An Article With Innocent Intention Evokes Unintended Consequences

It started innocently enough, clicking on a link to read a blog posting entitled, “So Who Needs an Editor?” The piece was written by Tony Collins, an editor for Monarch Books. The thoughts it evoked can be considered as unintended consequences, and most certainly not what the writer had in mind. But it triggered memories of a piece of history, one that should never be forgotten.

What first struck me very unexpectedly was this statement by the editor, one he considered important enough to present as a stand-alone paragraph. “Readers need a sorting function. An editor selects what is truly worthy of the reader's money and time, from the many books that are conceived and offered.”

By way of explaining his stance, the writer had this to say. “A very well written and printed piece of theology that I saw recently, which had been designed and published by the author, was in most respects of professional standard - but the author had omitted any information about himself.”

My thought was this. If the piece of theology was “very well written,” then what was the relevance of the author’s omission of personal information? And then I remembered a time when the identity of the author was more relevant than what had been written.

Joseph Goebbels, when appointed Nazi minister for propaganda and public enlightenment, decided what books were “truly worthy of the reader’s money and time.” The books of those authors who did not make his list⎯Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and Helen Keller to name a few⎯became fuel for a fire.

It was the night of May 10, 1933, when students, organized and urged on by the Nazi regime, removed some 20,000 books from Berlin’s Royal Library and burned them in the center of Bebelplatz, an event preserved for history in what is to me, a frightening photograph.



Book burning became an issue when America entered World War Two. President Roosevelt’s words on the subject were dramatically presented.


And today, in Bebelplatz, there is a reminder of that night in 1933.


Its appearance is most dramatic at night. Beneath the plaza is a room, lined with empty bookshelves, space representing the absence of 20,000 books.



My age, education, and being a long-time student of history influence my thinking and how I sometimes react to the thoughts of others. Maybe that’s why Collins’ words, written with what I’m certain he considered noble intent, made me feel very uncomfortable,

Positive and Negative Space in Life; Depends on Being Hedgehog or Fox

Sometimes it takes the words of another person to jerk the knots out of my brain so that the jumbled thoughts lurking there can be understood and put into words. Toni McGee Causey did that with her recent post on Meanderings and Muses, that delightful blog maintained by Kaye Barley.

In case you do not know, Toni McGee is the lady author from Louisiana who has written the Bobbie Faye series, creating a character that by comparison makes Janet Evanovich’s Sephanie Plum look like an Avon lady.

Anyway, Toni McGee wrote about the architectural term, “positive and negative space,” and how it applied to life itself. Now ten years ago, I would have said…. Actually, ten years ago, I would not have been reading her posting, but if I had been, I would’ve said the lady was full of it.

Ten years ago, I was 61-years old, enjoying retirement, and going around bragging about never having had a serious illness since childhood, not even a common cold. There was no negative space in my life. It was positive, 24/7, to the point that some might have said my attitude carried a tint of arrogance.

The first hint that I was overstating the case came when a cramp began to appear each time I took the long hike from the 6th green over to the 7th tee on the local golf course. When the doctor said, “Blood clots. From an aneurysm in the artery behind your right knee,” my medical ignorance was such that I asked what kind of medication would I need. The reality was surgery, and my long life in positive space took a hit.

Along with by-pass surgery for the aneurysm, came a post-op freebie, a MERSA infection in the leg. Six months later, after eight more surgeries, still with two working legs, but one with only thirty percent of normal function, I got my first taste of negative space.

However, when a wife puts her mind to it, she can really do a job on a husband’s ego. She turned what could have been a big negative into an enjoyable positive. She suggested that since I would not be spending so much time on the course, whacking a golf ball, or on a ladder, pounding a nail, I could spend more time with her. Maybe we could find time to renew our courtship.

However, that renewed courtship came to an end four years later when she was killed in a vehicle crash. Life suddenly became an existence in a totally negative space. My only view of life was in the rearview mirror. It took time, and the urging of family and friends, but that negative universe has been turned into a positive place. I returned to my roots.

Cobbling words had been a part of my life since high school, first for profit in the newspaper business and later as a sideline to my day job when I traded my typewriter for a calculator in the business world. My wife, a high school English teacher, had served as a research assistant and editor for many years.

Our last joint project had been three plus years researching, writing, and editing a book, a biographical history of the seventeen men who formed a local civic club in the early 1920s. The book took both of us into retirement, and we mutually agreed that a break from research, writing and editing was needed.

It took two years to write my first novel, a mystery; followed by two years of the surrealistic rock/paper/scissors game that takes place between writers, agents, and publishers. When the best offer included waiting eighteen to thirty plus months to see a book in print, all negative space from my perspective, I turned to my years of experience in the business world.

A book is a product, no different that a new type of hand soap, which would never be brought to the market without a business plan. The process started last February. The product has been developed, tested and ready for the market. The business plan is in place, including introduction of the new bar of soap for public sale at a local pub during a daylong street festival in October.

“Positive AND negative space?” I share the thinking of Isaiah Berlin, which he expressed in his essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox." He divided writers and thinkers into two groups; hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea, and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea.

Berlin’s comment is not a new concept. It’s the bloodstock of the cliché. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” “He who thinks least worries most.” “A man who seeks only one out spends a lot of time looking.” “He who looks only at the sunset will never see the sunrise.” “A problem is only an opportunity to which no thought has been given.” “Don’t cry over spilled milk; get a cat.”


Think about it. Have you ever seen a fox that didn’t look like it had a contented smile on its face?

The iPad is Amazing Learning Tool; Electronic Version of Flash Cards

If God created water for ducks, then Apple created the iPad for young children.



Electronic readers are going to change how adults buy and read books, or so all the experts say. But not mentioned as often and as loudly is the potential they have as a learning tool for young children.

I gave my son an IPad, not thinking about granddaughter Kate, now two and a half years old.

As a person who grew up when flash cards for spelling and math were cutting edge technology, I find the electronic, interactive versions of these learning tools totally captivating.

And so does granddaughter Kate. Her dad gets to play with his iPad when she is not around.

Vicki Lane's "DAY OF SMALL THINGS" Viewed as a Literary Tour De Force

THE DAY OF SMALL THINGS, to be published by Dell, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, is scheduled for release on September 28, 2010.

In this, her latest novel, Vicki Lane has succeeded where others have tried, but come up short. She has faithfully and completely captured the ethos⎯the disposition, character, fundamental values and beliefs⎯of generations of people who lived the mountain region called Appalachia.

She has swept aside the problem that Joel Chandler Harris described in a New York Times article on December 27, 1884. He was quoted as saying, “It is a fatal weakness of American literature that our novelists and story-tellers can perceive only the comic side of what they are pleased to term ‘provincial life.’”

Harris was not speaking about Appalachia specifically when he used the term “provincial life.” But much of what proved the validity of his charge in the following years⎯Ma and Pa Kettle on the radio, Barney Google, Lil Abner, Snuffy Smith in the comic strips, and The Beverly Hillbillies on TV⎯have become the stereotypical image that many assign to Appalachia.

Vicki Lane is giving to readers, in THE DAY OF SMALL THINGS, the life of Birdsong Honeycutt Gentry. We got glimpses of this lady called Miss Birdie in Vicki’s first four books, the Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mysteries. But now readers will get Miss Birdie’s full story, from being a child considered simple minded to a woman of age and physical frailty, but a woman of amazing spiritual power.

Through Miss Birdie, readers will also learn the elements that made Appalachia a mysterious and often misunderstood part of America. It’s a place where a mixture of old-world lore, Native American beliefs, and fundamental religion combined to create a mindset and outlook on life far removed from the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant image that has been most often hoisted as the banner for America.

In addition to capturing the essence of the Appalachian mindset and outlook, the author has captured perfectly the language of the mountains. It’s a language, which in sentence structure and wordage, is more in keeping with sixteenth-century England than twentieth-century America. Throughout the book, it rings as natural as breathing without slipping into what so often becomes affected dialect.

Having the opportunity to read this book in advance of publication was not the reading of a novel written today. It was a journey back in time. I experienced once again life among the elders in the community where I grew up.