jameswharris

Aegean Dream by Dario Ciriello

Aegean Dream by Dario Ciriello is a memoir about Dario and his wife Linda giving up their good life in California and moving to the Greek island of Skópelos. I bought this book because I met Dario back in 2002 at the Clarion West writer’s workshop. We were part of a class of 17 wannabe writers that lived together on a 12th floor dorm near downtown Seattle while taking daily classes with science fiction writers and editors. Most of the people were young, but Dario, Doug Sharp and I were all 50 that year. I think we wanted to reinvent ourselves. Dario, from Italian heritage but born in London emigrated to America in 1989, was one hell of a charming guy. I envied his energy, grace and social skills. He was an artist, craftsman and musician that wanted to be a writer too. I wasn’t surprised when a few years later he and Linda moved to Greece because of his adventurous nature. Years later, when I heard he wrote a book about living abroad I was anxious to read it. Dario lives the way I dream of living, and since I’ve always fantasized about living in another country, this book was a riveting read for me.

Dario and Linda had visited Skópelos on vacation after Clarion West and had fallen in love with it. Dario then convinced Linda they should move there, and they carefully planned, work to save money, got rid of possessions, and most of all, studied Greek to prepare for their trip. I’m going to try and not tell too much of their story because I don’t want to spoil the book’s narrative as it unfolds, but I will say learning the language before moving to a foreign land paid off a 1000% dividend.

That’s lesson one for me. I’m terrible with languages. I got through high school German and college Spanish, but it’s all forgotten. My friend Janis spends all her extra time learning Spanish to make her many south of the border vacations special, and so I constantly see how hard that is. I tried studying classical Greek one semester and couldn’t handle the strange alphabet, so I’m very impressed with Dario and Linda learning Greek. They met other British and Americans living on Skópelos that hadn’t learned Greek and making the effort to learn the language, no matter how comical the results were sometimes, allowed Dario and Linda to break the cultural barrier and make hordes of friends.

Lesson two is don’t move to another country with a shipping container full of belongings. Dario evidently is a packrat, to Linda’s great distress, and has been moving from country to country his whole life with his family’s belongings on his back, so to say.

Lesson three is harder to explain. It’s about being a craftsman and artist. Linda went from being a highly paid office manager to wanting to make natural soap for tourists. Even when you can make something beautiful that many people admire, it’s really hard to make money at it. We live in a world where everyone wants everything to be cheap, and it’s hard to make a living making something beautiful that takes a lot of time to make. There were many stories of small business failures in Aegean Dreams, and that’s a story in itself.

Lessons four and five are about marriage and friendships. Dario and Linda have a wonderful relationship and it comes out in their story, and they both have the knack for making friends, even in a foreign land with people that don’t speak their language.

I recommend this book because I learned so much from it. On one hand living in another country is like living here. You have to shop for food, work, clean house, deal with leaky toilets, buy furniture, go to parties, the list of similarities is long. What’s different is how people act, think and talk – all the cultural stuff. And there’s a huge difference between the US and Greece. And you wouldn’t know that unless you lived there, or the next best thing, read a memoir from someone who had. Being a tourist in no way lets you learn what its like to live in another country, and this book illustrates that perfectly.

Aegean Dream is a memoir about how hard it is to be a stranger in a strange land and live by different rules. Dario and Linda make amazing successes integrating into their new life, but had to swim upstream against a vicious current of bureaucracy. Aegean Dream is great background reading why Greece is doing so bad now on the world’s economic stage. Dario and Linda came to Greece just at the time when its citizens went wild with credit. About a third of Greece’s citizens work for the government, and all have become addicted to governmental generosity. Corruption and a snake pit of regulations make living in Greece impossible for outsiders and cruel for its own folk.

After reading Aegean Dream I doubt I could live in another country. The story completely convinced me what a wimp I am. I could never have done what Dario and Linda did. It would have crushed me. And to be completely honest, I wouldn’t even have the balls to try. I really admire Dario and Linda for their great adventure. I wish my wife Susan and I could do something like that. Aegean Dream also showed what it takes for two people to live closely together in their life, and I really admired that too.

The book describes Skópelos as a paradise of natural beauty, and parts of the movie Momma Mia was filmed near where Dario and Linda lived. So if you got Greek island fever after watching that show, read Aegean Dream. The movie will make you want to visit, but read the book before you plan to move there.

[You can read about Dario and Linda’s adventures and see photos at the blog he kept. But get the book for the whole story.]

JWH – 10/20/11

Blogging and Novel Writing

I’ve always wanted to write a novel but never had the focus or determination to complete one. November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWrMo. The goal of NaNoWrMo is to get would-be novelists to complete a first draft of 50,000 words. Now that’s about the minimal length of fiction to be called a novel, and most editors usually want twice as many words if you submit to them, but the NaNoWrMo consider 50,000 a good writing marathon for one month’s writing. Their goal is not for people to complete a polished novel, but just go the distance. They’ve yet to make December National Novel Rewrite Month, but many bloggers have suggested it.

Essentially this means knocking out 1,667 words a day of fiction. I have no trouble writing as many words on a blog post, but fiction is different. I love blogging and don’t expect to give it up for the month of November. Blogging is therapeutic for me. Writing about something that requires research exercises my memory. And I definitely need help with my memory – it’s slipping away more every day.

But I want to write a novel. Of course I’ve been wanting to write a novel since I was in high school over forty years ago. Rationally I’d think if I hadn’t written one by now I never will. Well, I’m looking at NaNoWrMo as a shit or get of the pot test. Either I’ve got to finish a novel now or give up thinking about ever writing one. All my blogging indicates I like writing essays, which suggests I should work harder to polish that skill. If I fail to produce a first draft in November that’s what I will do – but for now I want to give it one more try.

What I should do is publish my daily NaNoWrMo work here but that might screw up my chances of getting the novel published in the future. I’ve read that most authors have to write several novels before the get one good enough to publish, so maybe I’m being too protective of my first first draft. Also, I believe, and this might be naive, that I’ve got a unique science fiction idea and and I don’t want to spoil it by letting people read a first draft. However, I might be willing to show versions of the opening here as a marketing research to see if anyone responds.

Working on a novel will seem strange though. My blogging is about watching the world and reacting. It’s about looking outward. Novel writing is about looking inward and creating everything from scratch. That might be why I’ve never been able to write a novel. I’ve written about 30 short stories and even 5,000-12,000 words are an agony to produce. I recently put my best effort online and it sank like a stone. Writing non-fiction is engaging – writing fiction is lonely.

I haven’t signed up with NaNoWrMo yet, and I still might chicken out. The idea of coming home from work every evening and turning off the world, shunning all my favorite hobbies to focus on one activity is scary. I love my evening routine. Writing fiction will be like working two jobs. So why do it? I don’t know. I read a lot of fiction and I’ve always wanted to create a fictional work of art. It’s like going to a party and always listening to everyone else talk. Writing a novel would be like having my say.

JWH – 10/18/11

Occupy Wall Street v. The Tea Party

Occupy Wall Street protests have the reputation of being about diffused public anger with no real political agenda. The Tea Party has always been rigidly focused on anti-taxes but defines itself around the Contract from America platform that its followers stick closely to in their political campaigning. From their start in 2009 the Tea Party quickly organized into a grass roots federation of citizens that got many people elected around the country and in congress. But the Tea Party isn’t 100% a single structure either, with several web sites using the Tea Party name and each having slightly different platforms.

If the Occupy Wall Street movement wants political success they too will need to organize across the country into a political movement. First off, they need a better name, and second they need a political platform that will counter challenge the conservatives and define their movement. And they need to coop the Democratic party like the Tea Party has taken over the Republican party. Third parties just don’t work, unless they think Americans are ready for a complete change. But looking at list of American political parties and their history makes this doubtful.

The phrase “occupy Wall Street” just doesn’t ring true for a long term political party moniker. I’m not sure what these young new protestors want, but they sound like an Egalitarian Party because of their identity with the 99%. Since the Occupy Wall Street protests quickly found sympathy with people in other countries they would do well to make it a world-wide movement. The old phrase, Think Globally, Act Locally applies well to them because of their environmental demands.

In a world of global communications, global economy, global environment, why not a global political movement? However, if they don’t stay focused on the critical issues they will bog down and divide their followers. If you look at the various political platforms on the Tea Party sites you see how they’ve broaden their anti-tax focus to other issues – for example look at the Non-negotiable 15 Core Beliefs at the TeaParty.org site that deal with guns, English and family values.

The Tea Party advocates a small government movement where individuals are expected to pull their own weight. The Occupy Wall Street movement advocates economic fairness for all in a society that favors the rich. Both are about money. The Tea Party people want more money for their economic freedom by paying less taxes at the local, state and federal levels – thus the emphasis for a small government. The Occupy Wall Street movement is about protecting the individual rather than the bottom line, and that means social engineering, big government and more taxes. There is a direct conflict of goals.

Our society is politically polarized and getting more polarized all the time. I fear this process is only going to get nastier. The 2012 election will probably be a lot like the one in 1968.

JWH – 10/18/11

Occupy Wall Street–Is This Our Future?

In the 1960s the anti-war protestors would shout, “The Whole World is Watching!” With the Occupy Wall Street movement, that is true again, but with even more eyes. The internet is a game changer for social protest movements. Here in the west we rejoiced at the Arab Spring, but how are our politicians really feeling about our own uprisings? Most are giving polite sympathetic words, but what if this anti-establishment movement takes off? What does Washington really think when they hear anti-government movements from both the right and left?

The best reportage I’ve found on Occupy Wall street is at Wikipedia. They also provide this very informative graphic on the rate of news reports for the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.

File:Occupy-wall-st-vs-tea-party.png

My guess as to why there were so few news reports on Occupy Wall Street at the start is the press did not think the movement was serious and was unprepared for its rapid success. I’m guessing the American public also thinks it will be a short lived phenomenon. But what if it’s not? What if it’s the beginning of several years of social upheaval like we had back in the 1960s?

As I’ve gotten older I’ve wondered why the youth of each new generation didn’t protest for something they wanted. Since I grew up in the 1960s and saw anti-war, civil rights, feminist, gay rights, and Earth Day protests I just assumed protesting was a natural part of the political scene, but they died out and the youth of America became quiet for a very long time. Were they all happy with the way our country worked and comfortable with their vision of the future? So what’s changed now?

We’ve had other recessions and spikes of high unemployment since the 1960s. And we’ve had a few protest movements, like No Nukes, and various ecological and animal rights movements, but nothing that turned into a real political movement. Is this recession different? Has corporate greed and Wall Street really ruined our country enough that people are willing to bite the hand that pays them? Or maybe it’s biting the hand that used to pay them.

Young people were told to study hard, go to college and then reap the rewards of our great and rich society. Millions have run up huge student debts, gotten good degrees and can’t find work. Their parents have also lost their jobs, and their grandparents have lost their retirement incomes. Is it any wonder that I’m hearing Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” again:

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
I think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side
It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

What really is happening? Does anyone know? We’ve always pulled out of recessions before, but this one is lasting longer. Of course, we’ve always been helped by an economic bubble, like the technology bubble or the housing bubble. The trouble was the housing bubble was destructive, pervasive and ultimately devastated the economy. A huge percentage of our economy is depended on home ownership and rising property values. Consumer confidence drives our economy – but everyone is too afraid to spend now. And our economy runs best when unemployment is around 5%. That’s far from full employment, and it’s not even a real number of people who can’t find work, but it does appear to be the right number that reflects economic stability. We’re very far away from that figure and getting further.

My guess is most people thought unemployment would be back down again, or at least heading down, and now that it’s not there growing panic is leading to protest movements. People blame Wall Street for the problem mainly because they think Wall Street got us in the mess and felt they should have gotten us out too, and they haven’t. Instead Wall Street decided to keep its wealth, and the GOP took this particular time to downsize all governments.

Things aren’t quite that simple and some of the Occupy Wall Street protesters know that. Look at “Here Are the Four Charts That Explain What the Protests are Angry About….” Here is one chart, click on the link to look at the others. This one shows the wages as a percent of the economy. Because we live in a global economy where all workers compete, the average wage is decreasing even though corporate profits are skyrocketing. This is the reason behind the whole 99% versus the 1%. Corporations are more efficient at making money, but at the expense of the workers worldwide.

The rich (1%) are eating everyone else’s money up (99%) and the 1% is also desperately fighting to take all the money it can get from the Federal government too. In fact, the super rich are so good at gaining wealth that I’d think that ordinary millionaires would be feeling the pinch too and would be wanting to join Occupy Wall Street themselves.

Corporate profits are up, as well as their gross earnings and cash holdings, but they aren’t hiring people. What they discovered is they can trim the fat and do well. The GOP is now demanding we trim the fat from the federal government, and the extreme conservatives are also seeking to trim the fat from city and state governments. All this fat trimming is putting millions out of work and there is no economic indicator showing they will get to go back to work anytime soon. Does Wall Street and the GOP just want to live with 9-10% unemployment forever if that means saving money for them?

Over one half of American households earn less than $50,000 dollars and about 1/6th earn over $100,000, with the rest between the two figures. See Wikipedia for all the figures on U.S. Household Income. But also look at Wikipedia’s article on Wealth Inequality in the United States. Wikipedia says at the end of 2001, which is ten year old data, 10% owned 71% of the wealth, and 1% own 38%, and we know that last decade has accelerated this divide.

Is it any wonder why people are joining the Occupy Wall Street movement? If you look at the charts here and the ones I link to, the trends aren’t good. Unless there’s a drastic change in the system, Occupy Wall Street is just the tip of the iceberg that we’re about to crash into. Expect more fat trimming, which means more unemployed people joining the movement. But also expect a lot more social upheaval as we adjust to long term high unemployment.

Our economy has gotten too efficient. We need far fewer people to keep things running. And it’s much cheaper to hire people in other countries to make things. As long as corporations are only concerned with profits and their bottom line, and if our various levels of government are forced to do more with less, the trend will be towards growing unemployment.

The solution? Raise taxes and go back to a larger government and smaller profits for corporations? That would put more people to work, but there’s a growing anti-socialism climate in this country. Too many people resent paying for things they don’t think they need, like school teachers or scientific researchers. What they fail to see is big government makes for a big thriving economy. Wishing for a small government is equal to wishing for high unemployment. There’s not enough private enterprise to put all our citizens to work.

Either we have to accept big social programs or we’re going to have to learn to live with lots of poor people and protestors in the streets. Me, I’d rather pay more taxes than see so much suffering.

Conservatives believe that cutting the size of the government and taxes will grow the economy. When will we see this? Bush cut taxes years ago. As far as I can see, cutting taxes has lead to a faltering economy. Cutting taxes is letting the 1% get a larger share of everyone’s pie. And people are waking up to that, and that’s why we have Occupy Wall Street. It’s why we’re seeing social unrest across Europe too.

Conservatives will counter that we’re running up too much debt. But we wouldn’t have that debt if we hadn’t had the Bush tax cuts, or wasted so much money on wars and buying influence around the world. Which is more helpful, hiring more teachers in America, or building militaries for people who want to be our enemies? At some point it will become more important to apply our nation building funds to rebuilding America. The Occupy Wall Street people are asking for that help now. How long will the GOP deny that help?

JWH – 10/16/11

Can We Trust Facebook?

I’ve heard three stories lately that make me worry about Facebook. First, my friend Sutton from work posted a message to Facebook about diet pills. This threw me for a loop because Sutton is on the skinny side but since I’m on the fat side I read the message with interest. I asked him about it and he said somebody had hacked his account, and it started with a woman he knew that was also hacked sending the same messages.

Then another friend at work, Joe, told me how people called his wife’s parents pretending to be their daughter stranded on road trip and not being able to get ahold of Joe and thus calling her grandparents wanting them to wire money. The scammers had all kinds of interesting granddaughter and grandparent details to fool the old people. The old people just called Joe.

When I told these stories to my wife she told me about a circle of her friends who were getting messages on Facebook from a dead woman they hand known. They didn’t know if the hackers broke into Rachel’s account before or after she died, but they got messages from Rachel long after she passed – rather eerie.

Sutton and Joe cancelled their Facebook accounts.

I would have quit Facebook long ago because I don’t really use it, except that I’ve discovered it’s a way to keep tabs on friends, family and acquaintances. I was going to quit because I don’t do anything I feel like posting about. Being on Facebook makes me feel old and boring because all friends are out doing stuff and I’m not. However, I have to admit Facebook is a good way to keep up with people. As a social network it works, maybe it’s far from perfect, but it’s worth having an account.

People I would have quit thinking about years ago stay alive in my mind because of Facebook.

That still leaves the question: Can We Trust Facebook?

Just before Sutton was hacked, he recommended Pinterest.com, an online pinboard, whatever that might be. He assured me it was fun and I should try it. So I went to Pinterest and requested an invite. When the email came and I clicked on the invite I was told to register with either my Facebook or Twitter account. I was leery of this, but I clicked on signing in with Facebook and I was given a warning about how many rights I would be giving Pinterest and that scared me, so I closed the window.

I wrote Pinterest about this and they said they did this to make it easy to find your friends to share the pinboards. Now there’s a certain logic in this. Words with Friends and Spotify also want me to log in with my Facebook credentials. All these companies are hoping to ride the coattails of social networking. But it also solves another problem for them – they don’t have to maintain their own login system and manage accounts.

This brings us to question number two: Can We Trust Other Companies with Our Facebook Account?

Social networking is a fantastic idea, but is it being implementing safely? There are always stories on the news about the dangers of Facebook with warnings about what kinds of personal information not to post on the site. And Facebook has introduced more and more security features, but because Facebook wants to make billions it seeks all kinds of business partners and ways to integrate our personal lives into their businesses.

Facebook is now seen as a highway to nearly a billion customers so 21st century entrepreneurs are gold rushing to create apps that have symbiotic relationships with Facebook.

Which makes me ask: How Far Will You Weave Your Life Into the Social Network?

What Facebook has become is a login system to the Internet. When the internet first started people could be anonymous, but over time sites that makes billions have found endless ways to track us. Facebook is a pub where everyone can know your name.

And don’t get me wrong, there’s a certain logic of networking people together. What if all amateur genealogists were on Facebook and Ancestry.com was integrated into Facebook? It could easily link you to all your living relatives all over the world, and let you follow various paths of maternal and paternal inheritance. What if you wanted to remember everyone in your 6th grade class from 1962? If they were all on Facebook and the right information was in the database, you could have an instant class reunion. Facebook has the potential to change society significantly.

Social networking is extremely powerful. There’s a reason why hundreds of millions of people flock to Facebook. But can we trust it? I don’t think so. Should we abandon it? No, we shouldn’t do that either.

However there is a new concept on the net called Infosuicide where you leave the internet and try to erase all references to themselves. I don’t know if this will become a trend, but some people are being turned off by losing their anonymity. If the Facebook trend continues true privacy will shrink.

What we need is a science of social networking. We also need laws and etiquettes to match this knowledge. We need tight controls to how our personal information is monitored. Our identities need firewalls to protect them, so we can have control over what aspects of our lives are public, or to what degree they are made public.

I think it needs to start by allowing us to control our various social relationships. Think about it. We know things about ourselves we’d never tell anyone, but everything else we’d be willing to share with various kinds of people we know depending on the relationship. I think those breakdown something like this:

Spouse/lover
Friends
Close relatives
Close work relationships
Acquaintances
Game associates
Distant relatives
Distant work relationships
Various level of public networks

Once you start using Facebook for all kinds of social networks you have to divide them into all kinds of categories. Would you want to let your doctors, dentist, optometrist, plumber, electrician to post reminders and schedules to your Facebook account? You would if you got up everyone morning and checked Facebook faithfully. If you start thinking of Facebook as a super Outlook calendar and contact program you would.

I’m not sure most people realize the direction Facebook is taking. They are letting Facebook grow at its pace and not theirs. I know people that join Facebook and quit and go back and quit and go back because its so tempting. Many people don’t want Facebook to take over their lives but as more of their family and friends join Facebook the harder it becomes to avoid it without seeming like a misanthrope.

We can’t trust Facebook one iota, but we do. Why? Because it’s too good of an idea of pass up. This week I got a round robin email from my cousins. My cousin Jane wrote the first email to another cousin and gave them a list of who to forward the email to next, and I was last with the instructions to return it to Jane. She then resent it to everyone. When I saw that I wondered why everyone just didn’t join Facebook.

I don’t read Facebook regularly but I should. If I did I would know more about my family and friends. And that brings up another question about Facebook: Are we obligated to social network? I’m a loner and I’m extremely selfish with my time, but I feel there is an social obligation. I don’t know to what degree we should feel obligated to network with the people we know, but I think there’s enough of an obligation that Facebook should exist and be required to legally meet security obligations. In other words I think we need to make Facebook into something we can trust. Hell, it’s a lot easier to use than making phone calls and writing letters. I would make a case that Facebook is the minimum social obligation.

JWH – 10/8/11