Category Archives: Thinking About Thinking

New Rom-Com Shows How Hollywood Manufactures Celebrity

LaPuerta Books and Media announces the December 27 release of Gerald Everett Jones’s thirteenth novel, “Mick & Moira & Brad: A Romantic Comedy.”

Witty dialogue is very much the order of the day. Hollywood trade secrets – and gossip – are the center of it. Mick McGraw is an aggressive Hollywood agent who reps famous singers. Moira Halimi-Joubert is a headstrong criminal defense attorney who studied opera. Brad Davenport is an arrogant billionaire hedge-fund manager who has a soft spot for dogs. Mick wants to make Moira a superstar, but she may have to dump Brad.

What does the battle of the sexes look like when the combatants are equally matched – and might actually like each other? #MeThree?

The twisty plot takes rom-com fans inside a big-time movieland packaging agency as Mick’s team scrambles to put together a stadium concert patterned on Cher’s “Farewell Tour.” The superstar they’ve scheduled has canceled just nine weeks before opening night. They need a totally new show theme – and a new star. With Moira in the role, her “Follow This!” show brings back famous names and songs from pop culture – and surprises everyone, including Moira, who must decide whether to pay the high price of fame.

The book has already attracted rave reviews. Showbiz insider Roberta Edgar, coauthor of the award-winning book “Million Dollar Miracle” says, “This is smartly written with strong, sometimes very witty, dialogue. The narrative is rich with insights into “the biz,” particularly the music industry. Jones nails the latest in upscale fashion and other contemporary cultural trends. The story is fun, it moves fast, and it’s about Hollywood.”

“Readers’ Favorite” reviewer Pikasho Deka writes, “A seamless blend of witty dialogue, humor, and romance makes ‘Mick & Moira & Brad’ a thoroughly entertaining read you don’t want to put down. Gerald Everett Jones’s novel is a treat for anyone who loves romantic comedies. With a fast-paced plot and vibrant characters – whom you’re not going to forget soon – the narrative feels like a breeze. The three main characters, Mick, Moira, and Brad, all have strong yet distinct personalities that create a compelling dynamic, which is a delight to the reader. Their interaction involved some humorous and quick back-and-forth dialogue, and those were some of my favorite scenes from the book. If romantic comedy is your go-to genre, you will have a blast with this one.”

As these reviewers agree, the book offers a tantalizing view of how major entertainment agencies manufacture celebrity. As Jones describes Moira’s new stardom, “Show business wasn’t just a job change. She’d jumped into an alternate universe, a phantasmic place with its eccentric traditions, rules, and jargon. A place where talent was never enough, where emotions are manufactured, delivered, and manipulated as a product.”

Himself a veteran of the Los Angeles music business, John Rachel, author of the recently released novel “Love Connection: Romance in the Land of the Rising Sun,” applauds the showbiz realism: “A star is born? Not anymore. A star is manufactured. Gerald Everett Jones in a style of storytelling that is uniquely his and endearingly superb has spun a riveting yarn of an epic makeover, a young lady who’s plucked from the legal profession and thrust into the limelight of pop stardom. It’s a fascinating look behind-the-curtain at what goes into the creation of music icons like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé.”

“Mick & Moira & Brad” is available for preorder in trade paperback from booksellers worldwide, as well as in Kindle e-book format from Amazon. The release date is December 27, 2022.

Gerald Everett Jones lives in Santa Monica, California. This book is his thirteenth novel. He is a board member of the Independent Writers of Southern California (IWOSC), a Film Independent (FILM) Fellow, and a winner of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Diversity Award. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honors from the College of Letters, Wesleyan University, where he studied under novelists Peter Boynton (“Stone Island”), F.D. Reeve (“The Red Machines”), and Jerzy Kosinski (“The Painted Bird, Being There”).

Learn more about the author, including his other multiple-award-winning novels, at his website geraldeverettjones.com.

[Featured photo credit: The Everett Collection. Author photo: Gabriella Muttone, Hollywood]

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Harambee Means “We Are One”

“Harambee” is the motto of post-Independence Kenya. The country was ceded from the British Empire in 1963 after a period of social unrest, which included the Mau-Mau Rebellion. A leader in that uprising was Jomo Kenyatta, who became the new nation’s founding president. His son Uhuru is the outgoing incumbent president, defeated by William Ruto in the election, just concluded last August.

Harambee – We Are One. E Pluribus Unum – One from Many.

May it be ever so!

He went as a passive observer. He stayed when they showed him how to live.

When I read some more of the Ong’wen book, I discovered a delicious (if troubling) irony. In the early years of Independence, harambee came to mean voluntary labor or donations for grass-roots projects. Then it became dues for electing local politicians. Now it’s a synonym for all manner of mandatory political bribes, extending to the highest levels.

Yes, that’s a side of Harry, too.

 

Book Review: A Prominent Kenyan’s Memoir and Daring Exposé

Just after the recent Kenyan national elections, a disruptive and revelatory book appeared: Stronger Than Faith: My Journey in the Quest for Justice in Repressive Kenya – 1958 – 2015 by Oduor Ong’wen. Just who is this author, and how does his life fit the provocative description in the book title? Prof. Yash Tandon, respected Ugandan policymaker who is renowned for a career opposing the viciously oppressive Idi Amin, wrote this about Ong’wen in the Introduction:

… In 2015 he [Ong’wen became] … the Executive Director of Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). The ODM is a centre-left political party – a grassroots people’s movement which was formed during the 2005 Kenyan constitutional referendum campaign and led by Raila Odinga, whose foreword to this book aptly captures the twists and turns of Kenya’s democratic struggles, at the centre of which Oduor was.

Do powerful interests in Kenya want to suppress this book? Why did it suddenly appear after the national elections? Is its fate safer now? Or potentially more disruptive?

Most striking in this voluminous memoir is Chapter 28, “The New Eating Chiefs,” which alleges more than twenty power-grabs, public thefts, and scams on Kenyan taxpayers by the outgoing administration. Lest these protests seem fake news promulgated by the defeated party, note that The Standard – the nation’s most respected newspaper in Nairobi – is serializing the book in its current issues – perhaps to counter fears that Ong’wen’s version of history will soon be suppressed by entrenched interests.

Kenyan politics – and geopolitics – interest me because before the Covid outbreak I was a resident in Kenya for two years, having gone there to support my wife’s work in wildlife conservation and child welfare. This residency occurred after years of trips between our US home and various ecotourism venues in East Africa.  Just before our decision to move there, the previous national election had taken place in 2017. The principal opponents for president were Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the first president and founder of the republic Jomo Kenyatta, and Ong’wen’s colleague Raila Odinga. Raila (Kenyans often use given names rather than surnames, even in formal writing) is a veteran politician with a reputation as a populist leftist. Uhuru is seen as more conservative and backed by entrenched interests. Uhuru, the incumbent, and Raila have been contending with each other for decades. Accusations of voter fraud have been common in Kenyan elections, but when Raila lost to Uhuru for the second time in 2017, concerns about corruption exploded as violence in the streets. Raila insisted so vehemently that the process was rigged that he held an “alternative swearing-in ceremony” in a public park, attended by a huge crowd.

If some of this sounds familiar, bear in mind that this cockeyed scenario in Kenya took place three years before the disruptive events of the 2020 US elections – well before many of my countrymen and I thought such events were possible here.

Parallels, although tempting, between US and Kenyan politics are not straightforward. Far from being an exemplar for our election-denying past president, in political philosophy, Raila might have been viewed as Kenya’s Bernie Sanders. And to make matters perhaps more confusing to Western observers, in 2018, after a year of prolonged disputes compounded by longstanding tribal unrest, Uhuru and Raila came together in what has since been termed “the Handshake Deal.” Besides affirming peace between the parties, the deal seemed to make his rival Uhuru’s new right-hand man – so much so that Uhuru must have agreed to back Raila for president in the next national election – which is just what he did in the one concluded in August.

So Raila was looking like he’d made a deal of either convenience or necessity with the establishment. His populist messages softened, but they didn’t disappear. Meanwhile, after another year, the third man at the top of the government – Uhuru’s deputy William Ruto – broke away from the ruling Jubilee Party and declared himself an independent.

Ruto, himself a political veteran who had previously held cabinet posts, had initially been groomed by Daniel arap Moi, the country’s long-serving president from 1978 to 2002, having served since Independence in 1963 as Jomo’s vice president. To this day, Moi is widely regarded by Kenyans as their most unashamedly corrupt leader. But in joining Uhuru’s government, Ruto disassociated himself from Moi.

In this last election, Ruto squared off against Raila. Ruto won by barely a percentage point. Raila once again cried fraud, but he nevertheless conceded after the Kenyan high court ruled his objections had no basis.

Raila recently pointed the finger at those responsible for his defeat:

Our election was not stolen by [Ruto’s coalition] Kenya Kwanza. It was an international conspiracy involving Britain and the United States. A former president of the USA who many Kenyans admired greatly was on [the] Smartmatic Board. (Raila Odinga quoted in Kenyan Lyrics, October 8, 2022).

So – here we are today – Raila is still an active voice in Kenyan politics and head of the Orange (ODM) party of which Ong’wen, author of this confessional book, is the director.

One might assert that Ruto’s hands are not clean. Since his swearing-in as the nation’s new chief executive, Ruto is acting like a reformer. Maybe he is one. Perhaps significantly, politicians from both the Moi and Kenyatta families lost their seats in Parliament.

But now Raila continues to spin the next installment of the conspiracy story. He keeps insisting that the vote was rigged against him. He further accuses Western powers of favoring Ruto over him, presumably because of Raila’s prior leftist positions. Raila is telling Kenyans that the world’s big-money interests want to manipulate the future of this fast-emerging economy, and he stands instead for regional control of resources and investment.

All during my stay there, I heard Kenyans in the coffee shops, taxis, markets – and especially when tongues let loose in the bars – repeat, “Corruption is the mother of Kenya.”

Now I live once again in Southern California, having returned just prior to the Covid outbreak.

Then in 2019, I began to look at the US political scene with Kenyan eyes. All the while, I have marveled at how fast economic development in Kenya is progressing. (And this is a factor in the persistent human-animal conflict that threatens the natural world everywhere and the health of the planet.)

I have speculated and still believe that Kenya is poised to become the Silicon Valley of East Africa.

With Ruto in place and the elections having been settled this time peaceably, I’d expect international investment there to boom. Apparently, the Biden administration concurs, as evidenced by the appointment of Meg Whitman, past CEO of Hewlett-Packard, as ambassador.

A fictional story of love, intrigue, conspiracy, and corruption in Kenya.

Thinking About Thinking: A Novel of Tomorrow’s Happy World

The Big Ball of Wax: A Novel of Tomorrow’s Happy World by Shepherd Mead. Here’s the cover of the Ballantine Books mass-market paperback I read back in the day. It’s now available on Kindle.

That’s the subtitle of Shepherd Mead‘s 1954 novel, The Big Ball of Wax.

Do you wonder – perhaps with trepidation and creeping anxiety – what the socioeconomic impacts of Virtual Reality (VR) might be?

Well, author Mead did that with painful humor back in 1954, before the maestro of Meta was even an embryo. Now that some are betting the high-tech farm on VR, perhaps we’d do well to take another look at this crusty tale.

It describes an invention that is See-Hear-Taste-Smell-Touch-o-Vision. Spoiler alert: Formerly thoughtful people check into cheap hotel rooms with no change of clothes and a bushel bag of uncooked rice, never to be heard from again.

Rehearsing brain surgery by VR seems like a sensible idea. But – wondering where your friends (or your kids) are because they’ve disappeared into an illusory fifth dimension?

Mead was also the author of another more popular cautionary tale – How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. I suspect some tech tyros are also unknowingly following that example, as well.

 

Book Review – Platform – Where are you going on vacation?

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Kenyan national elections take place on Tuesday, August 9, 2022.

May wisdom and peace prevail!

I have a lot of respect for Michel Houellebecq as one of today’s foremost practitioners of literary fiction. I’d put Paul Auster in that category, as well. I’ve reviewed other novels by both of them in this blog. Another reason to read Platform was that its premise seemed comparable to my Harry Harambee’s Kenyan Sundowner – that is, an older, single, middle-class white man sets off on a vacation to an exotic resort where he expects he will find hookups and parties.

Houellebecq’s novel in French and English editions

There the similarity mostly ends. Platform’s protagonist, Michel Renault, is in his mid-forties. Harry Gardner is at least twenty years older. Both are men of comfortable means with time on their hands. Michel travels to Thailand, Gardner to the south coast of Kenya. Both places are widely known to provide the kinds of recreation these men seek.

But while Renault dives in up to his ears, Gardner holds back. Renault is a cynical, self-seeking libertine. Gardner is a well-meaning couch potato.

Houellebecq’s descriptions are raw and explicit, and his point of view is deliberately cynical. Both Michels – the author and the character – detest Western hypocrisy, arrogance, and exploitive capitalist drive. Harry and I focus more on the obvious corruption here and there – but with the hope that Kenya’s startlingly rapid emergence into the information age will ultimately be a better model of sustainability for the rest of the world.

Both characters become much more involved in the business enterprises of those countries than they had planned. Both stay. And both develop serious relationships.

It won’t be much of a spoiler to disclose that Platform’s view of the world is not hopeful. Houellebecq rants and scolds, and perhaps by being honest about his discontents he intends to drive the reader to at least question our geopolitical goals and methods. In Harry’s case, his new friends bestow on him a new surname – Harambee – which is the Kenyan national motto, meaning “We are one.” The meaning is much the same as our E Pluribus Unum, “One from many.” For Kenyans it represents the unification of 43 different tribes (ethnic societies) into one nation. (As of a few weeks ago, there are now 44. Kenyan-born Asians, mostly of Indian heritage, are now regarded as indigenous.)

Harry doesn’t know whether his friends are teasing him with this title, or honoring his newfound commitment to join their community.

Michel Renault plays the game to suit only himself. Later in the book, he says he’s learned to care for at least one other person, but then that illusion ends abruptly. Renault was never fated to find anything like happiness.

Harry’s outlook is ultimately hopeful. Eventually he has to ask, “Am I being played?” And then, “Do I mind?”

Bonnes vacances!

Harry Harambee’s Kenyan Sundowner is a captivating, witty read that explores the sociopolitical climate in Kenya in an honest way that is both entertaining and thought-provoking. This is a clear and compelling outlook that realistically paints Kenya while exploring glaring issues that are a bane to the country. When Harry decides to stop being a bystander who lets other people decide his fate, it’s noteworthy. This can be equated to Kenyans finally deciding to take responsibility rather than just going with the flow, waiting for decisions that affect their lives to be made for them. And it can be done without selling one’s soul in the process and leave a legacy and a better country worthy of its name. – Desmond Boi, Editorial Writer, The Standard and Citizen TV, Nairobi

Book Review – Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

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Here’ my book review of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman.

Of course, she’s not – fine, that is. This isn’t a spoiler. You’d have to suspect as much from the outset. As one of my screenwriting mentors was fond of saying, “No one wants to see The Village of the Happy People.”

Soon after sitting down with this novel, I picked up on its homage to the themes of the book that spawned the contemporary chick-lit genre, Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (1996). Bridget’s story owes its aspirational plot to Pride and Prejudice, the 1813 romance by Jane Austen. Both books follow what literary critics have since termed the marriage plot. That is, the female main character’s overwhelming and obsessive goal is to meet and marry the man of her dreams – or, at least, someone who will care for her forever, giving her the kind attention, comfort, and – most important, social standing – that a woman of her fine sensibilities deserves.

[Aside] In counterpoint, Jeffrey Eugenides wrote The Marriage Plot (2011) to examine (and not satirically) whether the marriage plot applies at all to the young people of contemporary society. It’s a fascinating alternative romance, involving a set of relationships that go at least four ways. But other than demonstrating that the old rules don’t apply, Eugenides offers no prescriptive message for the future.

But back to poor Eleanor. She’s a young, highly intelligent, single woman in the urban society of today’s Glasgow. She holds a sensible and reliable job as an accountant in a small graphic design firm. She calls the designers “the creatives.” They are trendy and self-confident. Her mates regard her as lackluster and back-office.

Eleanor tells her story in the first person, confessing her foibles, her aspirations, and her hangups. She believes she is flawed both physically and emotionally, but she persists in her belief that she is, overall, fine – coping nicely. Her goals seem limited and achievable – until she develops a crush on a handsome musician. He’s a local struggling artist who already has something of a name and a rep. They’ve never met. She admires him from a distance, until her following him verges on outright stalking.

Meanwhile, Eleanor has developed a real, albeit awkward, friendship with Raymond, a geeky schlump at the office. He seems much more interested in her than she is in him.

Do you have enough clues so far? You’d be right in suspecting that Eleanor’s story isn’t just another retelling of Bridget’s. You’d also rightly suspect – and I’ll stop short of spoilers here – that the rock star will be less than stellar and the schlump will be surprisingly sympathetic.

But it’s not just a relationship story, regardless of its homage to the marriage plot. Eleanor has serious issues as chilling as today’s grimmest headlines, and she’s in denial about how well she’s coped. How she eventually confronts the conflicts in her own psyche will be found in Gail Honeyman’s ultimately devious and unsuspected twists of plot.

Woody Allen meets Nick Hornby in this hilarious beach read. Gerald Everett Jones, who is every bit as clever as Larry David (and has more hair!), has created a witty, literate George Costanza for us to savor. NBC, are you paying attention? — Paula Berinstein, producer and host of The Writing Show podcast

Sneak Preview – My Inflatable Friend

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Rollo Returns!

The Misadventures of Rollo Hemphill series of humorous novels will be reissued later this summer. Shown here is the new cover for the first title, My Inflatable Friend.

First released in 2007 – in the same year the iPhone was introduced – the beginning of Rollo’s story presents few examples of smartphone texting and social-media interactions. It just wasn’t a thing back then.

And foremost among Rollo’s transgressions was his decision to make his girlfriend Felicia jealous with a life-sized rubber doll. That device, too, was a new thing, but times have certainly changed. This one is silicone and reportedly has her own Instagram page (this from RT, so for various reasons, beware of hacks and ads for personal applicances):

Kazakh Bodybuilder’s ‘Marriage” to Doll on Hold

Here’s a snippet of My Inflatable Friend, clipped from the audiobook narrated by the irrepressible, indefatigable Stuart Appleton, who I suggest sounds like Rollo but perhaps is a more exemplary citizen:

My Inflatable Friend audiobook (Audible)

Answers to the Big Questions – Thinking About Thinking #53

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The investigator in my mystery series, Evan Wycliff, is a young Baptist minister who is beset with doubt. When he was in college, he gave up his studies in the seminary because what he learned of Christian history was far too grim. Then he took up astrophysics and found more troubling questions than answers.

Like the rest of us when we bother to fret about the state of the world, Evan wants to know:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Why is there evil in the world?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe: Greene, Brian: 9780593171721: Amazon.com: Books

I don’t have any satisfying solutions to those riddles, but I have recently read two books that offer some explanations. The first is Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by physicist Brian Greene. Here’s a more lucid presentation of astrophysics and cosmology than I’ve yet encountered. Unfortunately from the standpoint of traditional religious teaching, Greene seems to side with the “godless universe” theorists, who hold that the dual processes of entropy and evolution, over 14 billion years of chaotic interaction, are sufficient to explain the complexity of our physical world and its dazzling life forms. Greene does stop short of attempting to explain how consciousness arises. He’s as stumped as anyone about whether a computer will ever be able to know it exists. (I’ve written more about Greene’s book here.)

The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex , Morowitz, Harold J. - Amazon.com

The most intriguing and persuasive scientific world view I’ve found so far is in Harold J. Morowitz‘s 20-year-old text The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex. Like Greene, Morowitz is a hard-headed physicist, but he seems to think there is more to the purpose of evolution than random outcomes, however complex or sophisticated. He’s in sympathy with the Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who theorized that all evolution tends toward the Omega Point, the pinnacle of creation decreed by its Creator. The breadth of Morowitz’s analysis is amazing – he begins with quantum particles and concludes with complex brain structure – hinting that the next step in evolution is into the spiritual realm, although he offers no opinions about what intelligent beings can find there.

If you are tempted to dive into Morowitz – and if you’re curious, I encourage you to take the plunge – feel free to skim the chapters on organic molecular chemistry. That’s the author’s specialty, and there’s way too much information here for anyone without an advanced degree in his field. Nevertheless, I promise that making your way through this ambitious book will be a rewarding experience.

Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls – Thinking About Thinking #52

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When I saw this special issue, “The Dead Sea Scrolls: 75 Years Since Their Historic Discovery,” published by National Geographic magazine, on the newsstand, I grabbed it eagerly. I hoped I’d find new revelations based on recent scholarship, which has not received much public exposure.

I was disappointed. This issue focuses almost exclusively on the scrolls that harmonize with the traditional versions of the scriptures. The editors’ mantra must have been to appeal to the broadest possible audience – and offend no one.

But then I read buried in these pages in the brief chapter “The Non-Biblical Manuscripts: The Writings of the Qumram Sect:”

Although a quarter of the Dead Sea Scrolls are copies from the Hebrew Bible, the remainder are non-biblical religious and secular texts that appear to describe the beliefs, rules and activities of the Qumram community. Josephus claims “[the Essenes] equally preserve the books belonging to their sect,” which could refer to these documents, bolstering the identification of the Qumram sect with the Essenes.

Besides the two pages that follow this quotation, the special-issue magazine ignores three-quarters of its purported topic.

For a more insightful treatment of that missing information, see Barbara Thiering’s disruptive and controversial scholarship, most notably in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. I’ve commented previously on that book here.

Thiering died years ago, and since that time her scholarship has fallen into disrepute in the academic community.

Perhaps because she dared to speak truth to power?

Houellebecq’s Fascination with Schopenhauer – Thinking About Thinking #51

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Here’s my book review of In the Presence of Schopenhauer by French prize-winning novelist Michel Houellebecq. In this novella-length essay, the author describes his fascination with 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

The Frogs is a sculpture by Sergio Bustamante. Can you guess why it reminds me of this book?

Houellebecq asserts that encountering Schopenhauer’s philosophy changed his outlook on life fundamentally. The author was in his mid-twenties. It was as if he’d met a perverse, cranky old man whom he could regard as a father figure – an understanding mentor who could forgive the author for being such a curmudgeon himself.

In her preface to the paperback, critic Agathe Novak-Lechavalier describes the author’s outlook this way:

Schopenhauer opened Houellebecq’s eyes and taught him to contemplate the world as it is in itself – as entirely driven by a blind and endless ‘will to live’ which is the essence of all things, from inert matter to men, via plants and animals. In Schopenhauer, this ‘will’, foreign to the principle of reason, is the basis of the absurd and tragic character of all existence, whose sufferings are at once inevitable (because ‘all willing proceeds from need and thus from deprivation, and thus from suffering’) and devoid of any justification. It also explains the author’s legendary pessimism.

“In other words,” the philosopher might have said to the author, “don’t feel bad about being such a cynic. Michel. Because the only sense you can make of the world is what you perceive through your senses, your opinion is the only one that matters!”

In my posts, I’ve included book reviews of Houllebecq’s novels The Map and the Territory and Submission. I’ve also read Whatever and Serotonin – all before I picked up this little book of admiration for Schopenhauer.

Well, finally, this essay explains a lot. I’ve found Houllebecq’s narrative points of view – whether expressed in the first or the third person – as solipsistic – that is, hopelessly self-centered to the point of self-obsession. His plots often seem pointless. He never explains. It’s as if he has no idea why he wrote the story.

I’d say this point of view agrees not only with Schopenhauer but also with the later French existentialists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as with some contemporary behaviorists. “The universe is empty and meaningless,” they seem to say. “Make of it what you will.”

Some say this is good news, Recently, I heard physicist Brian Cox say he thought the mission of the human race is to make meaning.

I wonder.