Reading in Vera

Susana snapped this shot of me reading from A Gift for the Sultan in the "Espacio Lector" ("Reader's Space") of the excellent bookstore Libería Nobel in Vera, Almería. If you are in our area (southeast coast of Spain), you can purchase the book there.

We had a good crowd at the reading and a good time, and even sold some books. A great many of our English and other friends were there, and I'm grateful for their support.

There should soon be a note on the event and the book, A Gift for the Sultan, in the local English-language weekly Levante Lifestyle.

(You can also find A Gift for the Sultan on Amazon, with customer reviews and a link to my author page, where there is a video discussing the book.)

PIGS Vs. APEs: Debunking myths about Spain

This is an engaging, amusing 3-part essay, not convincing in all its acerbic barbs, but clear at dismanteling some of the stupider and most common myths about Spain as compared to other European countries. I think you'll enjoy reading it, even if you want to argue with him over some points. Luis Francisco Martínez Montes is described here as "the adviser to the Spanish Deputy Minister" (presumably Ministry of the Exterior).

 
PIGS Vs. APEs: Living on an Animal Farm by Luis Francisco Martínez Montes - The Globalist

Introducing the APEs: Anglo-Protestant Economies by Luis Francisco Martínez Montes - The Globalist

Spain — A Country Built on Sand? by Luis Francisco Martínez Montes - The Globalist

Famous all over town

This has been a busy week for sultan “Yildirim” Bayezid. His image, paired with mine, was plastered all over Carboneras, Mojácar and all the way to Vera, to announce my readings from the novel about his last great adventure on earth, A Gift for the Sultan. If he is watching from Paradise, it will no doubt seem less than his magnificence deserves, but it is more attention than he has received in Spain in the past six centuries.

For our Spanish friends in Carboneras, Susana and I translated the introductory scene and another chapter to present in the town's library. The place was packed for the reading Thursday night, S.R.O., more people than the library had hosted for any other event in memory — just shows you how people still care about old Yildirim ("Thunderbolt"). Now they want a Spanish translation of the whole book; I do too, but I'm not about to do it. It would be a big and challenging job.

Then on Friday, the sultan filled the presentation room of the Nobel bookstore in Vera for a reading in English to folks who don't require translation, and several of them bought the book.

All this in the same week that I was interviewed by that Turkish radio program in San Francisco. 

Do you remember this book? The young Chicano who wrote it turned out to be a 72-year old non-Chicano playwright, Daniel Lewis James, but that's another story, a sad and funny one — sad because James had been so damaged by being blacklisted from the theater, which was his life, that when he years later dared to take up the pen again, he could manage only under a pen name. Funny, because after years of community work in East Los Angeles, he got the voice of the young Chicano so right that he fooled all the critics. In the novel, the young hero — frustrated by being treated as a nobody all his life — finally makes himself famous all over town by writing his name in big letters on all the billboards. And Daniel James did it by writing as Danny Santiago.

I was thinking of Danny and Daniel as our friends Hazel and David Jones (many thanks, from me and the sultan) put up those posters all over Carboneras, Mojácar and Vera.

Quality seal for self-publishers

A thought for fellow writers: My guess is that self-publishing will become more and more common and that the stigma will continue to diminish. This is partly because commercial publishers are more and more reluctant to invest in risky books, and partly because self-publishing has become so much cheaper and easier. However knowing that a book has passed through an editorial selection process (that somebody besides the author thought it was worth publishing) is still an important way to reassure readers of quality.

Maybe what we need to do is form editorial collectives, so that a self-published author (who has paid to publish) has the imprimatur of a respected coterie of writers/editors before the book appears (instead of just hoping for such support in reviews after it is published). The collective would provide (in effect) a blurb of approval. The collective (maybe two or three writers, maybe more) would create a web page where its members' credentials (previous publications, etc.) could be consulted.

Any thoughts? Any volunteers to join me in such a project? We would read and either grant or not grant our seal of approval to new works submitted — but publishing and distribution (and the expense involved) would still be up to the author. If we didn't give our seal, the author could simply ignore us, but if we did, he/she could advertise that fact on the book cover.

The strengths of Europe

A look on the brighter side.

The Supreme Strengths of Europe by Stephan Richter and Martin Sieff - The Globalist

It's all true, we do have much less inequality here (in Europe — I'm writing from Spain) and even the poorest are nowhere near as poor as millions of people in India or China or other countries, or even in the poorer areas of the US. If these 27 countries could only get together on major issues like defense or economic policy, Europe could again be a power, and this time (unlike the era of imperialism) for good.

Coming events

I'll be doing a reading from my novel A Gift for the Sultan this Friday at the Librería (Bookstore) Nobel in Vera (Almería province, Spain) at 8 p.m.

And on Thursday, I'll do a presentation in Spanish in the public library of Carboneras at 7 p.m.

I'm suppposed to be interviewed on the book on Turkish Radio, San Francisco — still to be scheduled.

And on January 4, I'll be presenting the book to a Turkish literary circle in Istanbul. Meanwhile, if any of you have had a chance to read the novel, I hope you will post a comment in the "customer review" section of the Amazon page. Thanks.

(Map of Constantinople, 1422)

Review: Postwar by Tony Judt | Books | The Guardian

Another view, more critical than mine, written by Norman Daview in 2005 when the book came out and Tony Judt was still among us.

Review: Postwar by Tony Judt | Books | The Guardian

A book this length and this comprehensive, dealing with so many histories of so many countries, will inevitably have a lapse or two, I suppose. But Davies still seems to be fighting the Cold War, while Judt is not. And this criticism seems to me off-base: "Judt, however, is impervious to religion, unmoved by music and rather complacent about non-French and non-political branches of art and culture." — especially the phrase "unmoved by music." There's quite a bit about popular music trends, hilariously opinionated so he must have cared about it.

Thanks to Andrew Hull for pointing me to this review.

Why Europeans Think We're Insane | Economy | AlterNet

A friend on Facebook posted this, and when I started to respond I realized it called for a longer analysis.

Why Europeans Think We're Insane | Economy | AlterNet

This is naïve and deserves a more detailed response. Yes, as an American resident in Spain, I know full well: European social benefits are vastly greater than those in the US. But that could not have happened (it's all since WWII) without the US: Marshall Plan, US defense spending & much else. The story is well told in Tony Judt's Postwar. And because of "the Crisis" (which showed how dependent European prosperity has been on US prosperity—it all started with US financial giants finagling their books and US banks overextending credit) the European advantage may not survive the big benefits cutbacks in the UK and elsewhere. Or will almost certainly diminish.

I'll have more to say about Judt's book on modern Europe soon. I'm about half-way through it, reading slowly and carefully (it's a big book) because what he says (whether I always agree with him or not) is so important for understanding where we are now

"No TV"

A complex, beautifully written story by
Dirk van Nouhuys at Unlikely 2.0

Here's just a sample:

Joe walked from the front door a little way along the palm-lined drive to where his companions waited in the battered Volvo bus that had carried them from Elsinore to Sarajevo, crossed from Le Havre to Vera Cruz, and then carried them from Vera Cruz here. He thought he had been on this road forever, at first a celebrity, then a classic, now three-quarters forgotten, meeting people he did not understand, unable to discern the outlines of motivation, disconcerted by the greed for violence and power, seeing figures that looked like battered cars, the motor failing, the fender falling off, and the emergency brake intermittent, trekking on a great highway where no one was sure of his direction. He imagined stopping someone to ask the way to the next town and hearing grammars plucked from a language beyond scholarship. Everything falling, like in Revelations, bumbling, directionless on this crowded road, refugees toting trunks of belongings, baskets, bundles, going north and south, tired, crazed with sleeplessness. The only hope: "I love to see her use her powers".

Update on "Sultan"

I've just ordered conversion to e-book format "for purchase on Kindle devices and Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, PC, Mac, Blackberry, and Android-based devices." Thus the book should be available for nearly instant delivery anywhere with Internet, and cheaper. (Price to be determined, but it will be less than the $15.70 list for the paperback, and virtually no shipping charge.) I was studying how to do this myself (you can do the conversion from a text in MS Word), but it was going to take me hours to figure out and anxiety about making mistakes, so I was glad to see the offer from CreateSpace to handle it for $69.

Of course, the printed paperback is prettier, with its color cover. But I'm beginning to enjoy reading on my Kindle, and maybe you will too. And if you live outside the US, you get the book much quicker (within minutes) and save the extra shipping expense, which can be considerable to Europe or Asia.