START GOOGLING NOW Google Brain is a "Time Machine" linked to the Internet. It takes you "back to the future" with fabulous immediacy. You're plunged into the sights and sounds of the past. You become an eyewitness of the twentieth century-the Great Depression, World War II, Censorship, Cold War, Strikes, and Protests. The author got this idea after a dog chewed up his memoir and Barack Obama's, too. By choosing Google Brain, you'll be whisked away on a "Time Machine" and after you've used it, you'll even know how to make one for yourself. Since anybody can do it-welcome aboard! Mike Johnson, foreign correspondent, now seen in the International Herald Tribune: "It feels good to see him surface as the good writer that he is". Ron Miller, editor of www.thecolumnists.com and noted syndicated television critic: "I wish only ten per cent of the people in America were as up-to-date and savvy . . . If so, we would still be leading the world in something more besides pollution and warfare". Jerry Nachman, author of Seriously Funny, writing in Newsweek: "At a recent college reunion, the life of the party was my former professor, who was funnier than any one of us".
GOOGLE BRAIN
Making Your Memoir a "Time Machine" on the InternetBy Gordon GrebiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2009 Gordon Greb
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4401-8430-7Contents
Preface: The Meaning of Google........................................ixPART I: THE HUNGRY ID.................................................1Chapter 1 The Dog Ate What?...........................................3Chapter 2 Mind the Gap................................................9Chapter 3 Start Googling Now..........................................15Chapter 4 It's a Jungle Out There.....................................20Chapter 5 Goodbye, Old Man Depression.................................28Chapter 6 Pick Yourself Up............................................37Chapter 7 Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?...........................44Chapter 8 Bugs 'n' Things.............................................53Chapter 9 A Gentleman of the Press....................................61Chapter 10 The America I Saw in 1941..................................67Chapter 11 A Prisoner in a Chinese Cookie Factory.....................75Chapter 12 A Movie They Didn't Want Us to See.........................84PART II: THE PROUD EGO................................................89Chapter 13 Homecoming.................................................91Chapter 14 Where Do We Go From Here?..................................96Chapter 15 My Own Fight with McCarthyism..............................102Chapter 16 Hollywood Finds a Miracle..................................109Chapter 17 I Help Democrats Win.......................................118Chapter 18 Your Big Scoop Can Hurt Us.................................125Chapter 19 Eureka! I Find the First Broadcaster.......................134Chapter 20 War and Peace on Campus....................................140Chapter 21 American Imbecile in France................................149Chapter 22 Lost in China: Help, Marco Polo!...........................157PART III: THE SUPER EGO...............................................163Chapter 23 A Philosopher Learns to Laugh..............................165Chapter 24 I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy..................................172Chapter 25 How I Quit Smoking.........................................177Chapter 26 Welcome to the Twenty-First Century........................185Chapter 27 The Man Who Would Be King..................................189Chapter 28 Is Orwell's 1984 Here Already?.............................194Chapter 29 Lord, Give Me My Daily Paper...............................199Chapter 30 Walter Mitty, Cary Grant, and Me...........................205Chapter 31 Who Was the Real Shakespeare?..............................211Chapter 32 Are We There Yet?..........................................216Acknowledgements......................................................223References............................................................225
Chapter One
The Dog Ate What? If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
Harry Truman (1884-1972)
I'm expecting an invitation from the White House any day now. That's when President Barack Obama finally learns about something that vitally concerns him. But the problem is that he -like me-counts on the U.S. Post Office to deliver the mail through snow, rain, sleet, and hail. What worries me is simple: How will President Obama react when he finds out the postman doesn't always ring twice?
What I need to tell Obama is that two prized possessions have disappeared, one belonging to Mr. Obama himself and the other one to me. I call it-"The Case of the Missing Memoirs"-the president's and mine! If Winston Churchill were alive today he would describe it as "a riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma," worthy of an investigation by Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or Raymond Chandler.
You may have bumped into this problem in the news but not paid much attention to it. You could have read about it in USA Today, seen it on C-SPAN, or heard it over National Public Radio. It's sort of a fever sweeping the country, affecting a huge number of people who have an absolute compulsion to be constantly scribbling, dictating, or clicking away. Each is trying to publish his or her memoir!
Among the 275, 232 writers who published new books last year, this group leads the pack-a long parade of greedy, media-generated fame-seekers, scrambling to be seen on television screens and the covers of People magazine. Look at this news item from the Sacramento Bee:
JUNEAU (AP)-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is ready to tell her side, agreeing to publish a memoir with HarperCollins. The book will come out in spring 2010-the year she is up for reelection.
Joining her are other personalities in the news-the endless line of anxious actors, fading entertainers, successful crooks, and failed investors-all wanting to be interviewed by Terry Gross, Brian Lamb, or Charlie Rose. Each has been hoping to become the next Madonna, Jon Stewart, or Paris Hilton. Even pop stars recently locked up in prison are being pursued by publishers eager for exclusive rights to print their stories.
Memoir writing is such a widespread and common affliction these days that it could easily be classified as some kind of disease. Its symptoms are quite easy to notice. You need to look for individuals who are overwhelmed by the desire to tell you, or anyone who will listen, the complete story of their lives. Whenever you bump into someone like this-a person highly infected with Ego Mania-the advice given by medical specialists to friends, neighbors, and relatives is to simply treat each wild-eyed memory chaser as you would a little child. Say simply, "Why don't you go to your room and write it down?"
According to recent studies, it's not uncommon to see all of these highly motivated writers developing a high fever on Sunday mornings. They hop out of bed, run madly in search of the New York Times, and flip open the pages quickly to find the "Best Seller" book lists to see who's made it. What worsens their condition is news of celebrities making big bucks. A perfect example occurred in the case of Bill Clinton, notorious non-stop talker, who was paid $10.1 million one year for simply flying around the world telling people his life experiences, which earned him $3 million when published as a memoir. Even without newspaper publicity, they still keep popping up as guests on network television and radio shows. There's little escape from tub-thumpers of this kind.
Before discussing this further, I have a confession to make. It's that I, too, am a victim of this Memoir Revolution. I caught this malady early in life and it's left me with the most awful of symptoms. Day after day I have had a persistent need to come clean, spill the whole works, and tell the world what normal people would only tell their psychiatrists. Trying to understand why this has happened has become part of the memoir itself. It's kept me working harder and harder, hammering away at my keyboard and madly looking for the answer.
I first noticed this condition after Miss Crystal, my seventh grade teacher, read a book to us in class-The Americanization of Edward Bok-the true story about a Dutch immigrant boy, who arrives in America at age seven with his family from Holland knowing no English and succeeds in adapting to his new country. It was such a well-written autobiography that it left me with lasting memories of how Bok at sixteen became a close friend of Ulysses S. Grant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and by the age of twenty-six, editor of one of the best-read women's magazines, the Ladies Home Journal.
At about the same time Edward Bok got me thinking about becoming a writer, I accidentally found another book, a weather-beaten copy of Henry Shute's The Real Diary of a Real Boy in an old trunk on my grandmother's farm. Inspired by Shute's primitive recollections of growing up in Exeter, New Hampshire, I began at the age of ten to try to write my own story the same way. I started writing my first diary during that summer's vacation, jotting down everything about chasing jackrabbits, climbing trees, and learning about bugs and things. It started a habit I've never been able to quit, and I've been hard at it ever since that time.
Something similar happened to Barack Obama before he moved into the White House. He sat down at a keyboard, collected his thoughts, and wrote his memoir, Dreams from My Father. They were recollections that gave a jump-start to his political ambitions, put him on the path to the U.S. Senate, helped persuade the Democratic Party to choose him as its nominee, and convince the American people to elect him as the country's forty-fourth President. As his supporter and fellow writer, I consider it a matter of high priority that I get to the White House to inform the President of my astounding news. Even though it will come as a shock, a dog owner has a "need to know." The President needs to know that a dog ate his memoir!
Certainly his own dog "Bo," a lively Portuguese water dog, wouldn't have done it. But the guilty culprit was one hungry enough to devour Obama's best seller-a new paperback edition of Dreams from My Father-that I bought for $14.95 to send as a gift to my daughter. Since I had packaged it carefully, took it to the U.S. Post Office, and then found out she didn't get it, what do you suppose happened to it?
"Did you get the book?" I kept asking my daughter by phone.
"No, I didn't," she said repeatedly.
Then finally one day she called to say, "Yes, your package got here today but there's no book inside. It's torn open and empty."
If you think about it carefully, ask yourself which animals prefer to chase the postman every chance they get? The answer is obvious! Dogs, that's what. Obviously the mailman was chased, the dog grabbed the package, chewed it open, and buried the remnants of Obama's memoir in a deep hole somewhere. Until somebody at the U.S. Post Office can honestly explain what happened, a dog seems to be the most likely suspect in this important case.
As for my own missing memoir, the story is slightly different. Years ago I began working on my memoir only to have the entire narration scattered hither and yon in my writing room. My little Maltese puppy "Sugar" got into it and began chewing away at every piece of paper in sight. When the time came to try to put it back together again, I faced the insurmountable task of going through huge stacks of old letters, notebooks, photo albums, half-finished manuscripts, diaries, newspaper clippings, and documents of every kind.
Wondering how others dealt with problems like this, I stumbled across the business section of my local newspaper. There was a story telling how the U.S Treasury had been handing out billions of dollars to save banks, insurance companies, and troubled investment firms to keep them from bankruptcy. To get that money, all they had to do was ask. Why, I asked myself, don't writers get a fair share of this bounty? Writers like me need help in this depressed economy, too. It's time we were recognized as private entrepreneurs.
The truth is that writers are business people. Each of us is like the top CEO of any company, heavily involved in a "word manufacturing industry" and working hard at word management, idea development, and language investment strategy. We are private entrepreneurs who make the product ourselves, send it off to a factory to be mass-produced on an assembly line, and then retail it to the public like cans of beans, soft drinks, or chocolate-coated peanuts.
At tax time the Internal Revenue Service certainly considers writers small businessmen who work hard at planting the seeds of ideas, harvesting them from our fields of knowledge, and delivering them as bundles of words to a waiting market. We're as much a profit-making enterprise as any business run by a neighborhood Mom and Pop grocery store, a Fifth Avenue fashion designer, or Las Vegas casino operator. If the definition of a capitalist is someone who dares take a risk, then we writers are the bravest or most foolhardy of the bunch. Here is how our business of writing has been described by people engaged in it:
Dr. Samuel Johnson: "Any man who doesn't write for money is a fool."
Anthony Trollope: "As regards remuneration for the time to write a novel, stone breaking would have done better."
Thomas Hardy: "A man who writes stands up to be shot at."
Clarence Darrow: "Some day I hope to write a book, where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away."
Henry David Thoreau: "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself."
John Steinbeck: "The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business."
As anyone can see, I am struggling to complete my memoir and I am as needy as any firm on Wall Street being handed a big check by Uncle Sam to keep on going. To rescue me from my unfortunate case of "blankruptcy"-a sudden loss of memory, which denies me the chance to complete my book-I need a nice fat loan of a million dollars from Uncle Sam. Such a sum would tide me over the bumps, vastly improve my credit rating, and give me the confidence to go back to my computer keyboard to finish the business of completing my Great American Memoir.
If you are still reading this, please write your Congressmen to help. Tell your representative that the treasury department needs to help us writers. Otherwise those struggling with long sentences may get it into their heads to start another Mutiny on the Bounty, believing, of course, that the pen is mightier than the sword.
Post Script
What if my letter to Barack Obama fails to reach the White House? If that should happen, I'll e-mail the president's chief of staff, requesting an appointment to see Mr. Obama. It will be the only way to assure him he that needn't worry, because CEO Eric Schmidt of Google, Inc. already has his organization in Silicon Valley busily engaged in completing the great Google Book project. Soon they'll have all of our books-which will include Dreams from My Father-locked safely away in the world's largest online library, completely assuring security for all books for all time to come.
"Don't worry, Mr. President," I'll tell the chief executive when we meet. "Your book is perfectly safe. Incidentally, may we talk for a few minutes about why some of us needy writers could use some of your bailout money-?"
Chapter Two
Mind the Gap With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs. -James Thurber (1894-1961)
The following is what I found when rummaging around in that told trunk looking for records of my travel and meal expenses while preparing my tax returns. I spotted a worn and tattered notebook amidst the clutter of my office. When I opened it, there lay a diary that could have been written by Socrates 2,400 years ago, that Greek philosopher who often advised his students to "know thyself."
I finally recognized the writing as my own. I had written it and then forgotten all about it. It seemed quite apropos since I've lately been depressed trying to remember the Stock Market Crash of l929, the Great Depression, World War II, Rock 'n' Roll, the Beatles, Vietnam, and Bush's Folly. I reasoned maybe this diary should be treasured as some kind of insight into a mind gradually fading away. It is in that spirit that I've chosen to admit these failings in this book.
* * *
Tuesday, February 6
Lately I've learned something shockingly new about myself. I'm beginning to forget small things. It is frustrating because these are mental losses of trivia which used to come easily to mind. My memory was good all of my life and my secret ambition had been to write an autobiography someday-remembering enough to set down a volume of interesting stories I took for granted. But now I realize it's something that can't be postponed.
Noting that today is Ronald Reagan's birthday, I am forced to consider a worse case scenario, which would be Alzheimer's disease, a terrible affliction that eventually robs a person of all he once knew and returns the mind to babyhood. I hope my condition is something less. I pray it's nothing serious, as what comes up missing in memory right now so far hasn't been anything too important, just names of people and places which are not part of my regular life anyway.
Do we really need to remember the names of long-gone movie stars of the 1930s and 40s, or street names of my old hometown, which have nothing to do with the way we live today? Once upon a time, facts and dates and names of people came trippingly to my tongue and without any furrowing of brow. Now it's somewhat surprising that I have to struggle, use word association, or other tricks, to bring these things to mind. I have to keep in mind that Albert Einstein once said, "Knowing where to find what you need in a book is more important than trying to remember everything."
Wednesday, February 7
Today I can safely say, "I've got six months to go." To what? Well, my next birthday, for one thing. While it may seemingly be an ordinary day of the year, it actually marks the exact mid-point between my birthdays-the time six months ago when I reached age 79 and the day coming up this year when I will attain the age of 80. There's no guarantee I'll get there, but the odds seem to say it's close enough to begin planning. I might as well look forward to its happening and then see exactly what happens.
The other day I met a lady on a bus who will be 81 this year. She said, "It's funny but I don't feel different from when I was young. I feel the same inside." She had to use a cane, walked with great difficulty, and needed help getting on and off the bus. Obviously her physical condition had not changed her self-image. Will my thoughts be the same? Do advancing years ever change how you feel about yourself? Will attaining 80 be significant? Knowing that there are people now in their 90s living a happy life keeps me going and looking forward to the same kind of future.
When I was very young, 40 seemed without question to be an advanced age. But on reaching it, I like most people, easily regarded it as the start of middle age. Because we keep busy, the years go by and then suddenly, there you are, having to face up to the fact you're nearly 60. However, this age may seem to be "good news" if you're healthy. New possibilities can be found in retirement, which, for an American with a good pension plan, means the freedom to do whatever you've always wanted to do in your spare time.
In many ways you can welcome becoming 60 or 65 because you'll be able to indulge yourself in a grand variety of leisure time activities, and join others your age who are doing the same. For many old people, this period of life means the first real freedom they've ever had. The term Old Age Pensioner (which has been used by the British to describe their old folks) hardly applies in the United States if you're happy and healthy approaching 70 and the thought of 80 seems far, far away.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from GOOGLE BRAINby Gordon Greb Copyright © 2009 by Gordon Greb. Excerpted by permission.
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