text:
Almost everyone who tries to write a novel hits a wall roughly a third to halfway through the book. They discover that the plot is played out and the characters have hit dead ends. Why is this?
Part of the problem is often found in the opening pages. One of the inescapable truths of storytelling is that you must get to the story quickly; it's the reason readers won't be able to put down your book. This is true for every kind of story, but it's especially true for a novel that fits into the category thriller. Yet if the novel focuses solely on kicking off the plot, it won't give itself enough material to keep going once the initial plot mechanism runs its course. This is why many early novel drafts tend to stall out after 70 to 100 pages.
The question is how to do two things at once: hook the reader and also plant seeds that will sprout later in the book.
An excellent example of planting seeds can be found in Natalia Sylvester's novel Chasing the Sun. The hook is made clear in the front flap: "Andres suspects his wife has left him—again. Then he learns that the unthinkable has happened: she's been kidnapped. Too much time and too many secrets have come between Andres and Marabela, but now that she's gone, he'll do anything to get her back. Or will he?" But you have to read the first chapter to find the seeds that will sprout into the second half of the novel.
How does Sylvester integrate early hints of those secrets into the kidnapping scene that must begin the story? Find out by reading the opening pages here.
How the Story Works
Anyone who's read the jacket of Chasing the Sun knows that Marabela will be kidnapped. So, the novel has no choice but to begin there. Even if Sylvester had wanted to start earlier, the reader wouldn't have stood for it. If readers know what happens next, they won't keep reading for long. So, Marabela disappears in the first chapter. And yet what a difficult place to begin. Once the kidnapping occurs, there are certain steps that must quickly follow: calls from the kidnappers, requests for ransom, negotiations, and wrong steps by everyone involved. These events carry an incredible gravitational field. The reader's eye will skip over everything else and move straight to the central question: then what? Good luck creating depth of character or culture or place when a woman's life hangs in the balance. But character and culture and place are the best parts of the story and (from a practical standpoint) the triggers that will propel the plot forward after the initial burst of kidnapping energy has played itself out. As a result, the writer must embed these things, this backstory, into the hook. Sylvester does this in a couple of ways.
First, she creates synchronous events. While Marabela is being kidnapped, her husband Andres is on a business call. Sylvester ties the events together in a few deft sentences, when Andres has to explain why his wife couldn't come to the meeting:
He'd hoped Marabela would come with him today to help make a good impression.
"She's so sorry she couldn't make it. She was really looking forward to seeing you again," he says.
"Tell her I said hello and that I hope she feels better," Lara says.
We don't yet know she's been kidnapped, but we know something is going to happen (and if we've read the jacket, we know exactly what will happen), and so we're aware of the irony of Lara's statement. Sylvester doesn't let it drop there. After the meeting, Andres' son asks why his mom would come to a business meeting for something that doesn't directly involve her. Watch how Sylvester uses Andres' answer to do something crucial to the novel:
He sighs, unsure how to explain the less concrete aspects of his business. "Sometimes those kinds of things help the situation along. A man like Manuel wants to know the person he's about to do business with shares his values. That he's a good husband, a family guy. That he can be trusted."
Again, the statement is ironic ("a good husband, a family guy. That he can be trusted"). Sylvester is making a clearcut statement about the man Andres wants to be, and, later in the novel, it will inevitably turn out that he's not this kind of man. But Sylvester is doing something else as well. She's beginning to tell the reader the values that Andres holds dear. Just one page later, when Andres and his son are being driven home, his son accidentally rolls down the window at a stoplight:
"Señor, tres paquetes de galletas por un sol." A young boy, no older than thirteen, pokes his head through the window. Ignacio shakes his head and starts rolling up the window when his father leans forward to stop him.
"Not so fast. You already got his hopes up. Don't toy with the kid." He leans over and shouts, "¡Dos paquetes! Go ahead, pay him." He nudges his son.
"But you're the one who—" With a stern look from his father, Ignacio stops protesting and fishes two coins out of his pocket.
The scene might seem incidental, but it tells the reader that Andres lives by a particular ethical code. Just as the novel will inevitably challenge Andres' definition of himself as a good husband, a family guy, and trustworthy, the novel will also inevitably challenge his ethical system, forcing him to act in ways he would have previously believed unacceptable. The scene has also introduced Andres' relationship to the larger political situation in Lima. The novel is set during the days of the Shining Path, a guerrilla group whose battle against the government cost more than 100,000 lives. It's not accident, then, that the scene just described involves two people with a hired driver and a poor boy selling cookies. The novel is hinting at the politics that will play a large role in the story.
These seeds will become increasingly important. The kidnapping will be resolved, as it must, and that is when the real story begins—a story that is impossible without these details about Andres that can be turned on their head, a turning that will drive the plot forward again.
The Writing Exercise
Let's plant some seeds using Chasing the Sun by Natalia Sylvester as a model:
- Create a synchronous event. Your novel probably has a Big Event that kicks off the story. At its most basic, it's likely some version of a stranger arriving in town or a character leaving on a trip. The story hinges on that event, and, as a result, it's difficult to shoehorn any character development in those scenes. So, carve out a scene that takes place at the same time or within the Big Event. It can be anything. Sylvester's Big Event is the kidnapping, and her synchronous event is the business meeting. In a way, this is true to life. We're never doing one thing at a time, and when something big happens, we're almost always engaged in some other activity. Create that activity. If your character is getting ready to leave on a trip, send her to the bank, the grocery store, the mechanic, to coffee with a friend, or to the person who will take care of the dog while she's gone. If a stranger is arriving, find out what people are doing as the stranger gets into town; they're probably not sitting around, waiting for him.
- Connect the events. The connection is essential because otherwise the reader may feel like you've added an extraneous scene. Obvious ways to connect the events are with glimpses of someone (I saw a figure walk past the window and didn't think much of it) or with phone calls or text messages (Ready yet?). You can also connect the events with irony (I couldn't wait for a relaxing evening, or, they seem like they'll make the perfect married couple). Because any novel's initial events are given away by the jacket flap, the reader is anticipating whatever Big Event you have in store. So, if you're dropping hints that the characters have certain expectations that won't be met, the reader gets a sense of anticipation. Therefore, the connection that you make between events doesn't need to be direct; it can simply hint at expectations that the Big Event will disrupt.
- Use that connection as an opportunity for character definition. Remember, not all character development is created equal. It's fine to know that a character is vegan, but if you write that a character refuses to sit in an establishment that doesn't serve vegan options, then you're creating a scene that the reader can anticipate. A great way to create expectations in the reader is to define the character's value system (He's the kind of person who…). Sylvester lets Andres define himself as a good, honest husband and family man. The reason that he defines himself is because he's thinking about his wife's absence at the meeting. So, how can you use the connection between events as an opportunity for your characters to define themselves? If your character is leaving on a trip, let her define the kind of traveler she is (I take books and a coffee grinder, but I refuse to answer my email). If it's a stranger arriving in town, let the character define the kind of place he lives, which will be a reflection of how he sees himself (I thought about hitting the showers but decided to knock out another couple of sets. The guys nodded at me as I came back into the weight room.) You're setting the stage for the Big Event. Notice that these definitions contain value systems. When you establish a value, it's a good idea to try to pressure it, even break it, in the story. The reader will be expecting nothing less.
Good luck!


text:
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Debian Security Advisory
DSA-2141-1 openssl -- SSL/TLS insecure renegotiation protocol design flaw
- Date Reported:
- 06 Jan 2011
- Affected Packages:
- openssl
- Vulnerable:
- Yes
- Security database references:
- In the Debian bugtracking system: Bug 555829.
In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2009-3555, CVE-2010-4180.
- More information:
DSA-2141 consists of three individual parts, which can be viewed in the mailing list archive: DSA 2141-1 (openssl), DSA 2141-2 (nss), DSA 2141-3 (apache2), and DSA 2141-4 (lighttpd). This page only covers the first part, openssl.
Marsh Ray, Steve Dispensa, and Martin Rex discovered a flaw in the TLS and SSLv3 protocols. If an attacker could perform a man in the middle attack at the start of a TLS connection, the attacker could inject arbitrary content at the beginning of the user's session. This update adds backported support for the new RFC5746 renegotiation extension which fixes this issue.
If openssl is used in a server application, it will by default no longer accept renegotiation from clients that do not support the RFC5746 secure renegotiation extension. A separate advisory will add RFC5746 support for nss, the security library used by the iceweasel web browser. For apache2, there will be an update which allows to re-enable insecure renegotiation.
This version of openssl is not compatible with older versions of tor. You have to use at least tor version 0.2.1.26-1~lenny+1, which has been included in the point release 5.0.7 of Debian stable.
Currently we are not aware of other software with similar compatibility problems.
In addition, this update fixes a flaw that allowed a client to bypass restrictions configured in the server for the used cipher suite.
For the stable distribution (lenny), this problem has been fixed in version 0.9.8g-15+lenny11.
For the unstable distribution (sid), and the testing distribution (squeeze), this problem has been fixed in version 0.9.8o-4.
We recommend that you upgrade your openssl package.
Further information about Debian Security Advisories, how to apply these updates to your system and frequently asked questions can be found at: https://www.debian.org/security/


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(CNN) -- Imagine the entire population of Kentucky forced out of their homes in the past 25 years, with many of the residents moving to a neighboring country.
Displaced children at a camp in El Barrancon, Colombia, earlier this year.
That's what has happened in Colombia, a country of 45 million where up to 4 million people -- roughly the population of Kentucky -- have been forced to flee fighting between government forces and an entrenched Marxist rebel group. So many Colombians have taken flight to escape violence that the nation has the second largest number of internally displaced people in the world -- surpassed only by Sudan in Africa.
Oftentimes, the violence is not incidental.
"Violence against civilians is a strategy of war for all the parties involved in the warfare," said Ellen Beattie, who worked for relief agencies in Colombia for 15 years. "That's the problem. They do it on purpose. They use it as a strategy. Vicious."
Exact figures are hard to come by.
Reliefweb, a United Nations Web site that provides information to humanitarian relief organizations, says nearly 400,000 Colombians were displaced last year. The Colombian government puts the number of displaced at 255,000 for 2008.
Likewise, the Colombian government says nearly 3 million citizens have been displaced inside the country in the past few decades. But the non-governmental Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacements, known in Colombia as CODHES, estimates more than 4 million people have had to leave their homes since the 1980s.
Mauricio de Vengoechea, a political analyst with the Newlink Group consulting firm, says about 200,000 Colombians have ended up in Ecuador, which has granted 5,500 residency permits in the past eight weeks.
At the heart of the violence lies a guerrilla war with the Colombian government and paramilitary groups on one side and the FARC, which is the Spanish acronym for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, on the other. The FARC has been waging war against the government since the 1960s and has major strongholds in the jungles of southwest Colombia, near the 366-mile (590-kilometer) border with Ecuador.
Narcotraffickers also have strongholds in the area and are often allied with the FARC, who provide security and intelligence. Many times the rebels and the narcotraffickers are one and the same. The guerrillas use drug money to buy weapons.
"There are large parts of Colombia where the state has no presence, no police, no army, nothing," said Myles Frechette, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia from 1994 to 1997. "That's where the narcotraffickers hang out."
That makes it valuable territory for the guerrillas and narcos, said Beattie, executive director of the International Rescue Committee office in Atlanta, Georgia.
"They're more willing to fight over land that is strategic," she said. "You've poured gasoline on the fire with that."
As the army, paramilitaries and the guerrillas fight for territory -- often retaking land one side or the other had held before -- the civilian population gets caught in the middle. When one side comes in, Beattie said, everyone living in the area is suspected of having collaborated with the enemy. That sometimes leads to massacres, or at least kidnappings and death threats.
"The majority of displacements in Colombia are not because of combat, but because people are directly threatened," said Gustavo Valdivieso, spokesman in Colombia for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. "They are told, 'Leave or be killed.'"
Many times, indigenous populations in far-flung places suffer the most.
That's what happened earlier this year to the Awa tribe in southwest Colombia. The FARC admitted in an Internet statement that guerrillas "executed" eight people February 6 in the town of Rio Bravo because the rebels believed the Indians were gathering information to give to the Colombian military.
The Human Rights Watch organization said the guerrillas tortured some of the Awa before killing them with knives.
Luis Evelis Andrade of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia said the FARC had targeted the Awa because the Indians don't want to get involved in the armed struggle and refuse to reveal information on government troop actions. He said the FARC had abducted 120 Awa in February and killed 44.
"We are very worried about the Awa community," said Monsignor Gustavo Giron Higuita, the bishop of the city of Tumaco. "It is a community that is pretty unprotected and that in the past five years has received a type of persecution by armed groups."
The Colombian government has issued a "risk report" warning that civilians in the region are in danger, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees proclaimed an alert this week about threats against human rights workers.
A U.N. report notes that displacement disproportionately affects Colombia's poorest citizens, and their lives get worse after they are forced to flee. One of every two displaced Colombians is unemployed and a similar number live in makeshift homes made of cloth, cardboard or wood, says the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. More than three-fourths of children who leave school after being displaced never return.
Then there's the issue of forced conscription. According to Reliefweb, between 12,000 and 14,000 minors have been forced to join armed groups.
Valdivieso, the U.N. spokesman in Colombia, notes that displaced residents have lost about 15 million acres (6 million hectares). That's an area about the size of West Virginia.
"You have displaced people living in hunger in the cities of Colombia while they still have property," Valdivieso said.
Displacement occurs when people move within a country. When they leave the country, they become refugees.
The problem occurs among all segments of Colombian society. The political class is often hit hard.
Ramiro Echeverri was among 12 regional lawmakers the FARC kidnapped on April 11, 2002, in Cali, Colombia's third-largest city. The rebels killed him and 10 others on June 18, 2007, when a Colombian army patrol came upon the camp in which the hostages were being held. When the bodies were recovered three months later, autopsies showed most had been shot several times in the back.
Echeverri's son, also named Ramiro, was a doctor in Cali at the time.
"We buried him and the next day we left the country," he said.
He, his wife and younger sister first went to Ecuador, where they lived for two months before securing passage to Atlanta, where he works as a neurological researcher for the Emory University School of Medicine. His mother stayed behind but visits often, especially after the birth of her granddaughter, Rafaela, four months ago.
Echeverri, 28, has been in the United States for 16 months but still harbors hopes to return.
"Of course," he said. "It is a very good country. I believe there will be a solution. Once there is, I will go back."
Atlanta resident Ibonne Pinilla Martinez, 25, tells a similar story. Her father was a politician in Palmira, in southwest Colombia about 17 miles east of Cali. He started receiving threats and some colleagues were kidnapped.
They first moved around inside Colombia, living in three cities over a two-year period. She, her parents and a younger sister then lived in Costa Rica for five years before moving to Atlanta two years ago, the soft-spoken Pinilla said.
"There is always fear when someone makes threats," she said.
She, too, holds expectations of returning some day.
"We will wait for the right time and for all that to end," Pinilla said.
Many refugees end up in Ecuador because it's the nearest country to the killing fields of southwestern Colombia. Some are forced there by the fighting.
"Over the course of the past five years, the FARC has been pushed back into Colombia's less densely populated jungle regions and across the Ecuadorian border," said Patrick Esteruelas, an analyst with the Eurasia Group consulting firm. "More and more citizens in southern Colombia have been forced out and had nowhere else to go but Ecuador."
Beattie, the aid agency official, has noticed the same phenomena.
"The Colombians go across where the violence pushes them that way," she said. "Often, that's the only direction they can go."
Ecuador has started incorporating the displaced Colombians, giving residency status to 5,500 in the past few weeks. That may seem surprising, given the poor standing between the countries.
Ecuador broke diplomatic relations with Colombia in March 2008 and amassed troops along the border after a Colombian military attack against a FARC camp inside Ecuador. The attack killed 25 people, including rebel leader Raul Reyes, four Mexicans and an Ecuadorian.
No country in the area is afraid of Ecuador, says Frechette, the former U.S. ambassador. Neither is the FARC.
"Ecuador is a very weak state. It's lost 60 percent of its territory since its independence (in 1822)," he said. "Ecuador is a little guy who gets pushed around by everybody."
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa used the tension to forge national unity when he successfully ran for re-election in April 2009, said Vengoechea.
"It was more convenient for President Correa to be an enemy of Colombia than a friend of Colombia," Vengoechea said.
"Now both sides have been trying to find common points to restore diplomatic relationships," Esteruelas said. The issue of residency visas, he said, "is one such point."
Ecuador also may have felt the need to do something about the FARC.
"Ecuadorians are also under a lot of pressure since allegations that the FARC was coming across the border and Ecuador has been looking the other way," said Esteruelas. "Ecuador is under pressure to register all Colombian immigrants coming in to prevent Colombian rebels from coming into Ecuador unregistered and unnoticed."


text:
Ocean Spray releases cranberry harvest estimate
Cranberry harvest predicted to be about 11 million barrels globally, same as in 2012
MILWAUKEE — This year's cranberry harvest is expected to be about 11 million barrels worldwide, or roughly about the same as last year's.
That's according to Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc., the nation's largest cranberry processor. Ocean Spray is owned by the farmers that supply it with cranberries.
The Massachusetts-based company released its estimate of the global cranberry harvest on Monday. It expects the global crop to be between 11.1 million and 11.5 million barrels. Each barrel weighs 100 pounds.
Wisconsin is the nation's largest cranberry producer, followed by Massachusetts.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced last spring that it would buy up to $5 million worth of cranberry products for domestic food assistance programs to help shore up prices. Cranberry prices fell after an unexpected jump in production in Canada.


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The Last Express Review
- Real-time events breathes life in to the murder-come-mystery thriller story.
- Little to no loss of quality on the audio track and visuals; as detailed and stylish as ever.
- Helpers nudge players in the right direction without ruining the intrigue.
- Navigation retains its quirkiness; highlighted areas only moderately help.
The Last Express may still be burdened by the click-through navigation that defined much of the genre in the past, but the marriage of gameplay and storyline remains pitch-perfect in this iOS adaption.
- Full Review
- App Store Info
In the world of Adventure titles, The Last Express is a sort of right-of-passage, especially as it puts a spin on the usual tropes of the genre by packing them in to a mystery-thriller that plays out in real-time. It should be no surprise that such a concept sprang from the mind of Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, and despite its relative age it remains a shining example of how deeply gameplay and storytelling can be intertwined.
You play as Robert Cath, a young doctor thrown in to an intriguing plot of murder and mystery on the Orient Express. Once on board the train comes to life; its passengers move about in real-time and you'll need to work out just why Tyler Whitney decided to bring his long-time friend Cath on board.
A lot can happen in the space of a few hours of gameplay and you won't want to miss any of it, which is unfortunate as each decision you make will spiral out and affect how the game plays out - miss something critical and you'll need to backtrack to work out what happened (or rather, is going to happen). This is easy enough thanks to the ability to rewind and fast-forward time, replaying events if you believe it will help. Alternatively, multiple game slots are available as well.
Despite DotEmu's hand in re-releasing the title last year (2011), the iOS version still relies on the basic hot-spot system (albeit with handy highlights that you can turn on or off) that can make navigation a chore. While it may not take too long to mentally map most of the game's locations, a genuine map indicating your orientation and relative location would have been extremely helpful, especially given the available screen-space on the iPad version.
Nevertheless, exploring the Orient Express, talking to its many passengers and staff, and becoming entangled in the plots weaved within makes for a fascinating playthrough that will keep you coming back for more. The stylized rotoscoped artwork retains its appeal despite the game's relative age, making it hard to see any downside to picking up this Adventuring classic.
pros: Real-time events breathes life in to the murder-come-mystery thriller story. Little to no loss of quality on the audio track and visuals; as detailed and stylish as ever. Helpers nudge players in the right direction without ruining the intrigue.
DescriptionStep aboard the 1914 Orient Express in this award-winning mystery adventure from Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, now for the first time on iOS!
JULY, 1914. With Europe on the brink of war, the luxurious Orient Express departs Paris for Constantinople, plunging American doctor Robert Cath into a maelstrom of treachery, romance, and international intrigue.
The Last Express is a complete, faithful iOS version of the internationally-acclaimed 1997 PC classic.
- 20+ hours of game play
- Interact with 30+ characters who behave like actual people on a train -- moving about in real-time and conversing in their native languages
- Eavesdrop on conversations, sneak into compartments, and uncover clues
- Explore a richly detailed, historically accurate 3D recreation of the 1914 Orient Express
- Your actions affect other characters' behavior, making every play-through different
- Rewind feature allows you to back up to any point in the story and choose a different course of action
- Playable in 5 languages: English, French, German, Italian and Spanish
EXCLUSIVE ADDITIONAL FEATURES ONLY FOR iOS:
- Unlock challenging achievements that test your sleuthing skills
- Dynamic, 3-tiered hint system created specifically for iOS
- 20 unlockable character biographies
- Unlock cinematics to replay at any time
**** Reviews ! 90% on Metacritic ****
"The Last Express is just one of those games that adventure fans, or just fans of a good story, need to play." 4/4 - Slide To Play
"A shining example of how deeply gameplay and storytelling can be intertwined" 5/5 - AppSpy
"It's a piece of videogame history and a shining example of what can be done to create an experience so much more immersive than the Heavy Rains of today." - 8/10, Destructoid
"Exquisite design and a literary story. A thrilling ride." – Newsweek
"The top adventure game… thumbs up by all ages and both genders." – Family PC
"A masterpiece." – Computer Games Strategy Plus
"Gripping… amazing… totally unique. The best adventure game I have ever played. Beautiful, skillfully crafted, and worth every penny and hour of your time." – Games Domain Review
What's New in Version 1.12This app has been updated by Apple to use the latest Apple signing certificate.
- Updated the game for iOS 11.
- Fixed some subtitle issues.
- Fixed a crash.


text:
Museum to open balcony where MLK was shot
Staff Writer
Columbus Monthly
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis plans to open the balcony where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to the public.
The museum was built around and includes the old Lorraine Motel, where King was staying when he was assassinated in 1968. Visitors had been able to see the balcony where King was shot but couldn't stand on it.
The museum's main building will close at the end of the day Monday for renovations. Officials hope to open the balcony to the public on Nov. 19, and they're installing a lift for disabled visitors.
A museum annex that includes the boardinghouse from which James Earl Ray shot at King also will be open during the renovation.


text:
Studies have shown an aspirin a day helps keep the heart doctor away. How about an aspirin every other day to help keep the cancer doctor away, too?
A brand new study suggests one low-dose aspirin every other day may protect healthy women from colon cancer.
The researchers used data from nearly 40-thousand women over the age of 45 who were part of a large, national Women's Health Study conducted from 1994 to 2004.
The women were randomly assigned to take either 100 milligrams of aspirin or a placebo every other day for the full 10 years. They were also asked to fill out questionnaires about their adherence, adverse effects, risk factors and health.
After the trial ended, researchers continued to follow more than 33-thousand of the participants through 2012, although they no longer provided them with aspirin or placebo.
The results? The incidence of colorectal cancer was 20% lower in the aspirin group than in the placebo group. Women who continued taking aspirin on their own after the trial ended had the greatest reduction in risk.
Along with the benefit, the researchers identified an associated side effect… an increased risk for gastrointestinal bleeding.
As always talk to your doctor about what is right medically for you.
I'm Dr. Cindy Haines of HealthDay TV with information that can help keep your family healthy.


text: These photos were taken on a June-July, 2011 trip to the Galapagos with two of our grandchildren. The photos were taken with a Nikon D300 using, largely, a Nikon 70-200 mm f/2.8 lens with a 1.7 teleconverter. Some scenic shots were done with a Nikon 16-35 mm f/4 lens (and a Nikon 18-200 mm f/3.5 lens was used occasionally.) All photos were processed with Photoshop CS4. The photos are arranged in chronological order. We began on Santa Cruz Island at the Darwin Center (where giant tortoises are bred). Then sailed to Isabela Island, the largest in the group, and spent most of the five days around that island and neighboring Fernandina. The 4th day we landed on San Salvador, and the final morning we walked on North Seymour (among the large number of frigate birds). (See also the gallery of photos from the 2008 Galapagos trip. That trip was more concentrated in the more eastern islands, and we saw a somewhat different collection of birds, mammals, and reptiles. In particular, we saw albatross and Nazca boobies.)Read More


text:
With the start of the school year right around the corner, I wanted to take some time to explore the use of apps in PreK through 2nd grade. I realized that a number of my thoughts about apps for this age level focused on questions. Such as:
- How are educators currently using apps?
- How are young learners using apps (at home and/or school)?
- What are the best review sites for educational apps?
- What rubrics exist for evaluating apps for this age group?
- How can app devices (e.g., tablets & smartphones) be used to connect with other tech tools (e.g., interactive whiteboards)?
- What type of teacher PD resources exist for new app users?
- What resources exist for young children learning how to use apps?
- How can apps best be used when you only have one device?
Clearly, there is a lot to consider when examining how and why to use apps with young learners. I decided to start with some of the key questions above and did some web searching. Here's what I found:
How are educators currently using apps?
To start, I reviewed the initial survey results from the Early Childhood Technology Collaborative, which show that only 35% of surveyed teachers of young children are even using tablets. So I realized I needed to narrow my focus to my #ECETech PLN to get information about how teachers who are actually using these tools in their practice work with apps. From there, I discovered a great post by @mattgomez detailing the apps he uses with his kindergarteners and links to how he uses many of them. I also checked out the Fred Rogers apps, which provide suggestions for how to use them and reviewed some other app collections, such as these two pinboards, iPad Apps for Early Childhood and Early Childhood/Preschool Apps, with suggestions for how to use each app. I also found a helpful post of how apps are being used in a 1st grade class and overall, teacher blog posts seemed to be the most informative to learn not just what, but how teachers are using apps with this age range. How are you using apps for education?
How are young learners using apps (at home and/or school)?
Aside from teacher blog posts about how they are using apps with their students, this question was hard to answer through general online research. I did find a very cute video of kindergarten children talking about how they used iPads in a butterfly study in their classrooms. I would love to see more of these types of active examples of technology used as a tool to support or enhance a project/learning from the child's perspective. How are your young learners using apps?
What are the best review sites for educational apps?
My go-to sites (in no particular order) are:
- Children's Technology Review
- Commonsense Media
- Ele by Fred Rogers Center
- Moms with Apps
- Kindertown
- I Educational Apps Review
Where do you go for trusted reviews of apps to use in school with early learners?
What rubrics exist for evaluating apps for this age group?
Some rubrics that I've found recently (and I hope more and more will be created to meet different needs!):
- Rubric for iPad Apps by Early Childhood iPad Initiative
- Rubric & Post by @jodialtringer on iPad Apps for Early Learners
- Rubric & Checklist for Educational Apps by Tony Vincent
- An educational continuum used to assess apps by @KateyTwit
Do you have other ways of assessing educational apps? What criteria do you use?
How can app devices (e.g., tablets & smartphones) be used to connect with other tech tools (e.g., smartboards)
It can be helpful to display apps on a larger screen, such as a SMART Board, so large groups can share ideas and see content at the same time. To display your iPad/iPhone screen on a SMART Board or other large screen, you need either a VGA adapter or an HDMI /Digital AV Adapter if you want to connect to an Apple TV/HD TV.
If you want to actually control what's displayed on your screen from your iPad instead of just mirroring the image on your mobile device, then you'll need an additional application, such as Doceri or Splashtop. These are helpful if you want to access your computer programs on your iPad.
I want to continue investigating these options because it seems like one of the best uses of the an interactive whiteboard (IWB) and a mobile device – using the IWB to control your device (e.g., interact with an iPad app on a SMART Board) – isn't currently possible. This combo could be especially helpful for early learner's fine motor skills and large group collaboration so hopefully it will be available in the future.
What tips do you have for connecting app devices to other tech tools?
What type of teacher PD resources exist for new app users?
This is one area where the Internet provides a rich treasure trove of resources! In addition to Twitter and a PLN full of other educators who are experimenting and playing with various apps and sharing their tips and tricks, there are numerous articles written on this topic. For example, this site is full of professional development resources for teaching using iPads in the Classroom. Apple provides a page of resources, as well as ongoing webinars for educators using their mobile products and Android4Schools is a good resource for those with Android devices.
Successfully finding professional development resources is connected to creativity. Be creative in selecting platforms to search. When looking for resources, include wikis, Pinterest boards, LiveBinders, Twitter, and other networks, as well as news sites, video-tutorials, and of course, colleagues!
What resources exist for young children learning how to use apps?
Although I feel like any technology should be used as a tool to enhance learning and simply another language kids can use to express their creativity, there are still some basics that can be helpful to review before handing a mobile device to a child. For example, how to: turn it on, control the sound, understand when it needs to be plugged in, swipe, click, and so forth.
It was tough to find resources to help with this but I do like the suggestions in the book Teaching in the Digital Age, by Brian Puerling, about how to introduce an iPad to young learners.
I also found these colorful posters about acceptable use, which could be helpful reminders for older children who can read and serve as a good reminder about building in time to discuss digital citizenship and acceptable use with even very young learners.
How do you introduce apps to early learners? What resources have you found?
How can apps best be used when you only have one device?
Finally, working in an environment where children may have access to app-filled devices at home and teachers often have them for personal use but there are no classrooms full of mobile devices, I wanted to consider this question. Luckily, this has been a popular topic lately and there are many resources online for working in a "one tablet/iPad classroom." Some only include app suggestions, others take the form of podcasts, blog posts, articles or collections of project ideas and links to explore in more depth.
Do you have suggestions for using only one mobile device in the classroom?
My head is filled with many additional questions, such as how to use mobile devices to facilitate global collaboration, creative expression, and documentation but those might have to wait for later in the year. I'm excited to keep exploring and to hear from others about their experiences and ideas!


text:
Malcolm Lowry died in his cottage in the village of Ripe, in Sussex, late at night on June 26, 1957, or early the next morning. He was forty-seven years old. His wife, Margerie, found his body upstairs, on the floor of their bedroom. An autopsy revealed that Lowry, an alcoholic, had been drunk, and the doctor who examined the body found that he had swallowed a large number of barbiturates and had inhaled some half-digested food from his stomach. An inquest was held, at which a police officer, the Lowrys' landlady, and Margerie testified. The coroner ruled the fatality a "misadventure"—that is, an accident. Lowry had choked to death on his own vomit.
Lowry is known for his 1947 novel, "Under the Volcano," which chronicles the final hours of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic Englishman living in Mexico, in the shadow of the Ixtacihuatl and Popocatepetl volcanoes. On November 1st, the Day of the Dead, Firmin, the former British consul, finds that his estranged wife, Yvonne, has come back to town. Paralyzed by his alcoholism, he drifts from cantina to cantina, considering ways to reclaim her; but he never acts. By nightfall, Firmin is dead in a ditch, shot by Mexican paramilitaries. "Volcano" fuses modernist and romantic sensibilities: the story is told from shifting points of view, and Firmin's daylong odyssey is borrowed from "Ulysses"; at the same time, Lowry's prose is fervent, laid down in unstable, looping sentences. Shortly before his death, the consul sees on a house an inscription that reads "No se puede vivir sin amar"—"One cannot live without love." Lowry, in a 1946 letter to Margerie's family, wrote, " 'Volcano' 's theme: 'only against death does man cry out in vain.' " Dawn Powell wrote soon after the book's publication, "In 'Under the Volcano' you love the author for the pain of his overwhelming understanding."
Lowry began writing "Volcano" in his late twenties. The writing took four drafts and almost a decade. In his early attempts, he was more interested in seeing how many images and symbols he could embed in the text than in creating lifelike characters. It was only in 1939, when Lowry met Margerie, who was herself an aspiring writer, that the novel began assuming a coherent shape. Margerie suggested characters and plot turns, added sentences, and cut back Lowry's wordiness. She was a good editor, and the only person who could manage her husband's reckless temperament.
"Volcano" was published to broad acclaim. The critic Mark Schorer, reviewing the book in the New York Herald Tribune, wrote that few novels "convey so feelingly the agony of alienation, the infernal suffering of disintegration." Lowry was hailed as a successor to Joyce, who had died six years earlier. "Volcano" was a popular success, too—for a time, Lowry bragged, the book outsold "Forever Amber."
He soon fell apart. "Success," he wrote to Margerie's mother, "may be the worst possible thing that could happen to any serious author." According to Lowry's biographers—there have been six—his drinking, always prodigious, became incapacitating. He had persecution fantasies. At times, his delirium tremens was so severe that he could not hold a pencil. Lowry worked on many books in these years—he had in mind a multipart novel called "The Voyage That Never Ends," which would parallel the Divine Comedy, with "Volcano" in the position of the Inferno—but the manuscript that he cared most about was "October Ferry to Gabriola," a novel about the happiest phase of his marriage, in the nineteen-forties, when he and Margerie lived in a squatter's shack on an inlet north of Vancouver. Lowry could not make the novel come together; Margerie edited and suggested, Malcolm rewrote and rewrote, and the book slid sideways. They began fighting, in part because of their failure to tell the story of their happiness. They countered their frustrations with heavy doses of alcohol, prescription sedatives, tranquillizers, and stimulants—sodium amytal, phenobarbital, Benzedrine, Allonal, Nembutal, Soneryl. (Lowry joked that he and his wife should be known as "Alcoholics Synonymous.") But they could not inure themselves to the pain of their creative failure. Twice, during a trip to Europe, Lowry tried to strangle Margerie. Though she was a fraction of his size, she attacked him, too. Shortly before Lowry died, he told a psychiatrist whom he was seeing that either Margerie was going to kill him or he was going to kill her.
Margerie, who died in a Los Angeles nursing home in 1988, at the age of eighty-three, did not like to talk about the details of Lowry's death, but when she did she said that Lowry committed suicide. To most of their friends, that explanation seemed more likely than the official one, that he had accidentally swallowed too many pills. A lot had been going on in Lowry's life at the time. There was the agony of "October Ferry," which in its various drafts amounted to more than four thousand pages. In the months before his death, he had largely stopped drinking, under the care of his psychiatrist, who was encouraging him to be more independent from Margerie; for years, she had been lighting his cigarettes and even tying his shoelaces. He began to do things that he hadn't done in a long time, from taking the bus by himself to carrying his own money. These changes may or may not have destabilized him: it is not easy to make surmises about a man as grandly dysfunctional as Lowry. Fifty years ago, on July 3rd, he was buried in a corner of Ripe's thirteenth-century churchyard, which overlooks the South Downs. About a dozen mourners accompanied his wife. Margerie hoped to be buried by his side, but by the time she died the spot next to him had long since been taken; her body was interred forty yards away, at the other end of the churchyard.
In June, 1939, Clarence Malcolm Lowry met, by his own description, "a grand gal named Margerie" on Hollywood Boulevard, in Los Angeles. A friend of his had set them up. He took the bus; she drove. Lowry was twenty-nine years old, and separated from his first wife, Jan Gabrial—the inspiration for Yvonne in "Volcano." He and Gabrial had lived in Mexico for a year, trying to hold together their volatile marriage. Lowry, an Englishman with a Cambridge degree and a handsome allowance—his father was a wealthy cotton broker in Liverpool—believed his destiny was to be a great writer. But he had published only one book, six years earlier: "Ultramarine," a minor novel whose overexcited style owed a great deal to other writers, especially Conrad Aiken, his mentor. Many of Lowry's friends saw him as a figure of entertainment rather than as a serious artist—they enjoyed him most when he serenaded them with his ukulele. He had been working for nearly three years on "Volcano," which was based on his troubles in Mexico with Gabrial. The project clearly exceeded his skills, or at least his limited focus. Lowry was such a heavy drinker that, in a letter to Aiken, he described himself as a "Lear of the Sierras, dying by the glass in the Brown Derby."
Margerie Bonner had tried her hand at murder mysteries but had not published any work. In the meantime, she had bit parts in several silent Westerns, and worked as the personal assistant to Penny Singleton, who played Blondie in movies based on the comic strip. Margerie's rapport with Lowry was immediate. Several years older, she had a toughness that he lacked; she wore furs and high heels and exuded glamour. (According to Gordon Bowker, the author of "Pursued by Furies," an incisive 1993 biography of Lowry, she had already been married, but she apparently did not tell Lowry.) Margerie saw Lowry as an exotic aristocrat. He was insecure sexually—he had an unusually small penis—but Margerie gave him confidence. He started calling himself El Leon ("the Lion") and gave her the pet name Miss Hartebeeste. Less than two months after they met, he wrote to declare his love: "The sensation of underground bleeding, of being torn up by the roots like a tree by a big wind—do you feel that? God, I do!"
Lowry was impractical in most ways, but he never met a woman without sizing her up as a typist and as an editor. In Margerie, he found both. Six weeks after they met, Lowry moved to Canada—his American visa had expired—and he asked her to follow him. She agreed. Margerie wanted Lowry to be a great writer almost as much as he did, and even in what he described as a "freezing bison-smelling attic in Vancouver" she got him to work. Lowry's sordid habits did not daunt her; she could drink nearly as much gin as he could. She told another Lowry biographer, Douglas Day, that she had once found him passed out in a Vancouver whorehouse, having sold all his clothes for liquor except his underwear. She demanded that the proprietor give Lowry something to wear; after he got dressed, she stood by him as he begged on the street for money to buy beer.
In 1940, Lowry and Margerie married, and she took his name. Lowry began working more intensely on "Volcano." His original manuscript, a short draft, had emerged from an incident that Lowry and Jan Gabrial had seen in Mexico. On a bus trip, they had come upon an Indian peasant lying by the road, apparently dying; the bus driver stopped, and one of the passengers got out and robbed the Indian. Lowry began to expand the story with Margerie's guidance. He wrote to Aiken, "We work together on it day and night." After Lowry wrote fresh material in longhand, Margerie typed it and offered criticism, a document they called the "margerieversion"; he then made revisions, and the cycle began again. Within six months, Lowry had produced a second draft.
The new version of the novel was his most sustained and inventive fiction to date. His portrait of an unravelling drunk was unnervingly intimate. The manuscript had better pacing, thanks to Margerie, and it had an extensive overlay of symbolism, thanks to Lowry, who was an admirer of Baudelaire. "I felt that it is the first real book I've written," Lowry wrote to Aiken at the time. He credited his relationship with Margerie for the difference: "I'm more than glad I never got a chance to finish it without her."
The manuscript remained flawed. Much of the dialogue was wooden—"Get this so you can hear it," Lowry lectured himself in the margins—and the plotting was often heavy-handed. "I wonder what's happened to that peón we had to leave beside the road," one character comments in the first chapter. "Gosh, that was an ugly business." When Lowry's agent, Harold Matson, submitted the new version of "Volcano" to publishers, twelve in all, not one accepted it. Lowry collapsed, but with Margerie at his side he pulled through. Together, they wrote to Matson, admitting that the manuscript still needed work. "Youth plus booze plus hysterical identifications plus vanity plus self-deception" was Lowry's explanation of what had gone wrong.
In August, 1940, they learned of a coastal village north of Vancouver, on the Burrard Inlet, called Dollarton, and rented a ramshackle cottage there. (Lowry was rich on paper, by the terms of a family trust set up in 1938, but the family gave him access only to the interest.) Built on land owned by the city, the house had no heat, electricity, or running water. Eight months later, they bought a nearby shack. After building a swimming pier with their own hands, they resumed work on "Volcano." They largely gave up drinking, and each morning, when Margerie typed Lowry's latest additions, he swam in the inlet, surrounded by seagulls and mergansers. They fetched their drinking water from a nearby stream, and local fishermen dropped buckets of crabs on their pier. Margerie was writing, too—she told Douglas Day that she had begun her first mystery novel, "The Shapes That Creep," to give Lowry something literary to assist on after "Volcano" was rejected.
According to Day, she finished the mystery in a few months, then quickly wrote another, a noirish tale called "The Last Twist of the Knife." At one point, an ingénue named Dora, who is falsely accused of murder, declares, "If you and your high-class friends think you can pin this on me because I'm poor and helpless and you're rich and important, you can just think again." Another character, Delight Dryden, braves a murder inquest, returning "the Coroner's benevolent gaze with artistically mingled fear and innocence." Scribners accepted both of Margerie's books for publication.
After Lowry's death, Margerie sold his papers to the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. The "Volcano" manuscripts reveal the process of refinement that took place in Dollarton. The two rewrote many sentences over and over, as Margerie kept an eye out for Lowry's tics. On one page, she writes, " 'Terrifying'—watch this word Malc!," and crosses it out in the two places where it appears. On another page, Yvonne states, "We won't have the moon tonight." Margerie writes, "Watch this moon—you've got one in Chapter xii." In the margin of one version of the consul's last monologue, Lowry asks, "Is all this a bit muddled?" Margerie's response is not recorded, but the next draft is tighter. "A good, thorough agonizing cut," Lowry writes after Margerie has deleted a hokey moment in which a character imagines that he hears the consul lamenting his failure to reconcile with his wife: "If only I had not been so sure I were the stronger." In a 1950 letter to a fan, Lowry said of the revising process, "After a while it began to make a noise like music."
To the novel's tremendous benefit, Margerie helped Lowry reconsider its dismissive portrait of his first wife. Originally, Yvonne was the consul's daughter, a trifling character fixated on the needs of her equally callow boyfriend. "She looked at herself in the mirror," Lowry writes, soon after she arrives in Mexico to see her father. "She was a white satin nightgown. She was a robe, but where was the person?" In subsequent manuscripts, Margerie's handwriting can be seen changing Yvonne from daughter to wife; Margerie also helps shape the character, refining Yvonne's feelings about a past lover and amplifying her background, which is similar to her own—Yvonne is an actress who has appeared in "Western pictures." In the published version, Yvonne is closer to how Margerie saw herself: more woman than girl, more giving and forgiving. She is also able to think independently—parts of the novel are written from her point of view. Significantly, she is perhaps the only Lowry character who doesn't drink to excess.
The archive also indicates that Lowry and Margerie borrowed freely from each other's work. After they agreed that Yvonne should die, Margerie later recalled to biographers, she suggested that Yvonne could be trampled by a runaway horse. She was at work on a third novel, "Horse in the Sky," which contained such a death: "The horse suddenly . . . screamed in terror. He reared, reared again, then plunged wildly, in uncontrollable panic." Lowry liked the idea; near the end of "Volcano," Yvonne now "saw, by a brilliant flash of lightning, the riderless horse. . . . She heard herself scream as the animal turned towards her and upon her." Lowry, in a letter to his friend the novelist David Markson, explained, "We swop horses and archetypes to each other all the time."
At the end of 1944, Lowry finished the novel. In February, 1946, while he and Margerie were in Mexico, revisiting some of the locales of the book, he received acceptance letters from Jonathan Cape, a publisher in England, and from Reynal & Hitchcock, an American publisher, on the same day. To Jonathan Cape, he wrote, "We are wallowing in success, feeling in fact like starving men whose eyes are being stuffed with potatoes."
In February of 1947, as "Volcano" began receiving excellent reviews, Lowry and Margerie made a celebratory visit to New York. ("The city buzzes with your name," a friend wrote.) But for Lowry the trip was a horror. He had begun drinking again, and, when literary celebrities crowded to congratulate him at a party in his honor, he was too inebriated to respond. Dawn Powell, who was there, noted his distress in her diary. "He is the original Consul in the book," she wrote, "a curious kind of person—handsome, vigorous, drunk—with an aura of genius about him and a personal electricity almost dangerous, sense of demon-possessed." In another entry, she noted of Lowry, "Wife Marjorie [sic] in control."
For many of Lowry's literary friends, the publication rounds were their introduction to Margerie, and though they applauded her effect on him, they found her pretentious and overly invested in her association with an English genius. David Markson, one of Lowry's last surviving friends, told me, "She had a strange manner of speech. She was always saying things like 'May I have a little more milk in my Scotch, duckie?' Aiken came over one evening and afterward wrote me, 'Please don't invite me when she is here.' "
Already Lowry was worrying that he might never write another book as good as "Volcano." After the New York trip, he and Margerie briefly returned to Dollarton, where they worked on a story about a couple looking for a new home, based on a visit they had made in 1946 to an island in British Columbia called Gabriola. They submitted the story, "October Ferry to Gabriola," to their agent under a double byline; it did not sell, however. In November, 1947, they began a yearlong grand tour of Europe. Margerie had wanted the trip—she craved a larger stage than Dollarton provided. Lowry knew that abandoning his austere life was not good for him. "The French have enormous vitality," he wrote to Margerie's sister after visiting Paris. "But it's a quality I don't always admire. I like things rather sleepy."
A friend, spotting him drunk in London, asked him what was next, and Lowry joked that he was writing "Under Under the Volcano." He and Margerie began to quarrel. Lowry was by turns depressed and threatening: one night in the South of France, during a fight, he grabbed her by the neck; later, she found him a sanitarium outside Rome and took an adjoining room. Sneaking past a guard, he tried to strangle her again. At one point, he boasted in a letter to his French translator, he capped off nine whiskeys—six of them doubles—with the sedative Soneryl. During their European tour, Margerie wrote a letter to Albert Erskine, Lowry's American editor, claiming that Lowry was "becoming actively dangerous: first to himself & me but now more savage towards everyone who crosses him in any way." She got into the habit of giving him phenobarbital at night, to calm him.
Her journal entries, which are also at the University of British Columbia, reveal her anger. In an entry from December, 1947, she writes, "Altho he makes a great pretense of working . . . & of exercising & tries to fool me it is too obvious he is drinking all afternoon. . . . I had thought when I adored him as tho he were a god that love could survive anything but I begin to think that there are certain insults to human dignity that one should not survive." She had also begun wondering about the effect of their folie à deux on her own creativity: "I have stopped thinking of myself as an artist because the last years my whole consciousness has been so completely absorbed by Malc & his immediate desires & storms." Around the same time, she asked in her journal, "Is it conceivable that a man's weakness can be so strong, that such evil can overpower me & exhaust me to the point that I become evil too?"
They came back to Dollarton in January, 1949, and Lowry sobered up. He took up several projects, including "Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid," a fictionalized account of his 1946 trip to Mexico with Margerie. For a time, the collaboration between Lowry and Margerie grew more harmonious. They co-wrote a screenplay of Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night," which M-G-M expressed interest in. It was never produced, but Christopher Isherwood wrote Lowry to praise it. "It ought to be printed as well as played," he said.
In 1950, Lowry returned to the "October Ferry" manuscript that he and Margerie had written. Around this time, the city government of Vancouver intensified an effort to evict the squatters of Dollarton, and Lowry's mood darkened. He expanded the draft of "October Ferry" into a short novel, and folded in an eviction motif. He wrote quickly, without the false starts that were typical of his writing. He thought that he had a clear vision for a novel. "I have completely rewritten it by myself and finally I'm extremely pleased with it," he wrote to Matson.
It was the last positive thing he would write about the book for seven years. In April, 1952, Erskine, who had moved to Random House, put him on retainer; but by August Lowry had become, as he wrote to Erskine, "half dead with discouragement." In the summer of 1953, in a letter to Erskine, he said that the challenge of writing the book was "a matter of life or death, or rebirth, as it were, for its author, not to say sanity or otherwise." The story kept rocking to and fro; the voyage to Gabriola went from real to metaphorical, then back again. "At my back I always hear Time's winged chariot changing gear," Lowry joked to Erskine.
Lowry and Margerie kept up their routine of swimming, eating crabs, and working on the book. They exchanged comments first in written form, then in conversation. But Lowry couldn't stop drinking, and the book's focus was changing daily—each new event in their lives was crammed into its pages. After Margerie gave him the omnibus edition of a writer named Charles Fort, whose work charted inexplicable coincidences, Lowry added to his book a chapter called "The Elements Follow You Around Sir," in which his alter ego stumbles upon Fort's book in a library. And, after they moved to a hotel in Vancouver during a cold winter, the hotel showed up in the draft. Between drafts three and seven, two time schemes emerged, and Lowry had trouble keeping them straight. The birth date of the couple's child, Tommy, fluctuates by four years. Lowry scribbled in the margin, "How old is Tommy? Check."
The collaborators began to despair. "The work has suffered," Lowry wrote to Erskine. "And so has she. And so, by God, have I. . . . This damned thing . . . has cost me more pains than all the 'Volcano' put together." As the Lowry archive reveals, his output had become a torrent of words flowing nowhere. Deletions grew more frequent. He was now rewriting sentences almost spastically. Vik Doyen, a Belgian academic who has made a definitive study of the "October Ferry" drafts, told me, "You feel sadness, the waste of possibilities and of genius."
At one point in the text of "October Ferry," the husband sees a prostitute at a newsstand. Lowry tries to capture her: "A woman seemingly out of the blue . . . with beautiful legs, eyed him, swaying her hips with aimless lust." He crosses this out, and substitutes, "A heavily painted young woman, evidently a premature noctambulist, wearing clothes & shoes so new they seemed just to have been stolen, eyed him, half humming." He crosses this out, too. Above such pages, Lowry often writes invocations, in small lettering, to the patron saint of lost causes: "St. Jude S.O.S."; "St. Jude Help me to think through this impossibility." At other times, he pleads to Turgenev, God, and "E. A. Poe."
Margerie could not be as helpful to Lowry as she had been with "Volcano." The portrayal of Jacqueline, the wife, in "October Ferry" was two-dimensional, just as the initial conception of Yvonne in "Volcano" had been, but, this time, Margerie could not offer an outsider's perspective—Jacqueline was based on her. As Lowry grew angrier with himself, his protagonist grew angrier at his wife. In one draft, the wife complains about the "goddam shack" that is obsessing her husband, and pettily points out that, "for a woman," its primitive stove was terribly inconvenient. In the back-and-forth notes that accompany the passage, Margerie reminded Lowry that her initial response to Dollarton was more complicated. She proposes adding this nuance: "He recalled the tumble-down dirt & disorder of the 'Goddam shack' when they'd first seen it, & how under her hands it had become . . . beautiful; he recalled the vision, the enthusiasm, the love with which she had labored." Lowry ignored her; above this suggestion he writes, "phony, sentimental, bourgeois."
Around the same time, Lowry and Margerie were working on another autobiographical novel, "La Mordida." In one editorial exchange, their marital tension becomes overt. "I absolutely refuse to be made out such a fool," Margerie writes in a comment. "This is not true; why not tell the truth?" And, in a testy exchange over "October Ferry," Lowry writes to Margerie, "Try to imagine yourself reading the story in bed etc. etc.—occasionally at least as a reader rather than a writer." To which Margerie replies, with underscoring, "SEE MY NOTES." Lowry begins to respond to her criticisms with posturing. Of one scene from "October Ferry," in which a character dreams that he is venturing inside a dark cave, he writes, "With a little discipline, one of the high spots in English literature."
These disputes found no resolution in print or in life. Even in the relative calm of Dollarton, Margerie was worn out. She wrote to David Markson, Lowry's friend, that "October Ferry" had become a "blood sucking monster." (These words, which are in the archive, appear on a letter begun by Lowry that describes his struggle with "October Ferry," but he was apparently too drunk to finish it; Margerie did.) Soon, Dollarton would be gone, too. Bulldozers had knocked down most of the shacks. Albert Erskine had cancelled Lowry's contract with Random House, because, as he told the biographer Gordon Bowker, the draft of "October Ferry" sent to him by Lowry was "just about as tedious as anything I'd ever read." Margerie was growing tired of living twenty-five hundred miles away from New York—having published three novels, she felt that she and Lowry ought to have a more normal life, one that might help her career. (Her books had not sold especially well.) She felt that her health was also suffering in the damp and cold of Dollarton. And Lowry's drinking made him entirely dependent on her.
In 1954, Margerie persuaded Lowry that they had to leave Dollarton. They decided to move to Taormina, in Sicily—in the shadow of Mt. Etna, an idea that gave Lowry pleasure. On the way to Europe, they passed through New York and stayed with David Markson. Margerie and Markson left Lowry for a time in Markson's apartment, in Morningside Heights, with just a six-pack of beer. Upon their return, Lowry met them with what Markson remembers as a "sheepish" look: Lowry had drunk Markson's aftershave. Markson noticed that Margerie, in an attempt to take the edge off Lowry's hangovers, shoved vitamins down his throat before sending him to bed.
Margerie and Lowry sailed for Sicily. Lowry disliked Taormina and missed Dollarton. In Italy, he did not write a word of fiction; he barely wrote a letter. Margerie toured the sights, while Lowry drank and menaced her. At night, Margerie locked up the liquor in her room while Lowry begged for a drink outside. Sometimes she gave him Cognac and pentobarbital tablets to get to sleep. And she continued giving him vitamin pills when he got drunk. Their friends thought that the couple should break up—no one could understand how Margerie tolerated the relationship. Eventually, Italy proved too much even for Margerie. She complained of gallbladder problems. After eight months, they went to London. Margerie, suffering from nervous exhaustion, checked herself in to a hospital.
Lowry, in turn, was persuaded by friends to see a doctor for his alcoholism. At a hospital in Wimbledon, in November, 1955, he met a psychiatrist named Michael Raymond, whom he grew to trust. Raymond gave Lowry a course of "aversion therapy," which consisted of an injection of apomorphine followed by heavy drinking. The goal was for the patient to associate alcohol with the nausea brought on by the medicine. Raymond wanted Lowry to be near him after he was discharged, and in 1956 Margerie rented a house, known as the White Cottage, in the village of Ripe. After a relapse—caused, in part, by Margerie's continued drinking in front of her husband—and another, more intense course of aversion therapy that summer, Lowry returned to the cottage, determined to give up liquor for good.
In Ripe, Lowry sustained himself on Cydrax, a non-alcoholic cider that Raymond had recommended. He was able to work in earnest on "October Ferry" for the first time in three years, and soon boasted to Markson that he was back in the "Sacred or Budding Groove." In a genial mood, he described his rebirth to Dr. Raymond with some doggerel:
To Lowry's surprise, his improvement did not thrill Margerie. She began drinking more heavily, and spent most days sitting in the house, shaking and crying. In October of 1956, she checked herself back in to a hospital for a long course of heavy sedation meant to calm her nerves. Lowry called her therapy "her Rip Van Winkle snooze."
Before entering the hospital, Margerie had told their friend Dorothy Templeton that she'd had enough: she was putting aside all the money she could for the day she would leave Lowry. "She is absolutely callous towards ML," Templeton wrote her companion, Harvey Burt, in July, 1956. "Her idea of love is not mine or the average woman's."
During Margerie's hospital stay, Lowry wrote her letters about how happy he was in Ripe now; of working steadily again; of being the object of competition between their landlady and the vicar's housekeeper, who gave him his meals. He knew that his words did not make Margerie smile. He writes in his poem to Raymond, "As with the see-saw in the childhood rhyme / Now I am riding high poor Margerie is low." Lowry speculated to Markson that Margerie felt "robbed of the potential in-a-sense nurseable object." He did not know what to do about the change, and as a novelist part of him wanted simply to observe it. He wrote Markson, "The trouble is it is part of the plot of the book."
The village of Ripe has changed little in fifty years. A dozen houses, a roundabout, and a pub named the Lamb Inn remain its center. The narrow lanes out of the village still give way to the farmland of Sussex. At Lowry's grave, a terra-cotta marker bearing the last lines of "Volcano" now rests in front of his weathered headstone. The White Cottage, where Lowry died, is down a short pebble lane from the pub; a few months after the Lowrys arrived, in 1956, the proprietor banned them because Lowry was unruly.
In 2004, the Times Literary Supplement published a provocative article by Gordon Bowker, Lowry's most capable biographer, which revived some longunanswered questions about Lowry's final days in Ripe. How trustworthy was the coroner's verdict of death by "misadventure," or Margerie's insistence that her husband had committed suicide? Why would Lowry, in good spirits and finally writing again, kill himself? "Volcano" was about to be reissued as a Vintage Classics paperback. And Hollywood directors were awakening to the book's cinematic potential; José Quintero had expressed particular interest. Jan Gabrial, Lowry's first wife, told an interviewer shortly before she died, in 2001, "Malcolm's death, to me, isn't quite explained."
In England, coroners' reports are usually sealed for seventy-five years. But Bowker had persuaded the Sussex coroner to give him Lowry's. The document contained some news: after Lowry's death, Margerie could not at first find the bottle for the pills that Lowry had swallowed, and only produced it for the police several hours later. The bottle had been stashed in one of his drawers. The coroner's report also recorded Margerie's claim that she had found the bottle with its top screwed on—meticulous behavior for a man as sloppy as Lowry. Even at the time of his death, friends had wondered about the challenge that unscrewing a top would have posed for Lowry. Harvey Burt, in a letter written four months after Lowry died, expressed doubt that he could have done it: "I can't understand. . . . His powers of coördination at such times were very low."
In the article, Bowker noted Margerie's habit of dosing Lowry with vitamin pills. He then offered a speculation: Lowry would not have noticed if what she fed him that night were not vitamins but sodium amytal, the barbiturate that helped kill him. He suggested that Margerie had developed a crush on a writer friend, Peter Churchill, a viscount and a recent widower. Finally, Bowker laid out an accusation of murder: "Margerie had the motive (hankering after Churchill), the means (the pill-feeding ritual) and the opportunity (the cottage after dark)."
Bowker also reported that Margerie and Winnie Mason, the landlady, had both testified to the police that they had spent the evening chatting in Mason's cottage, next door. Later, however, they both said that Margerie had been at home with Lowry. (Margerie made this claim in a letter to Lowry's French translator, Mason in a 1966 BBC interview.) For Bowker, these statements suggested collusion.
Lowry scholars did not take offense at the murder theory when the T.L.S. published it. Many of them have been drawn to Lowry as much by the drama of his life as by his writing. On his birthday, they gather at Dollarton and drink gin. The possibility of foul play has only added zest to their work. Bowker's notion of a romantic motive did not strike them as convincing, though. By the fatal night, Margerie was so run-down by Lowry that she could barely get out of bed; she was in no state to take a lover. For some Lowry scholars, this became the point: the idea of murdering Lowry was not just conceivable but almost justifiable. Lowry had not only used Margerie's talent; he had taken over her life. Then, after abusing and exploiting her for eighteen years, he had grown weary of her. Recently, I asked a leading Lowry scholar, Sherrill Grace, a professor at the University of British Columbia, who edited the two-volume edition of Lowry's collected letters, if Margerie murdered Lowry. "Gordon's right," she told me, then said of Margerie, "She should have done it sooner!"
The White Cottage is now owned by a farmer and his wife. When I knocked on their door this summer, they invited me to walk around the house. The cottage is dark and oppressively small, though a previous owner had installed a skylight in the kitchen. The owners had not read "Under the Volcano," but they knew about Lowry. We walked through a room with exposed wood beams and a hearth. "This was Lowry's study," the husband told me, showing me the room in which Lowry had wrestled with "October Ferry." The murder rumor had recently reached them—some visiting Japanese academics had mentioned it.
By the time the police arrived at the White Cottage on the morning of June 27th, Lowry had likely been dead for hours. He lay on his back by the side of Margerie's bed, the rug rumpled beneath him. According to the coroner's report, a transcript of which Bowker shared with me, a "quantity of sliced cold cooked meat" was by Lowry's arm. On the other side of the bed was a broken orange-squash bottle and a broken gin bottle. There were glass splinters on Lowry's chest and blood on his left palm. Two chairs had been thrown: an easy chair lay on its side by the window; a kitchen chair had been smashed to pieces.
After Margerie found Lowry's body, a constable named William Lord, from the nearby town of Selmeston, took her statement and that of Mason, the landlady. Margerie also spoke of what happened that night to Douglas Day. Lowry, she said, had once again fallen off the wagon. With the Lamb Inn off limits, they had walked to the Yew Tree pub in Chalvington, a mile away, where they drank beer. (The bartender recalled Margerie crying.) Lowry then bought a bottle of gin, over her objections, saying that it would cheer her up—he told the bartender that she was sad over their lost Dollarton home—and they walked back to Ripe on the country lane. They were planning to listen to the radio. Lowry began drinking from the bottle, getting wilder. Margerie said that after a BBC concert—Leopold Stokowski conducting Stravinsky—Lowry began "raving." He turned up the radio. Margerie, who had been downstairs making supper, came up and turned it down, not wanting to disturb Winnie Mason next door.
According to the police report, Lowry struck Margerie. She grabbed the gin bottle and broke it to keep him from drinking it. Lowry then brandished the broken bottle and chased Margerie downstairs; she recalled to Douglas Day that her husband had "a fiendish look on his face." She took refuge in Mason's house. She told Day that she then took a sleeping pill—she did not explain how she came to have one with her—and went to sleep. (Both she and Lowry were heavy users of sleeping pills; Lowry called them his "pink things." They both had prescriptions for sodium amytal. In October, 1956, Lowry wrote Margerie of Dr. Raymond's appearing at his door in Ripe, "bearing, in hand like a malt-shovel, a half-dozen sodium amytals to tide me over.")
Lowry's death made the regional paper, the Brighton Argus, with the headline "SHE BROKE GIN BOTTLE—FOUND HUSBAND DEAD." All the same, the Sussex police did not press an investigation. Lowry had no connections in the area. No one knew who he was. (The Argus called him "Clarence Lowry," and no other British paper recorded his death.) Locals did not like him; Roy Medhurst, the last living Ripe resident who knew Lowry, told me that Lowry was a "drunken yob" and said that his death left "some people relieved."
The inquest was routine. Constable Lord told the coroner what he saw. Winnie Mason, in her deposition, recalled Margerie showing up at her door, distraught, and claimed that Margerie had not gone out after retiring to a camp bed that she had made for her. If she had, Mason insisted, "I would most certainly have heard her, being a light sleeper, and also my dog would have barked."
Margerie at first told friends that there had been a suicide note but then said that there wasn't. The lack of a note surprised them. Alcohol would hardly have stopped his pen—he wrote while drunk all the time. And he was someone for whom written words accompanied nearly every moment of life; he even scrawled observations as he sat drunk in bars. Some four hundred jotted notes to Margerie are in the British Columbia archive—messages from El Leon to Miss Hartebeeste. "Lowry was always saying, 'Make notes,' " Markson told me. Lowry's despair was always part theatre; and, for such a person, self-destruction practically demanded documentation.
The coroner did not call Lowry's psychiatrist, Dr. Raymond, who, far from considering Lowry "incurable," as Margerie told the police, thought that he was getting better. Angry that Margerie had kept drinking in Lowry's presence, he later refused to treat her for her emotional exhaustion. He also thought that Lowry's spiritual beliefs precluded suicide. The coroner failed to call members of Lowry's family—he had three older brothers. Had he done so, they might have told him that they were suspicious of Margerie; in an unpublished reminiscence, one of the brothers called her "the very material Margerie," adding that the Lowrys, who thought she wore too much jewelry, referred to her as Bangles. Nor did the coroner speak to Dorothy Templeton and Harvey Burt, the couple who knew the Lowrys best. They had spent their summers near them in Dollarton for years; more recently, Templeton had visited them in Sicily, where Lowry had confided to her that Margerie had complained until he named her as his sole beneficiary. (In 1945, Lowry's father died, leaving a fortune that was the equivalent of ten million dollars.) In a letter, Templeton wrote of the couple, "I'm sure if she knew he would never write again she would hope for widowhood." In another letter, she recalled watching them argue one night in Taormina, when "all of a sudden Marg turned into a ferocious maniac" and beat up the enormous, cowering, and incapacitated Lowry. And on another occasion, she wrote, Margerie broke Lowry's nose in a fight in "the corso, with hundreds looking on." (Margerie told Douglas Day that this incident never occurred.)
"They think I murdered him," Margerie told Burt and Templeton when they came to Ripe to help her, shortly after Lowry's death. Fairly or not, Burt and Templeton began to suspect Margerie, too. Publicly, she seemed devastated, but they found her oddly energized in private. According to Bowker, to whom they spoke extensively, they thought that Margerie was playing the distraught widow.
In Ripe, I saw that Winnie Mason's cottage was so close to the Lowrys' that they almost formed one building. Margerie could easily have fled Lowry in his drunken rage, then returned home later for a pill. Perhaps, as she looked around for the sodium amytal, a decade of frustration caught up with her. Maybe she went to Lowry and told him that he'd better start preparing for his hangover with some vitamins. Her conciliatory manner would not have surprised him; their battles were often followed by more tender exchanges. Margerie, herself soothed by the barbiturate, could have returned to bed at Mason's several minutes before the pills would have knocked Lowry to the floor. The next day, Margerie would have discovered the body, just as she said she had.
Lowry's death will always remain a mystery. Even if his body were exhumed, it would offer no insight into how the barbiturates had entered his system. Maybe Margerie meant only to make Lowry sleep, as she had many times before—she had been drinking, too, and might have given too many pills by mistake. David Markson said of the murder theory, "What do I think? What I think is he was a drunk and then he died."
New York Review Books has just published a compilation of Lowry's work, including portions of the posthumous books, which have long been out of print. "The Voyage That Never Ends," as the volume is called, shows Lowry's extraordinary imagination and his ability to pull the English language in whatever direction he wanted to go. A typical aphorism: "The lightning, a good writer, did not repeat itself." And this description of a storm at sea: "One could see, as the ship lurched . . . great doctor of divinity's gowns of seas furling to leeward, the foam like lamb's wool." But the anthology does not change the impression that Lowry was a writer who brought only one significant book to fruition.
"Under the Volcano"—his "ultima thule of the spirit," as he called it—contains a remarkable death scene, and some of the language evokes Lowry's own. The Mexican paramilitaries close in on the consul. One pulls out a pistol and shoots him, then shoots him twice more, and the world becomes a giant symbol of despair: "Suddenly he screamed, and it was as though this scream were being tossed from one tree to another, as its echo returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, pitying." This is pure Baudelaire. But, at the moment when the consul sees the gun firing, Lowry sees things more plainly: "At first the Consul felt a queer relief. Now he realized he had been shot. He fell on one knee, then, with a groan, flat on his face in the grass. 'Christ,' he remarked, puzzled, 'this is a dingy way to die.' "
After Lowry's death, Margerie never married again, and never published another of her own books. She moved back to Taormina, while Lowry's family dragged its feet over her inheritance. After she threatened to move in with them, they released a small sum. "For all they care, I can starve in Sicily," she wrote Dorothy Templeton, four months after Lowry's death. "I am dead or wish I were," she wrote in another postcard. She had already begun to look for publishable work in the trunk of manuscripts that Lowry left behind.
Soon, most of Lowry's friends and family dropped her. "I haven't heard one bloody word from anybody in England since I left," she wrote Templeton and Burt in 1959. (When I met Lowry's great-nephew Jeremy Lowry in England this summer and asked about the family's opinion of Margerie, he said, "She was never referred to.") Margerie settled in Los Angeles and dedicated herself to her husband's legacy. Her agent, Peter Matson, Harold Matson's son, remembers her as a small, intense, heavy-drinking woman who "seemed to live very much in the past." She wrote Burt in 1971, "Malc is hotter than ever in Paris and Le Monde gave two full pages to him last fall," but noted a few months later that she warded off her "grief and troubles with vodka, mixed with ice and plain water."
The reputation of "Under the Volcano" kept rising with the years. Critics extolled it as the last great modernist novel, and scholars worked to unweave its web of symbols. "The doctorates are piling up all over the U.S. and Canada," Margerie wrote to Burt and Templeton in 1965. In 1998, the board of the Modern Library ranked it No. 11 of the best hundred books of the twentieth century. Gabriel García Márquez has said that it was probably the novel that he had read the most often in his life.
Every four or five years until her death, Margerie published a novel or story collection that she had retrieved from the unpublished part of the "bolus," as Lowry called his writing. Most scholars did not think that these works were anywhere near the level of "Volcano," and wondered if Margerie was truly fulfilling Lowry's wishes in offering them to the public. "I told Margerie not to publish them," David Markson remembers. Margerie told Douglas Day that she found such criticisms ridiculous. In a letter, she said, "I certainly wrote plenty of lines, and scenes, when I was editing 'The Forest Path' and 'Through the Panama' "—stories that Lowry completed—"both of which have received high praise and people write me about them all the time." She was keeping alive her side of their collaboration—the selecting and the shaping—even though the man who sometimes rejected and improved upon her ideas was silent.
In 1970, Margerie finally published "October Ferry to Gabriola." A short afterword, titled "About the Author," claimed that Margerie had based her edit on "an almost complete revision" that Lowry had been working on just before his death. This was wishful thinking: there had been no such revision, just thousands of pages of a half-dozen versions, none close to complete. Margerie pulled sections from different drafts and gave the book the happy ending that she had been pressing for: the Lowry stand-in realizes that his nostalgia for the squatter's shack is damaging his marriage. He cuts his ties to the past and the couple moves to Gabriola to begin life again. Margerie did not include any of the material from Lowry's final burst of inspiration—the pages written in Ripe, largely without her, which might have marked a creative renewal for him.
During this time, Lowry produced fascinating additions to "October Ferry"—almost a hundred pages, written in his tiny hand, in which he began to examine what he called the "alcoholocaust" of his life, and the way that drinking had affected his art. He wrote about his aversion treatment, and clearly expected to integrate this experience into the story of Ethan Llewelyn, the protagonist of "October Ferry." His talent for imagery is apparent when he merges the nautical and the medical to describe "a psychiatric ward at noon, waiting for the doctors to pass through, with two tall nurses at anchor." He had also put wholesale into the draft various letters of apology that he had written to Margerie over the years. None of this ambitious work was finished, but it pointed to a novel very different from the ones that Lowry had written before, one that might have taken him not under "Under the Volcano" but beyond it.
When Margerie consigned these manuscripts to the University of British Columbia, she added notes in her looping script. "Rambling notes," one said. "Seems like a dissertation on alcohol." Another said, "Nothing useful here." ♦
CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, "Day of the Dead," D. T. Max identifies Peter Matson as Harold Matson's son. In fact, he is Harold Matson's nephew. We regret the error.


text:
Fear, Loathing and Laura Bush: Reflections on the Functions of Mass Panic
Published as a ZNet Commentary, March 7, 2003
Laura Bush wants everyone to just relax; and more to the point, she wants the media to aid in the process of nerve-calming by restraining themselves from what she sees as a growing tendency to scare the public with stories of impending cataclysm.
From repetitive coverage of the "orange alert" announced by Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, to the airing of extended sections of Osama bin Laden's latest anti-love letter, the First Lady worries that the children might become overanxious. After all, it's difficult to explain to a nine-year old why mommy and daddy are running around the house, covering doors with plastic and sealing off windows with duct tape. As Lady Bush explained to an audience in New York recently, "It's a bit like crying wolf…you know it hasn't happened yet."
Quite so, though such a statement begs the obvious if impolite question: namely, who does she think has been feeding information to the press in the first place? Who said we have to launch a "preventative war" with Iraq because to wait might result in "mushroom clouds" over America? Simply put, were it not for Laura Bush's husband and his henchmen raising the red flag every time bin Laden farts there would be no news to exaggerate. 24-hour news cycles are a lot easier to fill when you're getting faxes every half-hour from the Pentagon proclaiming "new evidence" of Saddam Hussein's bad faith, provided by sources you can't name, but that the American public should nonetheless trust, or so we're told.
Perhaps the first maven of literacy — who has apparently forgotten the maxim that "charity begins at home" — should worry less about the media and a bit more about an Office of Homeland Security that puts out warnings based on tips from folks who weren't even given a polygraph for two weeks, and when they were, failed it. And just how much is this cracker-jack unit costing us again?
Fear isn't something created by the media, so much as by the political leaders they cover. It is politicians whose stock in trade is conjuring up insecurity among the public; after all, what better way to convince them to support civil liberties restrictions like those in the Patriot Act; what better way to convince them to support a war that might kill, according to UN estimates, a half-million Iraqis. Most Americans are decent people who don't relish the thought of such bloodshed. But if told that it's "them or us," even the most magnanimous soul can be turned into a reactionary automaton who will countenance mass murder.
Fear is functional. It serves the interests not only of the media, which can pull larger ratings in the face of crisis, but also the interests of elected officials who need public panic to justify their policies. Indeed, without the fear being generated by this Administration, Laura Bush would be looking at a guaranteed change of residence in two years, seeing as how the economy is in the crapper and her hubby's plan to rescue it can't even get the support of a conservative economist like Alan Greenspan. Far from criticizing media scare coverage, she should be welcoming it as the only thing keeping her from those hot Texas summers on the Crawford Ranch.
Fear always serves the interests of elites. Throughout history they have sought to identify dangers from which they insist their subjects must be protected: witches, Jewish financiers, Papists, freemasons, Indians, immigrants, atheists, communists, drug dealers, rebellious slaves, the Mafia, the Black Panthers, jazz, rock and roll and now rap music, the "homosexual lifestyle," satanic ritual abuse, day care operators who molest children, and now Muslim terrorists. And in each case, the generation of fear and insecurity does two things.
First, it enhances the power of elites by convincing the people to keep them in office. After all, candidates rarely tell the voters all the positive things they hope to do; rather, they focus on how they intend to "protect us" from crime, the "death tax," their opponents who seek to raid the social security trust fund, the scourge of drugs, or madmen like Saddam Hussein. Fear sells, and it gets people elected.
Secondly, fear sows mistrust in the population, which reduces the people's ability to come together for constructive social change; it hampers solidarity in other words. If the public is being encouraged to wonder if their neighbors are commies, sex offenders, sniper wannabes or members of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell, then what's the likelihood that they'll seek to forge relationships with others, especially strangers? And what will the lack of community cohesion mean in terms of the public's ability to confront serious social problems, from crumbling schools, to environmental pollution, to inadequate health care?
When whites flee the cities for "nice, safe" places in the 'burbs, because they've been convinced that their lives are endangered not from other white folks like their bomb-building, drunk driving kids, but rather by black and brown folks in the 'hood, what are the chances of whites and blacks getting together to deal with their often common economic interests?
Historically we have seen this dozens of times. Consider those labor unions that perpetuated racism and were encouraged to do so by employers who used people of color to break the strikes of white workers. By sowing suspicion of the "outsiders," elites could divide people with common interests, prevent them from acting in solidarity, and boost their own position as a result.
Likewise, slave owners in the South, who convinced poor whites to fight and perhaps die in a war that, by their own admission, was about protecting the property interests of the elite. And how did they do it? By scaring the masses about what would happen if blacks were free: they would take white jobs, rape white women, and overturn "our way of life."
Or during the Cold War, during which time we were told that we had to stop the Soviets from making inroads into "our backyard" by invading such imminent threats as Grenada. The perceived threat of communism was used to boost the careers of political elites and justify massive military spending, which in turn was good for economic elites.
In short, fear and insecurity increases the power of the state, encouraging us to trust "experts," who we're told have the specialized knowledge to protect us from the myriad dangers out there. They encourage us to mistrust our own judgment, suspect others of wrongdoing, and become less involved in political life. When one is afraid, after all, one tends to withdraw, become overwhelmed, and look for safety in the quickest manner possible, which in this case means trusting others who promise to make us safe, even if it means relinquishing certain freedoms and moving further to the authoritarian right of the political spectrum.
A population is best controlled when it's afraid. Not only controlled, but diverted. If one is worried about Saddam, or Quadaffi, or Khomeini, or Noriega, or Brezhnev, or Khrushchev, or Castro, then one isn't likely to pay as much attention to the actions of Enron, or WorldCom or Halliburton or any of a number of more localized dangers to our well-being. Suddenly, forty million people without health care or in poverty are off the front page, and rising unemployment becomes a footnote. If the public is afraid of being murdered by street criminals — who take the lives of about 15,000 people annually — then they won't likely notice the 60,000 or more who die every year because of workplace illness, disease or accidents that could have been prevented had corporations not cut corners on workplace safety standards or environmental protection.
If white parents are afraid of affirmative action and feel threatened by so-called racial preferences in places like California, they will go to the polls to ban such policies, while overlooking the erosion of state support for higher education generally, and the fact that in the last twenty years California only built one new four-year campus, while they built more than twenty prisons. Had the ratio been reversed, all college-eligible kids in the state would have had a good school to attend and affirmative action would have been largely irrelevant. But rather than take action on that simple truth, they turned on their neighbors and fought over the scraps of a pie that none of them owned to begin with.
With the fear of terrorism and Saddam, the gambit is working. Every place I travel I see letters in local papers calling on Americans to "give up some freedoms," for the sake of security: more camera surveillance, e-mail snooping, infiltration of organizations and mosques, or closing the borders and deporting immigrants. I hear folks on talk radio saying we should go to war, even if the purpose is to maintain dominance over oil, since "our way of life" depends on the substance. Ironically, these admonitions are often followed by claims that the letter-writer or caller "refuses to live in fear," because doing so would allow the terrorists to "win." This, despite the fact that fear is exactly the condition under which they live, perpetually it seems. It is the fuel that fires their votes, consumer purchases, travel decisions, all of it.
And to help throw more fuel on that fire, we now have a CIA report that claims the odds of Saddam launching an attack on the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction are 59 percent before the end of March, and that there is only a six percent chance he will never use such weapons against us. Of course the media reported this announcement, despite the fact that it has all the methodological soundness of a Tarot reading by Miss Clio. But is the panic generated by such a "revelation" the fault of George Stephanopoulos, who asked Tom Ridge about it on national TV, or is it the fault of the CIA itself, which puts out prognostications made up of whole cloth, knowing full well that much of the public will buy what it's selling? The answers are self-evident.
At the end of the day, when Laura Bush blames the media for stoking public anxiety, I would guess that there is a 91.3 percent chance that the Lady doth protest too much, and only an 8.7 percent chance that she really believes what she's saying. After all, it is 100 percent certain that fear is what pays her house note.