having been raped.

A succession of such experiences undoubtedly creates a wariness in prospective readers by activating their serotonin systems.

Unlike dopamine, serotonin focuses less on rewards and more on costs and consequences.

Gamblers thrive on dopamine; serotonin is the province of neurotics.

Dopamine argues: “All in.” Serotonin counsels: “Stay out.”

The serotonin systems of the overwhelming majority of prospective readers have been conditioned to regard the self-display of most writers as profitless posturings.

Conscious of the disabilities under which they labor, writers attempt to entrap readers with ever more suggestive “leads” or “ledes.” To little avail, in most cases.

Inevitably, therefore, the supply of writing will continue to exceed its demand at current prices, which are already approaching zero.

Indeed, a recent study suggests that the dopamine rush from self-expression exceeds that from money accumulation: in brain games, people are willing to surrender a large portion of their winnings from answering objective questions in order to be allowed to continue talking about themselves.

Writers are a little like Woody Allen who, when asked how much he earned as a bouncer in a house of ill repute, gave a preposterously low figure. That little, queried Peter O’Toole. It’s all I can afford, rejoined Woody.

The Occidental Ape

by Cusper Lynn

“Being a consultant is, I admit, difficult to explain to people since there are two things a good consultant generally has to be: over-educated and underpaid. At some point, when enough alphabetti spaghetti accumulates after your name in terms of degrees and certifications, you just are no longer employable.” Cusper Lynn

SARASOTA Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—5/7/12—For years, I’ve been asked by people, “What do you really do for a living?”

It’s one of those questions that aggravates me, because people always ask it right after I’ve volunteered that I am an author and a consultant.

The thing is, no one believes that being a consultant actually includes a payday, or even understands what one does; and if they haven’t read your book, subscribed to your newsletter, or heard about you in The New York Times, they don’t believe anyone makes any money as an author.

You might think I have witty retorts ready for these folks, but I don’t. They’d be wasted on that audience. Instead, I use the “Hey, what is that bright shinny thing bouncing over in that far corner?” approach to draw them off. It always works.

Being a consultant is, I admit, difficult to explain to people since there are two things a good consultant generally has to be: over-educated and underpaid. At some point, when enough alphabetti spaghetti accumulates after your name in terms of degrees and certifications, you just are no longer employable.

So now you are faced with the challenge of getting people to pay you big fees to solve large problems. To do this successfully you have to understand some fundamental things about human nature; in particular you have to understand “Expectations” and “Happiness.”

Chez Charlie . . . in the permafrost.

If you have a client whose company is going broke and you help them get a million-dollar contract that saves their bacon, they are “Happy.” When the following year rolls round and you help them get four million dollars in contracts, they are “Disappointed.” Why? Because, there has been a change in their “Expectations.”

Some might call this ingratitude but, in my experience, it is simply evidence of human nature.

“Happiness” is conditional. Everyone sets limits on her or his happiness: I will be happy when I lose 30 pounds; I will be happy when I meet and marry my soul mate; I will be happy when I have a million dollars; I will be happy when I travel the world. The list goes on and on. The thing is, every time we get one of our “Happiness” mile markers, we are happy for a while and that item drops off the list to be replaced with a new prerequisite. With that comes dissatisfaction because we have changed our expectations.

As a consultant, I deal with this issue every day. So I have developed a visualization exercise that helps my clients deal . . . .

CUSPER LYNN’S VISUALIZATION EXERCISE

Over the course of the past week, my phone has been bombinating because one of my services to my consulting clients comprises “legislative analysis.” This means that I read and follow the activities of the government in order to advise clients about pending laws and regulations that could impact their business. This year, our legislature has been very active, and my services in high demand.

Most of my clients call in for basic information and my best predictions for the coming 12 months. For a few, the truly profitable clients, extended hand-holding and a lot of explanation is required; I, of course, charge for all of this. “Charlie” is one of my more profitable clients. He calls me two to three times a day; he is a doctor whom I’ve known since back when I was in private practice.

“Cusper, are they really going to do this?” asks Charlie before I even manage to say hello.

“Charlie, there are still a number of things that have to occur before they pass the law,” I reassure him (as I clip a Flor de Gonzalez, 90 Mile Churchill Cigar). This is going to be a long call.

“Like what?” Charlie wails. (He really is a very good doctor. I care about the guy.)

“Well, the bill has just been passed in the House. The Senate has to take it up—,”I begin only to be cut off.

“But the Senate has their own bill! Why would they take it up?” Charlie protests, sounding a good deal younger and less mature than his 57 years.

“Well now, Charlie, like I told you earlier, the Senate can move forward on their bill, take up the House bill, or have a meeting with leaders of the House to try and reconcile the two bills. Things can go a lot of ways here,” I drawl, letting the smoke drift out with my commentary.

“Why would they do this? It’s a terrible bill! They have to know that people are going to hate it!” He whines.

I draw on my 90 Mile and look out across the yard. It really is a very nice day. I let some silence accumulate and let out a puff of smoke.

“Charlie, we’ve talked about this. How did I explain it?” I ask, not interested in having to repeat a lesson offered only two days earlier.

“You said, ‘Mr. Big Insurance Company’ came to town with a lot of money and bought a Governor, the House of Representatives and a lot of Senators.” Charlie regurgitates verbatim my précis on lobbyists.

“That’s right, Charlie. That is exactly what I said. And I said something else. What was the moral of that story?”

“You said that ‘Mr. Big Insurance Company’ got value for his money because he spent a few million to earn several billion.” Charlie sounds like a contrite school boy.

“That’s right, that is absolutely right,” I congratulate him. (I swear, some day I may have to use sock puppets to explain this stuff to clients.)

“Do you think it will pass?” he resumes, wheedling.

“Charlie, it’s about 60 percent done at this point. A lot can happen between now and the end of the session. But they made a lot of progress with the bill this time,” I say, hedging painful truth with nearly impossible hope.

“But Cusper, I’ve got tuition coming up for Henry, and Davey starts university next year! I am going to have two kids in college and no income! What am I going to do?!?”

“We’ve talked about this Charlie: it is time to re-invent yourself. Time to start over,” I tell the fifty-seven year old medical director of a mid-sized medical clinic chain.

“Do you know what that means? Seriously, Cusper, do you have any idea how bad this is?!?” he yelps.

“Bad is relative,” I answer, tapping off some ash.

“Relative?!?” he protests.

“Charlie, where are you, right at his moment?” I cut across his rising indignation.

“In my office. Why?” he asks.

“You by yourself?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“Take off your shoes, Charlie,” I say.

“What?”

“You heard me. Take off your shoes.” (I’m slowly sounding out each word.)

“Why?” he asks, fumbling with the phone.

“You’re taking your shoes off?” I repeat.

“Yes, but I don’t see . . .”

“Good. Got socks on?”

“What?”

“Do you have socks on?” I ask, drawing on my cigar.

“Yes . . .”

“Take ‘em off!” I order.

“But . . .” I can hear the phone being jostled from side to side.

“All right, now, you have no socks and no shoes on, right?”

“Yes.” He pauses. “You aren’t going to tell me to take off my pants, are you, Cusper?”

I smile. “No Charlie, I’m not going to ask you to take off your pants.”

But I know that if I told him to he would.

“Now Charlie, we are going to do a little exercise. It’s a guided visualization to help you get control of the situation. You are listening, right?”

“Yes,” he murmurs.

“OK: you are not going to see anyone or talk to anyone or look at your damn computer for the next few minutes. You are going to close your eyes and take a deep breath,” I say, drawing again on my cigar.

“Fine.” I can hear some resistance in his voice, but I know his eyelids are drifting shut.

“Now, wiggle your toes Charlie. What do you feel?”

“I feel the carpet,” he says.

“No, Charlie, you don’t. We don’t feel carpet, we don’t feel walls. Those are abstractions. What do you feel?” I ask.

“It’s cool.” He hesitates. “And soft.”

“That’s better, Charlie: cool and soft. Good, now you’re actually feeling.”

“OK,” he concurs.

“Now, Charlie, I want you to keep breathing,” I say, hearing his breath slowing. “Nice and easy. Deep and slow. And now, I want you to picture a farm. Keep your eyes closed and picture the farm. Can you see it?”

“Yes, yes I can see it,” he says peacefully.

“Charlie, what type of farm do you see?”

“It’s beautiful. There is a white picket fence, a duck pond, a red barn . . .” he burbles.

“That’s nice, Charlie, but that isn’t the farm we need to see just now. That is the retirement farm. That is the place for the grandkid to visit. I want you to picture a different farm.”

“OK,” he says, nervously.

“Your feet are going to be really cold on this farm, Charlie. Can you feel ‘em getting cold?” I ask, sending wafts of smoke ceilingward.

“Um . . . Yes, actually, I can,” he involuntarily grunts from the cold.

“Charlie, this farm isn’t green. It is white and gray. Because it is winter,” I say smoothly.

“Reeeallly?” He shudders.

“Oh yes, Charlie, as cold as can be, and your wife Helen is there with you and so are the boys,” I add.

“Why?” Charlie asks, tentatively.

“Well, Charlie, this is where you live now. You are standing in Siberia, the cold you are feeling is the permafrost, and that’s snow under your feet. You see, Charlie, it’s the dead of winter. In Siberia.”

“Why?” He shudders.

“Well, Charlie, this is your farm and, I have to tell you, you are doing pretty well, really. Your wife Helen, however, is coughing up blood each night, and the boys are both thin because they haven’t eaten,” I explain.

“Why haven’t they eaten?” he asks in alarm. “Why is Helen coughing blood?!?”

“Now, Charlie, you’re a doctor: think about it. You’re all in that one-bedroom shack; every night she is up coughing. You are thinking . . . what?” I ask.

“Tuberculosis?” he whispers.

“That’s right, Charlie, Helen’s got TB. But you’re hopeful . . .”

“. . . but why are the boys hungry?” he interrupts me.

“Now, Charlie,” I chide as he is getting ahead of the visualization process. “You had a poor harvest last season . . .”

“And why am I standing barefoot in the snow?” he interrupts again.

“Well, that’s one good question . . . and the other good question is why are you holding a rifle?” I reply.

“I’m holding a rifle,” he says in surprise.

“Yes, Charlie, you are holding a rifle, standing barefoot in the snow, with blood seeping from your cracked and calloused feet and you are defending your wife and your boys because starving peasants from the nearby village have been raiding farms. All you have in your house is 40 pounds of rotting, shriveled potatoes and some putrid bacon and you’re going to shoot these peasants who are wearing even less then you are . . . and who are hungrier,” I explain.

“But . . . I don’t want to shoot anyone,” he stammers.

“No, Charlie, you don’t. But, you see, they are going to tear you and your family apart for those rotting potatoes and that putrid bacon if you don’t.”

“But . . .”

“No, Charlie, this is it: you and your family, barely clothed, freezing to death outside your Siberian shack on a bit of frozen ground that you can barely scratch a living from, and you are going to have to shoot these half-dead peasant . . . or die,” I conclude.

“That’s terrible!” Charlie wails.

“Yes, yes it is. Now take a deep breath,” I instruct him.

Charlie sighs.

“And another. Now, I want you to open your eyes . . . slowly,” I say softly.

“OK.”

“Tell me. What do you see?”

“My desk . . . my office . . . my shoes and socks on the floor,” he says in a hushed voice.

“Good, Charlie. Now, is there a picture on your desk?”

“Yes: Helen and the boys.”

“How do they look?”

“Healthy. Happy.”

“Good, Charlie. That’s right. Your wife and kids are healthy and happy,” I say softly.

My cigar is slowly turning to ash.

“So, Charlie, if the law passes, what is the worst that will happen?”

“I will lose my job, have to start over. I might lose my home,” he responds, picking up speed.

“Charlie, are you going to end up barefoot and holding a rifle in Siberia, defending your family and a sack of rotting potatoes?” I ask.

“And putrid bacon,” he adds.

“Yes, and the putrid bacon,” I agree. “Is that where you’re going to end up if the worst case scenario happens?”

“No.”

“So, do you see that bad is relative? Between where you are now and living in Siberia holding a rifle and starving to death there is a lot of room for things to be unpleasant, but not really bad.”

“Yes, not really bad,” he agrees. “Thanks Cusper.”

“All part of the service. I’ll update you as soon as I hear anything,” I say happily.

“I think I’m going to go for a walk in the park. I’m feeling pretty good. Maybe I’ll take Helen out for dinner,” he says, his mood improving by the second.

“There you go. That is what I like to hear!”

“Bye, Cusper. Talk to you tomorrow,” Charlie says and rings off.

So yes, happiness is conditional and relative.

I do love being a consultant.

Post Script A brief disclaimer vis-a-vis this, and any, visualization exercise: if you are driving a vehicle, on psychiatric meds, or under the care of a physician for mental health issues, please do not do this exercise as you will drive off the road, become a threat to your community, lower pharmaceutical company profits, deny a good physician a well-earned fee and vex your local EMTs.

Breach of Close

by Stefanos Christoforos

“. . . we have so little talent for conservation when we are young. We have not yet experienced the irrevocability of loss or realized the sad transience that inheres within our relationships and possessions. The sense of invulnerability that is part of our youth makes us less provident than we should be.” Stefanos Cristoforos

ATHENS Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—5/7/12—The poets she chose to read that evening had all met violent deaths. One was killed in a duel, another committed suicide, and the third died, emaciated, cold and exhausted, in a transit camp on his way to imprisonment in Siberia. There was another writer, the old woman’s husband, who had translated the works of these poets from the Russian into his native Greek, and he also died an appalling death; that the aggressor was not a rival or a murderous state but nature itself (or, rather, nature gone awry) made it no less horrific. The Greek translations of the poems were read by a young man, himself a poet. He sat next to the woman on the stage of the small dark theater where the reading was held.

Mandelstam, Cukovsky, Livshiz and Annenkov, 1914.

She had selected five or so poems from each poet, early and mature works alike, not necessarily the most well-known poems but suggestive of particular milestones in the poets’ creative and personal journeys. There were love poems and poems of resistance, but also poems that spoke of exile and disillusionment and the premonition of death:

And so I wait through the night for my guests to arrive
Rattling these door chains, these convict shackles

Seated at a table that had been laid with black felt cloth, she would briefly describe these way-stations before beginning to read a poem. At times, she would interweave these annotations with reminiscences of her husband and the life they had shared in the Soviet Union, where he had fled as a political refugee in the wake of the Greek Civil War, and where he had lived for decades in an exile no less painful than the ones to which the poets he translated had been subjected.

These recollections seemed to come without plan or intent. Yet they felt entirely natural. It was as though, while reading, she had been transported back to the small parlor of a modest Moscow apartment, where she would sit at the end of the day and listen to her husband read the draft of a translation he had worked on, commenting here and there on a particularly felicitous or unsuccessful rendition of an allusion or metaphor.

And then she would read us a poem. She read as though she were reading a letter a solider on the front had written to his young wife at home, or an entry from a lover’s diary: strange and familiar at the same time.

I had expected the Russian to sound different. Weightier, deeper, more resonant, heaving and slow and mighty, like a great river. But she spoke like a stream flowing past a bank of reeds, a soft, quick murmur of conversation. Perhaps it was physical. She was a large woman of advanced but indeterminable age. (Some woman grow frail as they age, others gain in stateliness, and she was one of the latter.) Or perhaps it was just the burden of memory. Sometimes her voice would tremble as she told a story or read a line that moved her but, mostly, she read as though she were in the kitchen talking to a sister or confidante-neighbor in the very early morning, and did not wish to wake her husband.

The Russian was a soundscape of texture and rhythm, imperfectly apprehended. Just as we need to have listened carefully to Bach many times before we truly hear the gigues and sarabandes in his suites, it is only when we have become competent in a language that we can truly hear its music. I know very little Russian. I could hear traces of seduction, rebellion and lamentation, and other voices, too, but they lay too deep within this unfamiliar but inviting carpet of sound for me fully to grasp.

The heavy-set, dark-haired young poet with the neatly trimmed beard and somber black clothes who sat at her side had the earnest, inquisitive look of a young monk or philosopher excited by ideas but untested in life. After each poem was read in Russian, he would read the Greek translation. He had a hard, thick voice, all declamation. It was as though he couldn’t trust the poems to speak for themselves. The antiphon of Russian and Greek was jarring, not for the contrast in language but in tone: hers lute-like and intimate; his public and demonstrative, the stuff of marching bands. They seemed to be reading different poems.

There was still another poet present that evening.

He, too, died a horrible death, ravaged by a series of opportunistic infections (in the early days of anti-retroviral treatment, a time marked by much experimentation and little in the way of success). Cytomegalovirus caused him such intolerance of light that he didn’t want to leave his darkened apartment. An episode of delirium sent him on a spending spree that depleted his savings in a month’s time. He suffered necrotizing ulcerative periodontitis, which cost him most of his teeth and which, in the end, brought such pain he could not eat. He told me he was no longer at home in his body. It had become an enemy internment camp, a place of senseless torture.

He was not present in the way the dead poets were, or the old woman’s husband, who had translated them, was. There was no voice to give shape to the words he had once written. But he appeared nonetheless. He came unsummoned, as an angel might, and stood alongside the other poets; he, too, “taking delight in the greatness of the plains/and in the cold, the snow, and the darkness.” He kept reappearing as the old woman read in Russian and the young poet translated in Greek.

I could not remember his poems. I must have lost them in one of the earliest of my many moves. He had copied them out by hand for me, the ones he had written to me or because of me, back then when we were together and ravenously in love. I think the poems may have wound up in a cardboard box which I left at my parents’ house but returned too late to reclaim. It was stupid on my part. But we have so little talent for conservation when we are young. We have not yet experienced the irrevocability of loss or realized the sad transience that inheres within our relationships and possessions. The sense of invulnerability that is part of our youth makes us less provident than we should be.

I kept his letters, though. The ones he wrote to me after I first moved here, years after we had stopped seeing each other (though we never stopped loving each other). Written in a sinewy, austere hand on the yellow sheets of a legal pad, his words, too, traced the arc of a journey of cruel promise.

“Are you doing what you want to be doing?” he wrote. It was the kind of question he often asked himself. “I feel like I’m almost there . . . What I need is a huge nod in my direction—in the form, say, of an advance on a book deal—to let me know that the things that frustrate me (the job, the lack of $) are truly temporal . . . How I look forward to the happiness I think that’ll bring. Work, work, work! In the meantime there’s hope, hope, hope!”

The book deal eventually came through, for a biography of a well-known actor. Some of the reviews must have hurt—“The reader will feel the author’s failure as a biographer,” wrote one critic—but he was happy. He was doing what he wanted to be doing, earning a living as a writer. There was another book offer, again a biography of an actor.

I can see him now, writing in his tiny New York apartment—there was no proper bathroom, just a toilet, and the shower was in the kitchen—truly happy:

The excellent poorness, splendid destitution,
I live alone in it, somewhere—quiet, consoled—
the days and nights blessed.
The sweet voice of labor, guiltless.

Even when he became sick, he kept writing. Poetry, mostly, but also letters. It was the way he resisted the enemy by whom he’d been beseiged. Even in the last months of his life, his body in agony, he never succumbed to misery, never “asked alms from a shadow.”

“While I hope I go on beating the odds, holding out,” he wrote, “I know that I’m haunted by darker and devastating things. I think I’ve forgotten about them now, and I need to hear from you to keep it that way for as long as possible.”

I hope I didn’t fail him.

The quoted fragments of Mandelstam’s poems in this post are taken from a collection of new translations put out by Ugly Duckling Presse in its Eastern European Poets Series, available online: highly recommended for anyone interested or engaged in the translation of poetry, as most of the poems appear in more than one translation (one poem, in fact, appears in five different translations).  

The poetry reading referred to in the post took place on April 25, 2012 at the “104” Center for Arts and Letters in Athens as part of the monthly series of readings me ta logia yinete [1x2].

Stefanos Christoforos blogs at http://sxchristopher.wordpress.com/. His columns are reprinted here by kind permission of the author. 

Out to Pastoral

by John Idol

“The devil, in fiction and drama, presents a subject worthy of close study, and that has indeed been the case with Dante’s Satan, Marlowe and Goethe’s Mephistopheles, Milton’s Satan, Mark Twain’s, Mysterious Stranger, and Golding’s Lord of the Flies, to list but a few of works in which Satanic figures appear in the canon.” John Idol

BURLINGTON North Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—5/7/12—So firm were they in their belief that the devil hid in dark corners, that the congregation of a small Baptist church between Boone and Blowing Rock, North Carolina, placed windows in all four corners of the sanctuary, an act that earned the church a photo in Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

The church has long since vanished, due to the widening of US 321 but, if recent polls are trustworthy, the congregation carried that firm belief in Satan to their new church.

A Gallop Poll dating from 2007 revealed that over 70 percent of Americans believed in the existence of the devil. Only in Northern Ireland does belief in Satan range so high, according to a 1991 poll.

I have no way of knowing how church members of that North Carolina Baptist church nor those persons responding to the 1991 poll pictured the devil but, most likely, they saw him as red in hue, with cranial horns, pointed tail, cloven hooves, and horrid facial features—just the way he’s often depicted in popular literature and pamphlets we try to avoid being handed at our front doors.

From the Middle Ages on, he’s been conceived as a vulgarized version of the Greek god Pan, as may be seen in many of the illustrations gathered in Robert Hughes’ Heaven and Hell in Western Art—a book well worth seeking out. For from simple woodcuts to grand sculptures and paintings, he’s been a powerful force in the imaginative life of artists (http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?qwork=2855022).

But he’s not just a hideously ugly demon, and for good reason. As head of the Archangels, Satan was one of God’s supreme creations, a fact that John Milton seized upon in depicting him. But hubris and disobedience proved his downfall. (Hubris, by the way, is a Greek term much beloved of my editor, Elizabeth, who—obviously—chose to name this publication “Weekly Hubris” for good reason.)

Such was also the case with Iblis, a rebel angel in Islam. The Koran account of the fall of Iblis is moralistically detailed.

Iblis: as scary as his opposite, Judeo-Christian number, Satan.

When Allah created Iblis, he used smokeless fire, not clay. When he later created Adam and other humans, he ordered Iblis and others in his band to prostrate themselves before Adam, a command that Iblis argued against, to no avail. The fact that he had priority in the order of creation and comprised superior material (fire ranking above clay) did not sway Allah. Bow Iblis must or be cast out. His hubris would not be brooked by The Almighty. In Islamic art, he comes to resemble the devil.

Both Iblis and Satan begrudged the favored position of Man and set as goals for themselves leading mankind away from the paths of righteousness. If heaven were closed to them, it would not be open to humans if their wiles succeeded. Hence, they were tireless in their efforts to lead men and women to commit unpardonable sins.

An American short story illustrating how this might be accomplished is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand.”

Here, the titular character hubristically sets out to discover what no one has ever been able before to learn—what is the unpardonable sin? From his workaday job as a lime-burner, Brand devotes himself so wholly to his intellectual quest that he rises to stand with “star-light eminence” among the learned philosophers of his time. Along the way, he breaks the heart of a woman who pines away for him and comes, at last, to realize that, as her beloved’s intellect burgeoned, his heart withered, causing him to fall away from love and empathy, and his connection with the “magnetic chain of humanity.” His end, a fiery one, comes as he joins that fiend, the devil, with whom he had often conversed before beginning his quest.

Like Satan and Iblis, Ethan Brand suffers a devil’s fate, though his is self-selected. An interesting question is raised by his choice—is that final leap into the fiery furnace motivated by an act of contrition or by hubris? On the face of it, the leap seems to be the most rebellious human act of all, brought about by an unwillingness to admit that God’s mercy and love can indeed pardon the greatest of sins.

The devil, in fiction and drama, presents a subject worthy of close study, and that has indeed been the case with Dante’s Satan, Marlowe and Goethe’s Mephistopheles, Milton’s Satan, Mark Twain’s, Mysterious Stranger, and Golding’s Lord of the Flies, to list but a few of works in which Satanic figures appear in the canon.

Wherever he appears, the writers drawing upon his thought and delineating his conduct, seek, in their individual depictions of him, to explore the nature of evil and its impact on humanity. As tempter, in Marlowe, Goethe, and Milton, as tester, as in the “Book of Job,” as deceiver, in a host of works, the devil puts human characters on trial. We become witness to their struggles, failures, and hard-won victories.

Outside the Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions of Satanic figures are many other evil powers, far too many to cover in this brief essay. Perhaps I can later examine the role of Mara in Buddhist culture or take flight into Star Wars and peer behind the cloak and helmet of Darth Vadar.

Just now, I wish to return to my roots in the Blue Ridge and relate a story about an image of Satan “graven” on my high school class ring.

A good many fellow students came to class sharing tales of how upset their parents were to see the devil’s face opposite that of the facade of Appalachian High School.

“Don’t you know we are expressly forbidden by the Bible to have graven images?” parents asked their high-schoolers. “Take that ring off and get your money back. You’re not going to wear that in this house!” Some parents went to the trouble of coming in to the principal’s office to complain.

The principal calmed them by explaining that, like Duke University, Appalachian High had chosen to call its athletic teams the Blue Devils and assuring them that no Satanic worship was afoot at the school.

“That’s merely the hideous face of their mascot. Nothing more.”

The Bible-Belt complainants left mumbling: “That don’t make it right. It’s still a graven image.”

When the school combined with other high schools in the county, the devil was cast out, and the mascot for the new, enlarged school, Watauga, becoming a pioneer. I haven’t seen a recent class ring, but if it has a graven image, I’d guess it would look something like the face of Daniel Boone, topped by a coonskin cap.

Wherever found, however depicted, though, Satan seems not to enjoy a good press, except among Satan worshipers.

In the Baptist church I attended in childhood, he took it on the chin practically every Sunday, and he got hammered really hard during revivals. If the Mourners’ Bench* had been cleared of hardened sinners, the preacher proclaimed a victory over Satan. “Thank God,” he would shout, “the Devil’s been routed, praise be to Jesus. Now let us pray that these new lambs of God will tramp him underfoot when he tries to tempt them back into sin. He will surely try his best to lead them astray, for he is God’s eternal enemy.”

*Mourners’ Bench: A bench, seat, rail, pew, etc. set aside for mourners and repentant sinners that is usually found at the front of a revival meeting or southern evangelical church.

by Helen Noakes

“. . . is there a world in which/another me resides,/living a life quite different/from mine . . .” Helen Noakes

Wandering, wondering, in Paris.

SAN FRANCISCO California—(Weekly Hubris)—5/7/12—

“Wondering”

Quantum physicists have affirmed
what ancient sages knew,
that there are parallel worlds,
parallel universes.

If so, is there a world in which
another me resides,
living a life quite different
from mine,
embraced by husband,
children,
family?

Does she ever wonder
what it’s like to be
the me who’s writing
this
About her?

The me, who’s sitting,
in this quiet
early morning
reading Woolf and Oliver,
gazing at the not so distant
Pacific,
wondering what it’s like
to be her?

Photo: by Helen Noakes

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“Over a year ago, I foresaw clearly that Greece, my second homeland, would lose at least a generation—two, most probably. It would lose—to suicide, slow starvation, and silence—everyone over 60, living on pensions, to what Europe euphemistically calls ‘The Crisis.’ It would also lose those 45 to 60.” Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“Mourners Watching Souls in Lethe,” oil painting by Georgia Sanford.

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—5/7/12—In the card section at Walgreen’s, there are no Sympathy cards labeled “Loss of a Son,” or “Loss of a Daughter.”

Even Hallmark seems to have drawn a blank when faced with that marketing opportunity. Loss of a Mother, Loss of a Father, Loss of a Friend, Loss of a Loved One, Loss of a Pet: all there. But . . . “Loss of a Child”?

I can hear Doug and Dave down in Marketing: “Let’s just not create those categories, OK? Let’s, just for once, show a bit of restraint. What would happen, I wonder, if ‘Loss of a Son’ got placed, just by accident, say, next to ‘Loss of a Pet’? Wouldn’t look good for us. Not good for us, Dave.”

So the unthinkable remains the un-marketed. An opportunity lost for profit; but, a nod to common decency? Or, just perhaps, it’s only my local Walgreen’s that has chosen to suppress those categories. Perhaps I give American corporate entities too much credit.

Kneeling in the “Mahogany” section (the best cards these days are those marketed to Black buyers: trust me on this one), I finally found a card I could bear to send to I’ll-just-call-her-Maria.*

I then sat in my battered 2001 Ford Explorer—I will never again buy a car; I belong, in America, to the long-unemployed 99%—in the strip mall parking lot, and wrote inside, in shaky Greek:

“Maria-Mine [English has no “attachable pronouns of possession”: we English-speakers don’t seem to have those feelings, either], I am sending you my heart, for safekeeping. Place it where yours used to be; where that broken, not-beating thing is now. There is nothing else I can say or, from this distance, do. There is nothing, in any event, that will bring back your son, my student, the father of your granddaughter, the light of your life, and always, also, a light of mine, our shared darling, Hermes. I love you. Elisavet”

Then, I put a $1.05 stamp on the envelope, and sent that card to Greece. And now I am here, sitting in the dark.

Over a year ago, I foresaw clearly that Greece, my second homeland, would lose at least a generation—two, most probably.

It would lose—to suicide, slow starvation, and silence—everyone over 60, living on pensions, to what Europe euphemistically calls “The Crisis.” It would also lose those 45 to 60. Half would be unable to live on their slashed, and then slashed again, pensions; half, forced out of work, would be unable, at 50, at 55, to find new jobs. All would not survive the insane new taxes, the lay-offs, the collapse of Athens.

What I knew back then, what I saw coming, for Greece has, in fact, come to pass, and come to stay: utter desolation for all but the very, very rich, who got their euros out and into Swiss banks or French francs. Maria’s husband, Hermes’s father, leapt down a Greek island well at the very beginning of The Crisis. Now, his youngest son, and the extended family’s sole breadwinner, has followed him across the Lethe.

Gentle Readers, this gentle, mindful, loving 38-year-old began by slashing his wrists. However, finding that that did not quickly enough produce the desired result, Hermes, with the same knife—and he was a master craftsman, an artisan who apprenticed to his father—disemboweled himself.

Disemboweled himself.

In Europe. The Europe now run by Germany and Holland and France and their banks, et al. The Europe that views the Greeks as dishonest, lazy, “other,” and has, as a result of these judgments, nailed Greece, Christ-like, to the upright death-posts of “Austerity.” (Ahhh, we Northern Europeans, we speakers of the Romance Languages, have such a talent for euphemism—a Greek word, I might remind you.)

So, Maria, wearing black, perpetually, for her husband, who saw no hope for himself over two years ago, now adds black to black.

What sort of despair brings an educated, talented, able young father to bring out his own intestines with a blade? In Europe? In 2012? In the year of the Summer Olympiad in London? In the enlightened, “united” land(s) of the euro?

What sort of despair?

And who, truly, is responsible, for Hermes’s despair, and his father’s before him? These two “lazy Greeks,” who worked their fingers to blood and bone all the years I knew them as adults, and who, when I first met the family, were living in two rooms, with an outdoor toilet, up a back alley, on a tiny Greek island where un-lazy Krauts and Brits and Frogs came to vacation?

These Greeks defaulted on no big-euro loans. They owned no big European villas. They paid their taxes. They, now, are in the Greek earth.

When I first met Hermes, he was six, or seven, an irrepressible child whom Maria used to accompany to my English-language classes, basically to sit on him for the duration. Hermes, at that age, was all laughter and motion: unruly and wild. I adored him.

Fast forward, and he became, under his father’s tutelage, a quiet artist of gold and pearls, a successful jeweler, a good father, a supporter of the dramatic arts on his home island, that tiny, arid dot of earth in the Aegean Sea.

Every year, I watched him grow; grow wiser and more soulful. Three years ago, I took a series of motor-drive portraits of him for my Greek website. He had his father’s face and his mother’s height and grace. He had the countenance of a smiling Greek saint. Standing against a whitewashed wall, his little daughter held against him, his arms wrapped round her, Hermes seemed to have retained the child he had been within the man he had become. When his father was defeated by circumstance, I believed Hermes would fill those larger, paternal shoes . . . and survive.

I was wrong on this one point. The Crisis ate him alive, as it had eaten his father; as it is eating alive so many worthy Greeks. Every day, I scan my email from Greece for news from the front line; news of needless, senseless destruction—Flanders Fields, in their new disguise, and without the poppies.

Sitting in the dark now, at this bright screen, I know very few things. But I do know that teachers should not outlive their students, nor parents their children. I know that I saw coming, and am now witnessing, a senseless, manmade massacre of innocents, and that I am powerless to intervene.

And so, I cannot help now but feel that I have outlived my own capacity for optimism and hope, my own belief that, in the West, a center may yet hold, or any just unions survive, in this century of greed, corruption, cynicism, and grasping, always at the cost of our fellow man.

If Northern Europe does not soon see reason, Maria’s granddaughters will be the next to drink the hemlock.

*I have changed all the names and specifics of those discussed in this column; but have altered no other facts.

For more information regarding the mystical paintings of Georgia Sanford: http://www.home.earthlink.net/~artbygeorgia/index.html

From journalist Victoria Stoiciu, commentary refuting Northern attitudes towards Southern Europeans (http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/1506361-lazy-greeks-neo-liberal-cliche): “Data from the OECD clearly shows that Greek workers put in more hours per year (an annual average of 2,109 hours worked) than other Europeans—and in particular the industrious Germans (1,419 per year).

“Of course, it is easy to say that the number of hours spent at work and hours that are effectively utilised may not be the same, and that it is possible to spend half of a 12-hour day at the office looking up exotic recipes on the internet.

“However, this type of argument invariably means that discussion becomes bogged down over the issue of productivity, which is more difficult to calculate because it depends on factors that bear no relation to the level of diligence (type of technology used, the quality of management, etc.).

“Yet another fable has been circulated about retirement age in Greece. Eurostat figures show that the average retirement age in Greece, 61.7 years, is higher than it is in Germany or France. It is true that Greek civil servants can retire on half-pay after 17.5 years, but this is just a detail, isn’t it? Rumors about the ‘disproportionate size’ of the Greek public sector are also contradicted by official figures. According to reports published by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Greek civil servants account for 22.3% of the workforce, whereas this figure stands at 30% for France, 27% for the Netherlands, and 20% for the United Kingdom.”

Author Photo: Dionisis Tsipiras; Banner Photo: Doris Athanassakis

by Sanford Rose

“. . . the crucial point is that unless the government stimulates now in order to lift output, future output will unquestionably fall, and probably by a lot more than 1 percent.” Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—5/7/12—The morons who appear to control Washington’s political and legislative life are ruining the country by their inability to understand the basically oxymoronic nature of today’s economic situation.

That this situation is oxymoronic is indubitable.

In these uncharacteristic times in the USA: To spend is to save.

To go into debt is to improve the nation’s credit.

Austerity, by contrast, is profligacy.

These propositions are demonstrated econometrically by Professors Brad De Long (http://seekingalpha.com/article/426621-the-limits-of-monetary-policy-in-a-liquidity-trap) and (yes) Larry Summers, himself.

Larry Summers weighs in on “ the oxymoronic.”

They argue that: 1) because there are still so many unemployed and underutilized domestic resources (both labor and capital), 2) because the rest of the world will still lend the USA money at a derisory interest cost, and 3) because the Federal Reserve is still wedded to the most accommodative monetary policy in its history, the government can borrow huge sums to fund a new, properly crafted stimulus program that will raise economic growth by enough ultimately to reduce, not raise, the Federal deficit.

Marshalling an impressive set of numbers, the two luminaries lay it out candidly:

If you spend now, you do not burden our children with bigger tax liabilities, you lighten their load.

An oversimplified view of the argument:

If the central bank is not about to offset a looser budgetary policy with a tighter monetary policy, then it is likely that every $100 in extra federal stimulus will lift the national product by $150.

Taxing the increment at 33 percent, the government recoups $50 of the initially spent $100.

If it pays 1 percent in real interest on the remaining $50, the cost of debt service is obviously 50 cents.

So if, by raising output by $150 today, the government can avoid future declines in production equal to 1 percent of that output, then the cost of servicing the $100 in incremental debt that initiated the process is zero, zilch, nada (because the government picks up future tax revenues equal to 50 cents—33 percent of the $1.50 in income that would otherwise not have been created).

And the crucial point is that unless the government stimulates now in order to lift output, future output will unquestionably fall, and probably by a lot more than 1 percent.

That’s largely because the long-term unemployed are rapidly dropping out of the labor force and/or losing their marketability (work skills) should they try to return.

All of which serves to reinforce the hoary notion that a private virtue (thrift) can sometimes become a public vice. Those who insist on short-term draconian measures to reduce deficits may exacerbate the condition that they profess to hold in the greatest abhorrence.

Drop the oxy. Think, morons.

(But that doesn’t drop anything at all. Right?)

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge

by Diana Farr Louis

“. . .instead of following Eckhard Tolle’s advice and living in and for the moment, we found ourselves traveling back in time to other May Days. It was not a longing for the past; we were simply reminiscing, reliving sweetness and fun.” Diana Farr Louis

ATHENS Greece—(Weekly Hubris)—5/7/12—In early April, my favorite word blog, Anu Garg’s Wordsmith (www.wordsmith.org), gave subscribers the origins of the universal cry for help. Of course, most of us know it comes from the French, short for pouvez-vous m’aider but, as European Labor Day approached, the shout kept echoing in my mind.

For here we were in Athens, unable to celebrate the charms of spring because of having overindulged on Andros at Easter. No, we were not doped in an alcoholic haze, or even suffering from pollen allergies. Instead, we were trapped in our apartment by a mysterious malady. Poor “Joy of the People”—my spouse, Harilaos—in his drive to rid our plot of thistles, and cut corridors through the weeds (which are dwarves compared to last year’s but still annoying), overdid it and, after a couple of days in the city, had excruciating pain in his right hand that reduced him to a very unhappy couch potato.

We were to find out that it was gout! Brought on by a surfeit of roast lamb and asparagus. (Not red wine, nor a steady diet of grouse and venison.) Who knew it could attack the hand?

By May 1^st, Europe’s Labor Day, he was fit enough to be bored after sitting inside for too long. So, at half past noon, we hit the road with the intent of driving over Mt. Pendeli to the sea near Marathon for a taverna meal.

How could we have been so naïve. The turn-off for the mountain was so clogged, we couldn’t even round the corner. Then, we decided to try for Rafina, a little port, instead. But never got there. Almost two hours later, we were inching in neutral on the same road where the Marathon is run, still miles from our destination: locked into position along with half the population of Athens, consuming precious gas going nowhere.

Daisies: what we’d be missing on the island of Andros.

This is when the May Day signal howled loudest in my mind. We’d been stuck in the flat; now, we were stuck in traffic, with no rescue possible until we reached the access link to the Attiki Odos, the highway built for the Olympics. That would get us back home in 15 minutes, max, but it was still an age away.

So instead of following Eckhard Tolle’s advice and living in and for the moment, we found ourselves traveling back in time to other May Days. It was not a longing for the past; we were simply reminiscing, reliving sweetness and fun. After all, are not our memories part of us, too?

Maroussi. The name to you might mean a colossus, a teller of incredible stories to an illustrious audience. But to me, it’s where I lived for almost 20 years. A faded pink stucco house with delphinium-blue shutters, set in a garden of fruit trees and rosemary bushes, hedged on two sides by lilacs and yellow winter jasmine. An arcade covered with Virginia creeper and bordered by heavy-scented angelica. An orange trumpet vine scaled the walls in front, white jasmine fluttered outside the kitchen, which formed a courtyard with a tiny guest house, a majestic olive tree and the least favorite of our four fig trees.

This was where we sat whenever weather permitted, where we had fabulous lunch and dinner parties, or lunch parties that ended well past dinner time. Our wine barrel stood nearby under an alcove, and once I left a pitcher under its spigot and forgot to turn it off until a rivulet of retsina arrived at JotP’s shoes. My shame was punishment enough.

The house belonged to my first husband’s family, who called it the spitaki, or “little house,” as compared to his grandmother’s mansion across the street or his parents’ home before the Depression, located in the same neighborhood. Although Alexi’s father died soon after and his mother had little money, the place seemed to breed happiness. Older friends told me how they had loved to gather there before the War, though Dodo, Marina, and Alexi could not offer much more than stories and kefi (joie de vivre) with the simplest of mezedes (hors d’oevres) and drinks.

After my son and I settled there in June of ‘72, I do not remember a moment of regret; not even a question as to whether this had been a good move. Until autumn, we lived with practically no furniture, just the beds and cupboards we’d inherited, and a fully equipped kitchen, which I’d bought. But the house embraced us, and everyone who visited.

Was it the old red tiles on the floor, so soft on our bare feet: cool in summer and warm in winter? Or the built-in shelves and cupboards, the thick walls and window seats, the fireplace, and the glorious waste of space and glassed-in porch upstairs? Or even its refusal to keep people out.

Once we came back late for an appointment to find a family friend sitting in the living room. “Not to worry,” said Fani. “I knew the side door would be open and just let myself in. No one ever remembered to lock it, then or now.”

May Days were a new concept to me. As an American, I always thought of Labor Day as an end-of-summer holiday, not a rite of spring. In Paris, it meant little old ladies selling bunches of muguets (lilies of the valley) on the curb. In Greece, as I was to discover, it was a time for making wreaths of wild flowers to hang on one’s front door. Or one’s car mirror—in the same way that Athenians of those bygone days used to sculpt mini snowmen on the hoods of their cars as proof that they’d gone up to the mountains after a snowstorm; or dangle braces of game-birds to demonstrate their prowess with a shotgun.

Ideally, the May wreath should be hung on the door before dawn, so that the first rays of sunlight may strike it and bring luck to the household. Or so Christina told me. She was our housekeeper. She cooked, cleaned, did the laundry, babysat for Duff, who was only six, and looked after almost every aspect of our lives. She did so much for us that her husband accused her of loving us more than him. She might have agreed.

She called herself the Kali Magissa, or the Good Witch. She could have been our fairy godmother. And on May Day, she would fly down on gossamer wings from her own house about a kilometer away to place the wreath on our door in total silence. And be gone, leaving us to find her blessing alone.

On May Day, though, one also had to be vigilant. Any flowers hanging over the wall were considered public property, fair game for marauding wreath-makers, who might even invade the garden to grab my purple irises or red roses. I used to preempt them by cutting all the exposed lilacs and stuffing them into vases for our lunch party.

Freesias on the balcony console us: too pretty to pick.

Where are all our guests now? The friends and neighbors who would sit with us for hours, singing, telling stories, plucking their guitars. So few remain. So many now divorced, moved away, passed away . . .

And the Spitaki is gone, too, replaced, fig trees and all, by an apartment building. In fact, nothing remains of the neighborhood. Only one or two of the lovely old houses are still standing. Nobody would ever suspect the grace and elegance it used to possess; the residents who gave it color.

Shouting “May Day, May Day!” won’t bring them back, but it does me good to remember.

This column is dedicated to three beloved friends who were born on May 1^st and who left us way too soon: Marina Sulzberger, Gavin Borden, and Bill Cunliffe.

Recipe

Pavlova, named for the Russian ballerina.

It’s also strawberry season and, who knew: Strawberries are the best antidote for gout. So, in pain or not, we devour them every day. Here’s a recipe for “Pavlova,” New Zealand’s “national dessert,” which my Kiwi friends make this time of year.

4 egg whites at room temperature

1 cup fine sugar

2 teaspoons corn starch

1 teaspoon white wine vinegar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup heavy cream, chilled and whipped

2-3 cups strawberries, quartered and sprinkled with sugar and, for a change, masticha liqueur (available, for example, at Titan, in Astoria, or nearby Greek liquor stores)

Preheat the oven to very low, 275 F/125 C. Take a piece of baking parchment and pencil in the shape of a 7-inch/22 cm circle.

Beat the egg whites in a bowl until you have stiff peaks. Add the sugar, a little at a time, beating until the peaks are smooth and glossy. Beat in the cornstarch, then the vinegar and vanilla.

Spread the meringue mixture on the paper, making it higher round the edges than the center. Bake for 1 to 1 ¼ hours until the meringue is firm and ever so slightly beiged. Turn off the oven and let cool overnight. Don’t be dismayed if it cracks. You can repair any damage with whipped cream.

Just before serving, spread the whipped cream over the meringue and top it with the strawberries.