Reality Reconsidered

Naming Things

I’ve spent the last two hours trying to think of a name for this blog.  A label. Names, titles, slogans, headlines and labels–some people have a genius for them. Some don’t. I, alas, am in the don’t pile. For this blog–column–whatever it is, I thought of: Notes and Natterings. Mind Over Mutter. The Accidental Observer. And several others that made my advisors recoil in horror and dismay. So: Reality Reconsidred. I’ll go with it for a while.  I remember once, a bunch of us editors at Harcourt Brace were asked to come up with a title for the new edition of our reading program. The previous edition had been called the Phoenix edition, if I’m remembering correctly.  So there we sat in rows of chairs, about fifty of us, brainstorming for hours.  The Falcon Edition? The Eagle Edition? The Panther Edition? The Galaxy Edition? No one liked the titles I came up with–the Albatross Edition. Well,  it carried on the bird theme, didn’t it?  The Dinosaur Edition. 

Next to me on the desk here is a brilliant newspaper headline. It goes with a story about the new alternative-fuel stations springing up along the west coast. 

Where the Gas Is Always Greener

How do they come up with stuff like that? Those who do?

Great authors often write great titles–well duh: they’re great writers.  The Beautiful and the Damned–it doesn’t get much better than that.  Fitzgerald had some other gems too.  Tender Is the Night–to die for, in my opinion.  Then again, maybe great books turn their own titles into iconically great ones just by being such great books themselves.  On the face of it, The Great Gatsby is ho hum, but somehow it’s stamped indelibly into our cultural imagination. I hear the phrase, I see a certain kind of guy, his white suit, the lawns in the background, the whole milieu.  Same sort of thing with Peter Pan. Before there was the book/play/movies, was “Peter” already the perfect name for that little boy? What if J.M. Barrie had called him “Henry Pan”? Would “Henry” now feel like the very embodiment of magical, cocky, little-boy, naughtiness?

Some titles are great because of their audacity.  You can’t top A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But there’s a subtler, more elusive audacity about James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  It issues such a peremptory call, and for such an odd act. Immediately you wonder:  who’s “us”?  Who’s telling us we should do this?  And why should we praise famous men? What men, for that matter?  And why now, particularly?  At first blush that title seems perfectly direct, rather plain even, and yet every word in it turns out to raise a question.

I see that same elusive quality in some of Hemingway’s titles. The Sun Also Rises, for example.  It’s the “also” that does it. What is that about?  Is it saying something else rises, and so does the sun? Or is it saying the sun does something besides rise? (It does of course. Maybe one of us should write that book:  “The Sun Also Sets.”  Hemingway has a couple of other great ones: For Whom the Bell Tolls. And especially–especially: The Old Man and the Sea. Epic simplicity and mystic grandeur, yet so unassuming.  

And now that I’ve started–As I Lay Dying.  Light in August. The Sound and the Fury.  I envy the guy who could come up with titles like those.

My own titles aren’t bad, I think, but they didn’t come easily.  West of Kabul, East of New York was a last late suggestion that I tossed out because my agent didn’t want to try to sell my original title,  Straddling the Faultline.   The Widow’s Husband  started out as The Malang of Char Bagh, but one of my writer friends pointed out that the only two English words in that title are “the” and “of.” As for Destiny Disrupted, I love it, personally, but I didn’t think of it.  At book signings and such,  people ask how I came up with that title, and here’s how I did it.  I shot about a thousand ho-hum ideas at my editor Lisa Kaufman, and then she came up with a thousand and first idea better than all of mine.  People also ask me  what I mean by “Destiny Disrupted.” I’ve got an answer, but I leave that for another time. 

And having said all that, I’m realizing: maybe Faulkner and Fitzgerald didn’t come up with those great titles.  Editors are the great unsung creative heroes of publishing.  I’m picturing them shaking their heads as they stare at the titles their authors are suggesting.  The Good-Looking and the Goddamned. As I Lay There  Feeling Sick.  Old Codger Catches a Big Fish.  Big Hand Here for Celebrities–Big Hand. Thank You. Thank You Very Much.

Latest News Briefs from Afghanistan

 August 31

• The Central Bank seized control of Kabul Bank, the country’s erstwhile most powerful private bank. Shareholders included Mahmoud Karzai, the president’s brother, and Haseen Fahim, brother of Vice President Mohammed Fahim. Fahim has borrowed $92 million for business ventures that have won major contracts at U.S. bases operated by the CIA.
• In southerm (Zabul) militants attacked a private security company’s convoy, killed two guards, and set fire to 15 vehicles. In the north, a roadside bomb killed three Asfghan aid workers empoyed by OXFAM. in Kabul, armed men killed two government employees. Over the last 4 days, insurgents have killed 22 American soldiers.
• Petraeus admits that “the Taliban footprint” is expanding across the country but claims security duties will nonetheless slowly be handed over to Afghan forces over the next year.
• British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg visited Afghanistan and said the war there is “turning the corner.”
• Those schoolgirls who collapsed recently in Kabul weren’t just suffering from hysteria. Blood tests show they really were victims of a powerful poison gas attack. No one knows by whom or how.
• It’s official: a pipeline will be built to carry natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan—the deal was just signed.

August 30

• A poll by the Afghan TV station TOLO finds that 78 % of Afghans favor Karzai’s decision to expell private security firms from the country. Stanford professor Joel Brinkley has bitterly derided this order.
• After studying just 34% of the country, the Cadastral Survey of Afghanistan–whatever that is–reports that influential figures have seized over 20 million acres of land from government ministries and private citizens.

August 29 

• In Herat, the bodies of five kidnapped Afghan campaign workers were found. They had been working for Fawzya Galani, a female candidate in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
• The Agha Khan Foundation is funding environmental protection projects in Bamiyan, where the huge Buddhas once stood. The Japanese are talking about reconstructing those Buddhas from shattered fragments. Local Afghans in the area are trying to build vacation facilities to draw tourists. Last year, 750 adventurous tourists visited Bamiyan. Festivals give visitors sporting and musical events, and there is talk of a ski resort being developed here. August 29 2010 Norway has built 120 schools in northern Afghanistan and plans 50 more. On Sunday it reported that all the new schools are doing well. Over 40 percent of the students (57,000) are female.

August 28 

• Karzai fired 72-year-old prosecutor Fazel Ahmed Faqiryar, the main official in charge of pursuing corruption cases in Afghanistan–cases like that of Mohammed Zia Salehi of Karzai’s National Security Council, who’s been charged with corruption but is also (one of many Afghans who turn out to be) on the CIA payroll.

August 25

•  Afghan security forces rushed to northwestern Afghanistan to quell riots that erupted after a police recruit killed two Spanish soldiers and then was shot to death himself.
• The Chinese report that 22 girls fell unconscious at a girls’  high school in Kabul on Wednesday. Were they poisoned? No one knows.

August 23 

• Talk is bubbling of building a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India.  The Asian Development Bank would finance the project to the tune of $7.6 billion dollars.
• August 20
• The infamous WikiLeaks document reveals that “capture/kill teams” set up by the CIA and various branches of the military are hunting down people in Afghanistan,  working from a list of 2,058 Afghans considered dangerous.

August 18

• Karzai ordered all private military contractors out of the country within four months. Their presence, he said, retards development of the country’s own security forces.