Glenn Alan Cheney's Blog

Here's an item I wrote for the local paper, on writing letters:


https://www.theday.com/local-news/202...

I had a good and educational time compiling thoughts expressed by Pope Francis. I gathered them into a book titled "Be Revolutionary: Some Thoughts from Pope Francis."

On the occasion of Donald Trump's visit to the Vatican, here's one of the thoughts. Somebody please pass it on to Mr. Trump. (For that matter, pass it on to anyone who would appreciate the message.)

On the Worship of Money

We talk about land, work, housing … we talk about working for peace and taking care of nature. Why are we accustomed to seeing decent work destroyed, countless families evicted, rural farm workers driven off the land, war waged and nature abused? Because in this system man, the human person, has been removed from the centre and replaced by something else. Because idolatrous worship is devoted to money. Because indifference has been globalized: “Why should I care what happens to others as long as I can defend what’s mine?” Because the world has forgotten God, who is Father; and by setting God aside, it has made itself an orphan.

Some of you have said that this system cannot endure. We must change it. We must put human dignity back at the centre and on that pillar build the alternative social structures we need.

This must be done with courage but also with intelligence, with tenacity but without fanaticism, with passion yet without violence.

And all of us together, addressing the conflicts without getting trapped in them, always seeking to resolve the tensions in order to reach a higher plane of unity, of peace and of justice.
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You can read more excerpts at NLLibrarium.com/pope .

"Neighborhood News" is a kind of surreal look at philosophy, life, politics, and economics, all of which seem kind of surreal even without getting the old Cheney twist.

The book is a novel structured like a small-town newspaper. Here's one of the articles:

Existentialist Injures Child

Justin Bulgarino, 8, received an injurious psychological blow when an out-of-town existentialist hit him with the meaninglessness of life. The child was reported to be devastated, perhaps permanently.

The incident happened at the Baltic playground, on High St., when the stranger saw Justin leap gleefully from a swing and dash around the perimeter of the playground, screaming like a pterodactyl on fire.

“Your joy is meaningless,” the stranger said, pointing hard at Bulgarino, his eyes glaring. “Your fun is utterly futile and without basis. You are nothing. Your mother’s nothing. You come from nothing, and to nothing you are bound.”

Resident state trooper Chris Johnson detained the man for questioning but was unable to link him to a specific crime.

“The suspect confessed to being an existentialist, but that’s still legal in Connecticut,” Johnson said. “All we could do was release him to his own responsibility and tell him to define himself, preferably in another town.”

Consumadora Bulgarino, the boy’s mother, said he has not been the same child since the incident. He has stopped watching television, loses video games on purpose, and lies awake in bed most of the night.

“The other day at dinner, he was just poking at his food,” Ms.Bulgarino said. “And then he looks at me with his eyes all wet and he goes, ‘Why broccoli?’ and I go, like, ‘Because it’s good for you,’ and he just looks at me like I’m an idiot, and then he just looks at his broccoli like it just fell there from outer space.”

State poet laureate Leo Connellan, a Hanover resident, was called into offer the comfort of literary light on the incident and its disturbing implications.

“That was a rotten thing with which to hit a kid/ We ought to get him back, quo pro quid,” Connellan said. “It was a tale told by Sartre or Camus/ full of sound and fury, signifying poo.”

Trooper Johnson said he was considering visiting Sayles School to talk with the lower grades about the dangers of broaching the imponderable.

“Let’s dare to keep kids off post-modern thought,” Johnson said. “It starts at home, but it’s up to each and every one of us in the community to keep a lid on the old cogito.”

Robert Meya, president of the Hanover Philosophical Society, agreed that existentialism could be disturbing to the uninitiated. He suggested that Sayles School incorporate the philosophy into its curriculum, starting in kindergarten.

“Think of the benefits of having children realize, from a young age, that they are what they do,” Meya said. “Being precedes essence. Or maybe it’s the other way around, depending on which way you look at it. What’s important is that it doesn’t really matter.” Ω
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I'm offering this book as a giveaway here at Goodreads, but if any dedicated follower of mine who would like to read it and write a review for Goodreads and for Amazon, I'll send a copy to the first 5 people who ask. But only with a promise of a review. You can email me at glenn@cheneybooks.com .

I've written precisely one book with the intent of making it different from every other book, that is, a very weird and strange book. But it's madness with a method. It's a surreal look at philosophy, American life, human life, the human comedy, politics, Republicans, capitalism gone amok, and a hamster that pees a mysterious message on a schoolroom floor. It's Lake Woebegone on acid. It's the thinking person's "Onion." Or maybe not. Hard to say. But definitely worth sticking your nose into.

The title is Neighborhood News.

Here's a bit:

“When you think about it,” he mused, “aren’t we all Dumpsters? Don’t we all have our jobs to do? Don’t we all smell pretty bad sometimes and take up too much room on the sidewalk of life?”
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It's only $8.95 at amazon. You might as well get it. It's a great bathroom book that lasts a long, long time.

From a book I translated, "Tender Returns," by Rubem Alves:

"I envy plants and animals. They seem to me so calm, possessing a wisdom that we don’t have. As if they were enjoying the happiness of Heaven. They suffer, for there is no life without suffering. But they also suffer as they should, at the right time, when suffering comes, not in anticipation of it. Knowing how to suffer is a hard lesson to learn. If the terrible hits us and we don’t suffer, something is wrong. How to not cry if fate has made us bleed? If we don’t cry, it’s because our heart, too, is sick, having lost its capacity to feel. But to suffer at the wrong time is also sickness. It lets you get struck by blows that haven’t happened and that only exist as phantasms of the imagination. Animals know how to suffer. We don’t. We are prisoners of anxiety."
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You can download a free excerpt from this book at NLLibrarium.com/alves .

Once in a creative writing class I was teaching, a young writer was writing a story that touched on the horror of the holocaust. He read his first draft to the class. The story involved an old woman in a city in the Unites States. She had survived a Nazi concentration camp. Some adolescent punks in the neighborhood were harassing her in the street, calling her old or stupid or ugly or something. They didn't know she had a tattoo on her arm and some horrific memories. They didn't know they were acting not unlike a bunch of little Nazis.

The story attempted to evoke the horror of the holocaust. It mentioned the conditions in the camps, the statistics on how many were killed. As I recall, it mentioned the murder of six millions Jews.

Needless to say, the class was sympathetic to the attempt to depict the horror. But no one showed any emotional reaction to the historical information. Six million people slaughtered, and no one in the room batted an eye, let along shed a tear. Even the writer noticed this. How, he asked, could he communicate the horror.

No one had any ideas, so I suggested that maybe, for example, he have the punks grab the woman's cat and soak it in gasoline and tie a rope around the cat and hoist it, flaming, up over a power line.

Somebody in the class said that was a sick idea. And indeed it was. And indeed I'm not happy that I was capable of such a sick idea. But the horror hit everyone. And that was my point—not the horror but the specificity. Though six million industrialized deaths is far more horrific than one cat, it's impossible to imagine those six million. But the specific cat—the sight and sound and small of a specific cat—had a greater impact on the readers.

The lesson is not in depicting horror. It's in depicting the general through the specific, giving readers something they can not just imagine but effectively perceive in that weird, inexplicable way that we see visions in the little black squiggles on a page. That's what fiction does when it works.

At our house, on Thanksgiving, before grace, I always read this paragraph from Chapter 5 of "Thanksgiving: The Pilgrims' First Year in America":

"So the Mayflower contained a cross-section of values that would become quintessentially American: the insistence on following the heart rather than the law; the inability to tolerate injustice; the audacity to demand authority over authorities; the courage to pursue happiness no matter how miserable it might make them, and to seek a better life no matter how much worse it might be; the wisdom of working together as a society for mutual benefit and personal profit. They believed in the power of the congregation. They would do their own thinking and make their own decisions. They would pray their own prayers. They would dig in their heels. The strong would bury the weak, perhaps suffer a moment of doubt, then remember the mercy of their God, and then get back to work."
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I love to write fiction, but I prefer to write nonfiction. Actually, I tend to prefer to be writing the other genre, the one I'm not writing. When dealing with fact, I wish I could just make things up. When writing from imagination, I wish I could rely on facts rather than on something hard to conjure up in my riot of other conjurations.

"Thanksgiving: The Pilgrims' First Year in America" is an example of creative nonfiction, a.k.a. literary nonfiction. As such, it tries to reflect a truth that goes beyond known facts. After all, are known, verifiable facts the entirety of the truth? Or can imagination reach something closer to the truth? Sticking to known facts may be committing deception by omission.

It's a fine line to walk. What writer of nonfiction has never wished to just make up something to fill in a gap between documents? Wouldn't it be nice (for the writer) to be able to just generate some dialogue to spice up a description and add life to a human situation?

In "Thanksgiving," I often resort to conjecture, but only under two conditions. One is that the conjuration must have been highly likely to have happened. For example, we have no document attesting to whether the Pilgrims watched the Mayflower sail east after the horrific winter of 1620-21. But how could they not have watched it sail away, leaving them with no way to return to England?

The other condition was that I would always leave an indicator of conjecture. I would use a phrase like, "they must have..." or "how could they resist [doing something]," or "they probably...."

I wanted the reader to be aware what I was doing, so this is what I wrote in the Foreword:

"This book is nonfiction.I like to think of it as “a true story.” I have stuck to the facts as best we have discerned them, and we have tried to reflect the truth.

"Truth, however, is an elusive, if not impossible, ideal. The truth isn’t so much in the objective data as in the human experience. To say that the Mayflower crossed the Atlantic in sixty-six days and that people got seasick would be a lie of omission, a belittling of an experience beyond the imagination of modern people. The two writers who related the crossing were guilty of that same omission, but their spare descriptions hardly mean the passengers experienced the trip as no more traumatic than an extended church service.

"In our attempt to reflect the truth of the Pilgrim experience in that first year in America, I had to walk a fine line between fact and imagination. The facts alone would deny the bigger truth, but imagination necessarily explores the unknown and inevitably stumbles into places that just don’t exist. In general, therefore, I stuck with the facts and left imagination to the reader.

Now and then, however, I apply a little conjecture, suggesting a scene within the scope of probability. These passages are either tagged with a qualifier, such as “probably” or “may have” or “no doubt,” or are obviously imaginary descriptions of what we can be pretty sure happened. The occasional quotations from the Geneva Bible, appearing here in italics, were not uttered at the moments being described in this narrative. Rather, they are inserted as illustrations of the kinds of religious thoughts and prayers that typically filled the minds of these devout people."
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You can download an excerpt from the book at NLLibrarium.com/thanksgiving .

I promise to write about something other than Rubem Alves, but until I get around to it, here's an article that just appeared in the online publication Brazzil.com :

http://brazzil.com/24112-a-publisher-...