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journal of the plague year again

Donna Levin: Too Soon?

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Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year describes events of 1665: the Great Plague of London. From the title, as well as the writing style, one might infer that it is, indeed, an up close and personal account of his experiences during that a period when nearly seventy thousand people died.

But Defoe published the book in 1722, some fifty-seven years after the fact. He was a child of five when that particular spam hit the fan, and he relied on accounts of older relatives for both stories and details, as well as, like any author of fiction, on his imagination.

When the Covid-19 shelter-in-place was first imposed on many parts of the country (as is so often the case, California was a leader: life as we knew it came to a crashing halt on March 17th of this year), I was ready to ride it out. The first news I got was good: I went to my local Jewish Community Center and saw a note that the gym would be closed for two weeks. Hooray! What a defensible excuse to avoid a thirty-minute Stairmaster climb!

I had to keep that relief a secret, knowing that, for millions of people, this has meant job loss, children to homeschool, and worse. But that still left some millions with enough financial cushion that they could think, finally—I have time to write that novel!

Enough people not only had that idea, they acted upon it—so much so that the topic reached the culture aerie that is NPR’s Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me. On the July 13th broadcast, host Peter Sagal said that a literary agent had made a plea on behalf of her colleagues that people stop submitting their quarantine novels. “[She] told NPR that, first, if you wrote your novel in less than three months, it probably reads like it was written in two months.”

One could argue that making fun of the crushed dreams of aspiring novelists isn’t really nice, but you can’t argue with their conclusion. It’s about perspective.

I’m a classic movie fan, and my fave of faves are those made about World War II during World War II. My mother-in-law, who worked at a hotel in Los Angeles during that time, once said, “You have to remember that we really didn’t know who was going to win.”

That’s what gives those movies their special slant. It was propaganda, but it was propaganda for the good guys. These movies are about sacrificing for the greater good, for saving humanity from fascism. Number one on my list is So Proudly We Hail, because it was made at a time when the war was going badly for the U.S. in the Pacific Theater, and it centers around a group of (yes, female) nurses, putting themselves in harm’s way, and it ends with Claudette Colbert realizing that there are more important things than her love life. (Casablanca=same moral.)

If you’re interested in another decade of Hollywood propaganda, look at the 1950s. One example: in Bigger Than Life, James Mason takes too many prescription steroids, because, although he has a job as a schoolteacher and a side hustle, he can’t afford to go to the doctor. Plus ca change, plus la meme chose, amirite? When the high school coach, Walter Matthau, suggests to Mason’s wife, Barbara Rush, that she get a job to help out, she replies indignantly, “Do you think I would do that to him, Wally? Let him feel like he can’t take care of his family?” Read #1: Undermine his masculinity that way? Read #2: Women have to stay home because putting kids in daycare is a Commie thing. And no, I am not reading into this! The Wikipedia entry, while acknowledging the film’s initial financial disappointment, also summarizes Francois Truffaut’s and Jean-Luc Godard’s analysis of it as a critique, inter alia, of the overuse of prescription drugs and the abominably low salaries of public school teachers. Then again, the French love Jerry Lewis.

I digress. I’m famous for it. But we were talking about movies, at least, which are also fiction, only, unfortunately, a form that requires multiple people in the same space, unless Zoom-in-gallery-view is all we have to look forward to. The shelter-in-place immediately closed down movie theaters. (Anyone old enough to remember Polio Summers? Not I! But I heard about them—and there was no Netflix. The horror. The horror.) Hollywood postponed blockbusters, and then, as the pandemic dragged on, quietly moved them to streaming platforms.

In the past month, filming has restarted on various movies and television shows.

Production companies are coping by filming in locations with looser restrictions (no one will be filming in San Francisco), and you won’t see crowd scenes. I’ll be very interested to see what propaganda (did I say “propaganda”? I meant, “messages”) come out of Hollywood (did I say “Hollywood”? I mean “Georgia”) this time around. There may be a lot of historical settings, but stories are always seen through the lens of the time in which they are created.

But back to the “pandemic novel” that literary agents don’t want to see. Unlike journalism, which documents the day-to-day, and the hour-by-hour, a novel needs deep roots in the time and place in which the story unfolds. We need perspective. Maybe not the fifty-plus years that Defoe had, but a lot more than the six months we’ve lived through. If I’d written a quarantine novel in late March, there would have been several chapters devoted to toilet paper. Early on, Amanda Urban, doyenne of literary agents, was quoted as saying that publishers are wary of novels about the pandemic because “we don’t know what the narrative arc is.” Let’s hope it has a happy ending.

^^^

Image by Saiyabatulhamdi

Donna Levin is the author of four novels, all of which are available from Chickadee Prince Books. Her latest novel, He Could Be Another Bill Gates, is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at the bookstore right across the street from your home. Please take a look.

Hoarder

Donna Levin: Confessions of an Unrecovered Hoarder

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Hoarding is a spectrum disorder. I don’t qualify for my own reality show: One can walk through my house without using a machete to clear a path. Let’s say, however, that when I read about the older woman who had a jar labeled “pieces of string too short to save,” it touched something in me, something very deep and terrible, something I shudder to name, but it includes the syllable “hore.”

The stuff I’ve hoarded is all over the house: A friend once opened my refrigerator and remarked, “It’s too bad that penicillin’s already been discovered.” On the third floor, where I “work,” though I use the term for lack of one more precise, there are piles of papers giving birth to dust bunnies. I look at these papers – bills paid and unpaid, receipts, lists – and I think, throw it away, but then, what if I need this someday?

My local Walgreen’s and Safeway often run out of lemonade vitamin water zero, so I buy it whenever and wherever I see it. As I write, there are 46 bottles of lemonade vitamin water in the basement.

There’s also a storeroom in our basement. It’s a large, finished room, with electricity, and a cheap but functional hardwood floor. If we added plumbing and a heating vent it would easily command $1000 a month, even in San Francisco’s currently depressed rental market. Instead, it’s home to shoeboxes of “mementos” that I’ve schlepped from city to city, and apartment to house, now well into middle age. There’s a saying, “three moves is as good as a fire.” My moves haven’t even singed the cardboard.

A few months ago, my husband brought home some boxes of his old papers from the office. Hopeless romantic that he is, he invited me to keep him company while he went through them to see what he could throw out, thus implying, this is a chance for you to go through some of your old stuff!

Who could resist a fun-filled afternoon of confronting one’s most virulent demons?

In the storeroom, I grabbed a random shoebox. It turned out to be where I’d stored souvenirs from a two-week trip I took through Scandinavia with my sister, forty-five years ago. That’s forty-five, as in two generations, six presidents, and 11,745 episodes of General Hospitals. Coffee was twenty-five cents and we all thought that there would be colonies on Mars by now.

And what was in this shoebox that I’d carted from Berkeley to San Francisco to Los Angeles then back to two different San Francisco apartments, before settling in my current house? Ticket folders for SAS. Notepads with the hotel logos. Some Swedish currency.

I did throw it away. Except for the Swedish currency.

Can it possibly be a coincidence that I was doing a little “Swedish Death Cleaning”? As explained to me, Swedish Death Cleaning means that you throw away everything that your children aren’t going to want. But how do I know for certain that Sweden won’t eventually adopt the euro and that one of my children won’t want to collect krona?

A few years after the Scandinavian trip, I drove across country with a friend who was moving her car back to Los Angeles from Boston. At each place we stopped, mostly Howard Johnsons, I bought postcards. Not one postcard, mind you, three identical postcards. In case a thief took two of them?

I did throw away the Howard Johnsons postcards, but only because those images are all online now. I did not throw away the programs from plays in which I was cast when a student in the UC Berkeley drama department. And no one throws away photos, right? No matter how unflattering.

Every letter I ever received is also in a shoebox, folded in the original envelope, though the envelopes have a variety of addresses. The most recent one in twenty-five years old. Do I really think my children will want to read about Janice, or Debbie, or even letters from my longest-term friend, Doug?

No. But I kept them.

There’s something inviolable about the written word. That’s why I’ve saved every silly piece of anything I put on paper. The embarrassing attempt at a novel when I was in college. And oh, yeah, notes that my husband I wrote to each other when we were first married: “Be home at 9pm.” Immortal words.

(In the early days of email, I printed out every message I sent and received. I have several boxes of exchanges between myself and friends. I think of it as an ersatz journal.)

My last attempt at reforming hit a wall. After a round of self-administered ECT, I threw away the twenty-plus theater programs I’d brought home from trips to New York. That included the program from a July 2015, performance of Hamilton that by sheer dumb luck I saw before tickets were going for the price of a gently used Porsche.

Last weekend I watched the filmed version on Disney+. And I wanted to know exactly who of the original cast I saw. Since I haven’t been living in a bunker the past five years, I immediately recognized Lin-Manuel Miranda, Daveed Diggs, Leslie Odom Jr and others… but was Philippa Soo onstage the night was in the audience, or was it her understudy? I know I saw it mid-July, but I don’t know the exact date.

The program would tell me, since there are always inserts that announce which understudies are in for the night.

But I don’t have the program.

And I wish I did.

You see, I should have kept it.

Certain neural pathways have been reinforced. The clutter remains. My kids will have to wash it out with a hose, like the ball turret gunner. Won’t be my problem.

^^^

Donna Levin is the author of four novels, all of which are available from Chickadee Prince Books. Her latest novel, He Could Be Another Bill Gates, is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at the bookstore right across the street from your home. Please take a look.

Chickadees Talking

Editor’s Choice: Audere Conversations

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We’ve interviewed some interesting writers and artists in Audere, and if you’ve never heard of some of them, then this is the opportunity to learn more.

We interviewed the idiosyncratic filmmaker Kevin Schreck, who made his name with a great documentary on the animator Richard Williams (more on him here); the screenwriter Chen Drachman, on her new film that imagines a family’s Passover secret that will change history; Leonardo DiCaprio (the actor), whose long-ago (probably) earliest interview surfaced in these pages; the great, pseudonymous and anonymous novelist, Torsten Krol, who granted his first interview in many years to Audere, and so many of the great Chickadee Prince authors, like the post-war novelist Jay Greenfield, legal-thriller writer Ed Rucker, poet-novelist Pen Pearson, Donna Levin, the author of contemporary women’s fiction featuring characters on the autism spectrum, and even an interview with Steven s. Drachman’s fictional character, Watt O’Hugh.

We also featured a series of lively political debates between novelist Alon Preiss, on the left, and iconoclastic conservative Alan Levy, on the right.

Take a look.

Image by Suju/Pixabay

Woody Allen Memoir Cartoon

Donna Levin: Apropos of Woody Allen’s Autobiography

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On Woody Allen’s Apropos of Nothing: When I was 15, I went to the Bridge Theater, here in San Francisco, to see Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run with my dad and stepmom du jour. There weren’t three seats together, so I sat by myself, which is what they call a metaphor.

But it was just as well, because I got to do all the overly loud guffawing and chortling, I wanted without embarrassing them any further than I had when I showed up wearing a mini skirt up to my pupik.

A devoted fan

I walked out of that theater a devoted fan of Mr. Allen and have remained so, in spite of scandal and some true cinematic clunkers: September, Cassandra’s Dream, Vicky Christina Barcelona, and Irrational Man come to mind.

But then there’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan, Whatever Works, Midnight in Paris … and the movie I watch once a year: Annie Hall.

Apropos of Nothing: A scandalous memoir

For those readers who have boycotted the news for the past few months (and who can blame you?), Arcade, an imprint of Skyhorse, has just released Woody Allen’s autobiography, Apropos of Nothing.

He had trouble finding a publisher for it, and when he did, that publisher, Hachette, backed out of the deal after some of its employees staged a walkout in protest. That little piece of theater was inspired by threats by Woody’s son, Ronan Farrow, who is also a Hachette author, to break ties with the company. Farrow claims, along with others, including the purported victim herself, that Mr. Allen molested his adopted sister, Dylan.

You can read Allen’s side of the story in Apropos of Nothing, and you can read the opposition’s side of the story everywhere else, at exhaustive length. My own belief is that he’s innocent of this crime. Pedophiliacs are never “one and done.” The origins of his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn are troubling, but their marriage has now lasted 23 years, and if there were any drama (substance abuse, infidelity, tubes of toothpaste left uncapped) taking place behind the scenes, I’m pretty sure we would have heard about it. Friends and household help may be loyal, but there’s always someone who has their price.

So, that’s enough on that subject. Back to the book. Apropos of Nothing is almost 400 pages long, most of which are devoted to the rest of the author’s life and work.

No villains here

Allen first describes a childhood we’ve glimpsed in some of his movies: raised in Brooklyn by devoted parents (Allen preferred his father, even if Dad did have a bit of a gambling problem) and often extended family.

“As it is, having two loving parents, I grew up surprisingly neurotic. Why, I don’t know.” He’s adored his sister, Lettie, eight years his junior, since her birth, and they remain close today.

There are no villains here, no whining about neglect or deprivation; in an autobiography, this makes for a nice change, and almost, if not quite, compensates for his relentless description of women according to their appearance.

Of Barbara Hershey, “she was delicious to behold and gave new meaning to the word eros.” Naomi Watts is “not only very beautiful, but she has the sexiest two upper front teeth in show business.”

If observations such as these are a deal-buster, you’ll want to skip the book. (By the way, he has nothing but admiration, which he expresses in detail, for Mia Farrow as an actress. Now we really are finished with her.)

Most readers will be familiar with how Woody started in high school by writing jokes for columnists, then stumbled into television and screenwriting, and, for a while, into standup comedy.

Joining the movie business

His first involvement with the movie business was as writer for What’s New Pussycat, but he was so disappointed in the finished product that he sued to get his name taken off. After a similarly disappointing experience with What’s Up Tiger Lily, he vowed never to share artistic control with anyone, and he’s stuck to that. He wants “a paper bag with cash” and no questions.

Enough money-people have acceded to this demand that Allen has released a movie a year since 1982. (He missed 1981 but made up for it with two films in 1987.) That’s 42 films, in addition to the limited series for Amazon, A Crisis in Six Scenes (best forgotten anyway) and his not insignificant earlier output.

Flashes of brilliance

Many of them have flashes of brilliance that illuminate the darkness: that is, they make the 100 minutes (Allen’s films tend to be short) worth the watching.

But I’ve thought for some years: wouldn’t it be better to make fewer movies, and take more time on each one? He freely admits — except that it’s as much a boast as it is an admission — that he doesn’t have the patience to do a lot of rewriting, reshooting, or, usually, even to watch the dailies.

He shoots a lot of long masters (a shot that includes both actors in a scene) without much coverage (close ups on the individual actors) so when it comes time to edit, he and the editor have limited material to work with.

And he’s fine with that. He wants to knock off at 5:00 so he can catch the baseball game, presumably even in December.

These long masters do give a Woody Allen film some of their unique texture. And he manages to hire brilliant cinematographers, costume, and set and lighting designers, who cover a multiplicity of failings.

Repetition of plot devices

What they can’t hide is the repetition of plot devices: the ordinary man who becomes a murderer; the married man who falls for another woman even though he knows (and she warns him) that she’s “trouble.” His characters’ debates about the meaningless of life and the hopelessness of lasting love, are simultaneously part of his appeal to me and, at times, self-parody, presumably unintentional.

But after years of watching and re-watching Woody Allen movies, I identified a quality that only a few Hollywood films possess: they improve not only on second, but often on repeated viewings.

I walked out of Radio Days thinking, cute, but it’s no Annie Hall. But that’s like comparing every one of Eugene O’Neill’s plays to Long Day’s Journey into Night. Even Tolstoy wrote a novel that people don’t read as often as War and Peace. (That’s Resurrection, by the way, if you’re looking for something new that also comes with bragging rights.)

A few weeks ago, I saw Radio Days for probably the fourth time, and liked it better than the third time, and way better than the first time. Compare that to a movie like Forest Gump, which is feel-good and inspiring, but full of plot holes that open wide the second time around.

Parties, lunch, dinner dates … and name-dropping

Allen insists that he’s anti-social, but for a guy who doesn’t like going out, there are an awful lot of descriptions of parties, and lunch and dinner dates. There’s also an awful lot of name-dropping, but I don’t suppose we read the autobiography of a famous person to hear about their mailman.

If you’re a fan, like me, none of this will trouble you, as it will be outweighed by the fun of his humor and natural story-teller’s voice. I do wish that he had more to say about his movie-making process, beyond his lack of perfectionism, and less about the beauty of his female stars. I wish he had more insight into himself: just why has he been drawn to so many “troubled” women?

As Stephen Sondheim wrote for Into the Woods, “I wish a lot of things.”

^^^

Donna Levin is the author of four novels, all of which are available from Chickadee Prince Books. Her latest novel, He Could Be Another Bill Gates, is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at the bookstore right across the street from your home. Please take a look.

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DONNA LEVIN ON HOGAN’S HEROES: TOO SOON?

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I work out on the Stairmaster four times a week. Okay, three. I show up, anyway, at my nearby Jewish Community Center gym.

There is, thank God, a TV screen positioned at the top of the machine, but since the JCC only subscribes to basic cable, the pickings are slim, and my bar is low: like, three-minute-commercials-for-LifeLock low. Like, the Susan Lucci Collection on QVC low. Like, test pattern low.

So, when, on some double-digit station, I saw the gate of a POW camp open, I didn’t change the channel, even though I recognized Hogan’s Heroes.

Finding humor in a World War II prison camp

Hogan’s Heroes was the unlikely CBS hit that aired from 1965-1971. It’s set in a German POW camp, and POW doesn’t stand for “Party on, Wiener Schnitzel.”

Bob Crane (word of advice: don’t Google him) plays Col. Hogan, ranking officer of a gaggle of Allied POWs: LeBeau (French) Newkirk (English), and two other Americans: Carter, and Kinchloe. Kinchloe is African-American, and, as played by Ivan Dixon, he gets big chuckles by posing as German officers on the phone. Dixon’s accent is the best of the bunch. Crane’s accent is the worst, but why are any of the German characters speaking to each other in German-accented English anyway? That was a common convention of television of the time, and the least of our problems here.

I didn’t watch it as a kid. In 1965, WWII had ended only 20 years before. If comedy is tragedy plus time, Hogan’s Heroes wouldn’t make the cut: that’s the year 2000 to you and me. Besides, if my mother had heard the Hogan’s Heroes theme song playing anywhere in the house, she would have had hysterics.

But, as I said, at the gym, the stakes are low (like, Friends low), and the alternatives few. So I kept watching.

Then I went home, where I subscribe to every cable channel available, including one in Tagalog, and taped an entire season.

It’s funny, but should it be?

Because — well, hang me out to dry and call me a bedsheet! — the show is funny. This is mostly thanks to the camp Kommandant, Col. Klink, and his staff sergeant, Shultz. They play classic schlemiels. In their bumbling, their sycophancy, and their ineffectuality, they become sympathetic. Hogan persuades Klink that a woman working for the underground is in love with him, and Klink laps it up like one of the camp guard dogs. Schultz’s feelings are hurt when the Allied prisoners say he’s a “meanie kraut.” “I’m a nice kraut,” he protests.

But the giant step required to make Klink and Schulz sympathetic is provided by the fact that both characters are played by Jews: Klink by Werner Klemperer (born in Germany) and Schulz by John Banner, born in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The two German officers who appear as regulars, Major Hochstetter and General Burkhaltar, are also played by Jews: Howard Caine (né Cohen) and Leon Askin (né Aschkenas).

So, what’s the harm in laughing? Mel Brooks believes that the best way to get back at Hitler is to make fun of him, as Brooks has many times, most memorably in The Producers: first, in the 1967 film, and later, in the musical adaptation.

You can certainly laugh at the pure ludicrousness of Hogan’s Heroes. The inmates have a listening device in a coffee pot that allows them to eavesdrop on everything that goes on in the Kommandant’s office. In one episode, Hogan requests that the underground drop a dose of penicillin to use on Klink. It arrives within hours.

Put your disbelief into a medically induced coma

Hogan also oversees an underground set-up so vast, so complex, and so obvious, that it requires not that one suspend disbelief, but that one put their disbelief into a medically induced coma. Hogan and his men come and go freely, using a network of tunnels that reach practically to Berchtesgaden. In the excavated area below their barracks they have a radio room where Kinchloe can call London, as well as a lab where Carter, the in-house weapons expert, can create whatever he needs to blow up whatever he wants, In the pilot, there was also an underground steam room, but the producers decided that was “too far-fetched.”

In every episode, Klink threatens the inmates. He’ll send them to “the cooler,” (a jail cell within the camp) or shoot them if they’re outside the barracks past curfew. Klink also likes to threaten Schulz with a transfer to the Russian front, but not as often as the higher-ranking Germans threaten Klink with the same. No one takes any of these threats any more seriously than my kids took my threats to curtail their TV privileges. Hey, I watched TV throughout my childhood, and look … never mind.

So, I was guiltily enjoying my binge-fest until the episode in which Hogan and his men convince Klink and the Gestapo Major Hochstetter that the war is over, using a fake radio broadcast and a dummy newspaper. I was going along with it until the major decides to releases the four leaders of the underground that the Gestapo has just captured.

This was a fatal mistake by the writers, at least if they cared about Donna Levin, which, admittedly, they may not have. Up until then, Hochstetter had never made good on any of his threats, but he remained in character as an actual German officer. Within the alternate reality created by the show, I was ready to believe that he’d fall for the ruse, but releasing members of the underground, who IRL would have been hanged by piano wire, was a bridge too far.

My comatose disbelief awoke and snapped its fingers under my nose, and shouted, “Achtung!”

I headed to the internet. If you’ve ever Googled yourself, you know that it’s sometimes a mistake. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you about Bob Crane.) I already knew that Robert Clary, who plays the Frenchman LeBeau, was also Jewish, but I’d forgotten that he spent three years in Buchenwald. And I didn’t know that, until the end of his long life (he died in 2014 at age 93), he carried the tattoo “A5714” on his arm. He, like John Bannon (who plays Schulz) lost most of his family in the Holocaust.

What made this show a hit?

This led me to wonder yet again, how could this show have been such a hit in the 1960s? Could it have been cathartic for that generation? As a Jew, it’s sometimes easy to minimize, by contrast, how much so many others suffered. We could start with the Japanese-American internment, but that would be only a start.

World War II and the Holocaust will be to children born in 2030 the same as the Civil War is to me. Which is a sobering enough thought that I feel compelled to say, Never Forget. And: Never Again.

^^^

Donna Levin is the author of four novels, all of which are available from Chickadee Prince Books. Her latest novel, He Could Be Another Bill Gates, is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at the bookstore right across the street from your home. Please take a look.

Berlin

Donna Levin: Eine Frau in Berlin

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I lived in Europe in the mid-70s, and but didn’t visit Germany on principle. The Holocaust was only 30 years old. That’s like 1989 in our money.

But speaking of money, there aren’t even Deutschemarks, let alone Reichsmarks, anymore: they use euros. Things have changed. And my middle daughter, Elena, had visited Berlin two summers before and loved it.

So, on our trip to Italy last May, we tacked on a few days in Berlin.

I hired a tour guide for a few hours for the first morning. His name was Jan, but it’s pronounced “Yan,” which I learned after greeting him with the name of the middle Brady Bunch sister.

I’ll admit it. I liked Berlin better than I liked Rome, or even Venice. I felt more at home there: most of the city is new, for reasons that are probably obvious. (If not, google “Battle of Berlin.”) Also, it’s a very cosmopolitan city, cosmopolitan in this case being dog whistle for “immigrants.” The barista at Starbucks (of course there’s a Starbucks—on the same street as our hotel!) was Asian, and for entitled American visitors such as we, she has to learn not only German, but English.

And people are friendly. There was a particularly nice lady at the flea market who, although I speak no German and she spoke no English, seemed to be complimenting me on the color of my (dyed) hair. Then again, when I can’t understand someone, I am wont to assume they are giving me a compliment.

But back to Jan: He was a fun and knowledgeable guide, and I guess he didn’t hold it against me that I began our acquaintance by calling him by a girl’s name. He started us off with some historical monuments that survived the war, or have been reconstructed, and then, inevitably, moved onto more recent events: the buildings that housed Gestapo offices, you know, cheerful stuff like that.

Then he escorted us down a nondescript street, where we stopped at a square of unpaved ground. “Look down,” he said. “this is where Hitler’s bunker was.” He told us about Hitler’s last days, stories I was mostly familiar with, but which were all the more powerful coming from a native German.

He also explained that they (“they” in this case being either local authorities, or the German government, or somebody in power, anyway) purposely did not mark the spot, lest it become a shrine for neo-Nazis.

We were moved, and reassured, by this, though later I thought, he could have taken us anywhere and said that Hitler’s bunker was beneath us. Good story, though.

I didn’t tell Jan that we’re Jewish. I didn’t want to make him self-conscious. Granted, with the last name “Levin,” I might as well be wearing giant Star of David earrings, but the reservation was under my husband’s name, and though my husband is Jewish, too, his name is one of those ambiguous ones that can be German, or even Nordic. There’s even an Ibsen play, Pillars of the Community, in which the main character has the same name as my spouse.

However, about three-quarters of the way through our tour I let the expression “oy vey,” and therefore the kippah-wearing cat, slip out of the bag. Jan didn’t react: maybe he thought “oy vey” was a quaint California thing, like surfer-slang for “these waves be high, Dude,” but more likely, it was obvious we were Jewish from the beginning.

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After this first guided tour, my daughters and I took ourselves around on Berlin’s enviable public transit system. I paid for day passes for us, to the tune of 60 euros, but you don’t punch the ticket, or hand it to anyone. It’s crazy: for the whole time we were there, no one ever asked to see proof that we’d paid. It’s done entirely on the honor system. Can you imagine how that might work in the U.S.?

Only when I was back home did it occur to me that this is a cultural phenomenon. Germans play by the rule. In other words, they follow orders. I guess when it comes to public transit, it’s a good thing.

On our second day, we spent a couple of hours at the Berlin Wall museum, which is central to the tourist’s experience. It was sad to see the stories of the people who died trying to get to West Berlin only months before the wall came down; also sad to see how families were divided for decades. I watched the wall come down, on television, at least, in 1989. Hey—weren’t we just talking about 1989? What a coincidence!

The funny thing is that I started this piece intending to write about how Jan asked me to post a review of his guideship on TripAdvisor. I did, and now I’m being bombarded with emails from TripAdvisor encouraging me to write more, so I can claim my reviewer badge. What is this compulsion to write reviews of everything, from paper towels (I like the “select-a-size”) to traffic lights (“Too long on the Spruce Street side!”)? My conclusion: many of us are way too high up on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

By the way, there’s no hotel tax in Berlin. All is forgiven.

Photo by Levin [no relation]/Unsplash.

Donna Levin is the author of four novels, all of which are available from Chickadee Prince Books. Her latest novel, He Could Be Another Bill Gates, was published this month; it’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at the bookstore right across the street from your home. Please take a look.

Steely Dan

Donna Levin: Steely Dan Fan

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I was (and remain) a devoted fan of Steely Dan.  I had all their albums on cassette; later I bought Donald Fagen’s solo albums.  I adore their unique jazz-rock fusion, and omg!  The horn sections!

I also enjoyed the rhyme and rhythm of their lyrics, but for the most part found them impenetrable. From one of my favorite songs, “Deacon Blues,” came the line, “They call Alabama the crimson tide.”  I had no idea to what they referred.  None.  Zip.  Zilch.  Goose egg.

Fast forward about two decades, and we’re at a party given by one of my son’s classmates.  The boy is wearing an Alabama State jersey. His was more scarlet than crimson, but I got it.  You’d think that after all those years with a college-football-obsessed husband, I might have picked it up sooner, but… no.

If I hadn’t had that epiphany, I would only have had to wait another 10 years for the internet to give me access to interpretations of many of Steely Dan’s/Donald Fagen’s songs.  I can only love them more for that. (I had sort of figured out “Caves of Altamira” but “Babylon Sisters”? No way.)

And so, again thanks to the internet, I recently purchased about sixteen of my favorites from their early days.  I mean, where the hell are the cassettes I once had, and if I had them, where would I play them?

Here in the 21st Century, I play them on my phone.  Wow.  Has recording technology really progressed this far?  I can pick out each instrument, though I can’t claim to correctly identify each one.  Trombone.  Electric guitar.  Piano.  And the saxophones are clearer than ever.  The sound reverberates through my chemically unenhanced brain.

Apparently, Fagen and Becker did as many as forty takes of each track.

Which leads me (you had to hope I’d get here eventually, but I really wanted to tell that “crimson tide” story) to my point:  Steely Dan’s finished product seems effortless, but that’s only when the listener doesn’t know how complicated the process is.  Sometimes at a Broadway musical I’ve been able to peer into the orchestra pit and watch the musicians as they pick up their instruments, put them down, pick them up again.  When I see that, I contemplate how many hours, on how many days, over a period of how many, not months, but years, a musician must practice, in order to play those instruments at all, let alone well enough to play on Broadway.

By contrast, writing looks so freakin’ easy.  No notes to learn to read.  No chords.  No sharps or flats.

But it isn’t easier.  Every novelist started her career by working with prompts such as “I hate blenders,” or “My First Felony,” then getting feedback, internalizing that feedback, and starting again.  Throwing out material because it doesn’t fit, or entire novels that just won’t work.

Yes, in every generation there are a (small) handful of lucky people born with a gift that doesn’t need that much honing.  But the vast majority of us, although born with ability, need to practice as hard as any musician, or painter.  Or artist of any kind.

Yet somehow, because we had a working knowledge of English by the age of 12 (and because we had the misfortune to read about Francoise Sagan, who published her first, bestselling, novel, Bonjour Tristesse, at 17), we believe that we either have it or we don’t, and if we do, then two drafts, three if we’re perfectionists, are all we need.

So, when you’re writing that tenth draft, ready to set yourself on fire, and thinking that any world that doesn’t acknowledge your efforts is an unjust one… Well, actually, I feel your pain.  It’s hard, and it doesn’t help to think of Steely Dan, but I wanted to share these thoughts anyway.

Image – Dane Deaner/Unsplash

Donna Levin is the author of four novels, all of which are available from Chickadee Prince Books. Her latest novel, He Could Be Another Bill Gates, was published this month; it’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at the bookstore right across the street from your home. Please take a look.

 

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