A Southern Missive

While visiting my parents, I borrowed a book, one of those Reader’s Digest Today’s Best Nonfiction–you know, with four book-length selections in it. I began one and just finished reading it. It’s called By Way of Deception: Inside Mossad, the Israeli Intelligence Agency by Victory Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy, originally published by St. Martin’s. The book is a memoir of Ostrovsky’s days in the Mossad. He paints an illuminating, albeit unflattering portrait of this most secret of government organizations. The book will certainly be a valuable resource, not only about the Mossad specifically, but for pieces I might write that touch on crime, assasination, spying, government propoganda, manipulation of people (which the Mossad are experts at), and human nature generally. The memoir also reveals how the American public has been shielded from the true news behind the sanitized and often inaccurate news we are fed through the government and the news media. I gained some insights into the dynamic tension between Israel and the Arab world. I also learned the Mossad are not accountable, somewhat cultish, extremely brutal, and have access to almost unlimited resources. I must confess, when I read of the money they spend and pay people, I tried to think of a way I could be useful to them, but I failed to come up with anything other than suggesting a few rednecks I’d like for them to interrogate. Pitch it as knowing they are spies for Iran, perhaps?

There were many quotations I could have used, but I settled on this one, as a reminder of how my characters must be sufficiently motivated. It concerns Mossad recruitment: “The idea of recruitment is like rolling a rock down a hill. You take somebody and gradually get him to do something illegal or immoral. You push him down the hill. The whole purpose is to use people. But in order to use them, you have to mold them. If you have a guy who doesn’t drink, doesn’t want sex, doesn’t need money, has no political problems, and is happy with life, you can’t recruit him” (61).

As I reflected upon that last sentence, I tried to think of people I knew who were unrecruitable. I’m still trying to think of someone.

Averno: The Poetry of Louise Glück

My best friend recently introduced me to the poetry of Louise Glück and gave me a copy of her tenth collection, Averno. Averno is a small crater lake near Naples, Italy, that the Romans regarded as the entrance to the underworld. An oversimplification perhaps, but I thought the collection to be another haunting look at the myth of Persephone, who according to my friend, is featured in several other Glück poems. The book’s jacket says “Averno proceeds as a sequence. It is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without conventional resolution or consolation, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken.” The language in this poetry is indeed strong and forceful.

I enjoyed the read and determined to study Glück and her poetry more thoroughly in the future, and I will certainly include a few of her poems in the next ENG 102 class I teach in college. I’m also thinking of tying her work to the mythology unit I teach my gifted students.

As an example of Glück’s writing for this blog that might be food for writing thought, I selected this quotation from poem number 6 on page 18: “Scholars tell us / that there is no point in knowing what you want / when the forces contending over you / could kill you.”

12/24/06 It’s Christmas Eve as I’m writing this, and I’m in an I-HOP (God bless them for having wireless) Denison, Texas. I’ll be visiting with my parents (who live in Kemp, Oklahoma, where I set Red River Fever) until the day after Christmas. It is the first Christmas Eve and Christmas Day I’ve not shared with my children. I’m here because of the duties of progeny, me being the firstborn and all. Last week, my father was taken to the emergency room at the VA hospital in Bonham. They sent him by ambulance to Dallas. Had a nasty virus that nearly did him in. My mother was very sick too—too sick to drive to DalIas, so after he stabilized, I picked him up at the VA in Dallas yesterday and brought him back to his Red River Valley home in Kemp, Oklahoma. The night before I had worked a DJ job with my friend and fellow musician Tom McClandlish, and I didn’t get home until 3:30 A.M. I rose at 6:00 A.M. and hit Interstate 20. After I worked through the initial sense of exhaustion, the adrenalin kicked in, and I ran on that until I went to sleep last night around 11:00 P. M. I finally found my father’s room and arranged for his discharge. Thankfully, both parents are much better today. I just couldn’t leave them alone, sick, during Christmas. Some events and crises teach you things. This trip has tutored me, but I feel as I though I’ve been schooled by a heavy-handed Irish schoolmaster who pounds his students until they pay attention and get it right. Perhaps I’ll write my thoughts concerning those lessons in another entry.

I intend to use my time well—not only to fulfill my sonly duties, but to read, do some writing I’ve put off, and some much-needed thinking.