About Cynthia G.

Cynthia Gregory is an executive coach, nonprofit consultant, and creativity coach living with a menagerie of two among the vineyards and coastal hills of Northern California.

the mother of invention

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Cynthia G.

OIL IN WATER

PAM LAZOS

CHAPTER ONE (b)

Marty stopped and laid his face against the side of the metal grate. It was cool to the touch and not at all indicative of the processes going on inside. He shook his head and started his hop, skip and jump dance all over again, this time adding an ecstatic laugh to the mix.

He’d done it. Just like Dr. Frankenstein, he’d brought the beast to life: his Thermo-Depolymerization Unit, or TDU, lived – years in the making, like nothing the world had ever seen, and until five minutes ago, only a theory. Marty had envisioned that the TDU would take garbage, computers, old sneakers, last night’s dinner, yard waste, old fence posts, plastic tupperware, with or without lids, old sweatshirts, used ball point pens, broken picture frames, old love letters, paint waste, empty cardboard boxes, broken refrigerators, busted telephone poles, wrecked car parts, or the whole car for that matter, old comic books, unwanted furniture, hell, this machine could take anything carbon-based, and do something magical with it, something that, to date, no one else had figured out how to do – take trash, and convert it into oil – pure, unadulterated, car-starting, engine-revving, turbo-driving, eighteen-wheeler-moving oil. Marty figured that the TDU would mimic what Mother Nature did every day hundreds of miles below the earth’s surface: break down fossils into fuels. But Marty’s contraption would take about three hours instead of millions of years, combusting nothing, and leaving no waste. After twenty years of toil, Marty’d had his share of false starts. But now the whir and hum of booster pumps and coolant fan units was evidence: modern-day alchemy. Marty had called down the vision.

But the world had no template for it. Like the shaman of the first American Indian tribe to come into contact with Columbus, Marty had to mold the vision into a discernible shape, give the people something palpable that they could recognize. For even as Columbus’s ships approached the shores of the New World, the Indians couldn’t see them, not until their shaman provided them with a frame of reference.

But being a shaman was at times an exhausting, aching and lonely occupation. So Marty did what any man in his place would do when faced with a discovery of unrivaled proportions. He propped himself up on the hammock in the corner of the barn and took a nap.

to be continued. . .

The Sweet By and By

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Cynthia G.

It’s not really giving anything away to say that the debut novel by Todd Johnson, The Sweet By and By, will make you cry. Maybe this says more about the reviewer than about the book, but still, the fact remains that the subject matter of The Sweet By and By is tear-worthy. It’s about friendship and loyalty and big end-of-life issues like dignity and happiness and who really loves you for sure.

Lorraine is a church-going, God-smacking woman who has made a career out of taking care of other people. She is a caregiver at the Ridgecrest Nursing Home, and little gets by her. Lorraine has equal measures of patience and endurance, which she exercises each day as she looks after Margaret and Bernice, the two brightest spots at the home. Margaret has a sharp tongue and high standards, and Lorraine bears Margaret’s rebukes and criticisms with calm mother-patience. More than helping Margaret to dress and bathe, Lorraine preserves the dwindling strands of dignity that Margaret clings to.

Bernice provides comic relief in what would otherwise be too sad a story to bear. Bernice is a happy ditz and reliably out of her mind most of the time. She is Margaret’s constant companion, and they look after each other is a way that is endearing and practical. Bernice carries a stuffed monkey with her everywhere and treats him as a real person. Except of course when she hides bootleg booze deep in his throat where no one of the nursing home staff, even Lorraine, would think to look.

Rhonda is at the home by accident, if you believe such things. Rhonda survived being raised by a hateful grandmother and has grown into a decent person. As a hair stylist, she endeavors to make the world a more beautiful place. However, it is for cash that she applies to Ridgeview, never expecting to like it, much less fall in love with the ladies who line up outside the beauty parlor door each week. Despite any intention to get in, do her job, and get out, Rhonda is adopted by both Margaret and Beatrice, who see the goodness in the girl and provide the mother-encouragement for which she had been starved as a child.

One of the delights of The Sweet By and By is that it is set in North Carolina, where eccentricity is as natural as sunlight and sweet tea. This lovely bit of fiction is not nostalgic; it takes an unflinching view of who we are, what connects us, and what’s important, without being preachy. In the end, we realize it is Lorraine’s story, and Johnson leaves her narrative not with a nice neat bow, but with faith that everything will somehow work out:

“I used to hope that if I went to church long enough, all my inside weight would go away. That ain’t right. Jesus may have come to take away our sins, but he left our feelings right where they’ve always been. I still have inside me some of what I’ve always had, built up over a lifetime. I just keep adding to it, every day, like everybody else, and hope the stew gets better the more ingredients I put in.”

The Sweet By and By is perfect summer reading. It’s weighty enough to matter, but manages also to take itself lightly.

Review by Cynthia Gregory/ceegregory@aol.com

Eureka

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Cynthia G.

OIL IN WATER

PAM LAZOS

Chapter One

Marty Tirabi sat on a stool aside his drafting table, an aluminum pie plate in each hand. His eyes were closed, his spine erect, his breathing slow and regular, his conscious mind sitting on the pinnacle of present awareness. At the exact moment Marty’s consciousness shifted, sliding across the threshold from beta to alpha to delta like a single-base hitter stealing home, Marty’s grip slackened and the pie plates clattered to the floor. He woke with a start and stared, wide-eyed, at the back wall of the barn where It sat, all the while scanning his interior databases for a revelation that refused to be retrieved.

Marty rubbed his forehead. This was how Thomas Edison did it, mining the gem-rich ground of his subconscious by bringing himself to the brink of sleep, then pulling back with a start for a third-party observer’s view. The result of Edison’s efforts was the light bulb and one thousand and ninety-two other patented inventions, but Marty’d be damned if he could get Edison’s process to work. For him, it was just there, a vision that sometimes crept, sometimes hurtled from unconscious to conscious awareness – claircognizance some called it, a simple knowing – and suddenly Marty would know how to pull it all together.

But not tonight. Frustrated, Marty spun his stool around, laid the pie plates and his overtired brain on the drafting table, and stared at his father’s oil lamp, its soft, incandescent glow casting ectoplasmic shadows on the blueprints beneath his head. He started to fall – no aluminum to stop him this time – but was halted at the threshold again.

A faint hum jarred him back, a soft, deliberate noise like the whir of a refrigerator motor or the patter of a soft rain. He felt it in his feet first. It climbed up his legs as it grew in intensity, settled in his heart, and then shot up to his forehead. His head vibrated. Marty rose slowly so as not to disturb the hum’s cadence and strolled across the barn floor toward the back wall, convinced that a nonchalant attitude was imperative to the hum’s survival. He tried not to smile, tried not to look directly at It until he had stopped in front of the thousands of pounds of steel assembled in six distinct units. He sniffed the air. Dozens of smells slid past the cilia in his nose and traveled along his olfactory nerve, stopping at the cerebral cortex to register: methane, plastic, burning rubber, decay, ash. Even in a closed-looped system, the vapors, like his dreams, always escaped.

And then, suspended in the air like dust motes lollygagging in a single ray of sun, the smell of oil, sharp, sweet and slightly acrid, knocked on the registrar’s door, tap, tap, tap, piercing Marty’s nasal cavity and shattering his equilibrium.

“Hahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Marty clapped his hands and because he was half-Greek, did the only dance he felt comfortable doing, a little hop/skip combo that was the backbone of most traditional ethnic dances. He repeated the steps over and over until he came full circle. He added a little jump to his combination. The word Eureka came to mind.

to be continued. . .

The Imperfectionists

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Cynthia G.

There are certain professionals that seem to be the darlings of fiction: lawyers, doctors, cops, writers. In The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman takes great glee in shining a light on journalists, and as the title of his debut novel implies, they are best at their worst.

Newspapers are not what they used to be. And certainly, Rachman’s unnamed global English language newspaper launched from Rome in the 1950s, is no exception. Before CNN and the Internet and iPads, there were newspapers. If you wanted hard, cold, facts, you got them printed in black and white on newsprint and by gum, there were people who ate and breathed deadlines to bring them to you.

Newsmaking was a noble profession. It was gritty and real and yet, there was something a little glamorous about the paper and the men and women who made it run.

This fact however, bears little relevance to Rachman’s book. None of his characters are quite likeable. Their noble profession is to deliver the news of the world, and to that extent, they are quite good. And yet personally? Well, it’s probably best not to look too closely.

The Imperfectionists is more a collection of short stories than a novel in the traditional sense, with all stories related by the terribly important international English language newspaper printed in Rome. Stringers in Cairo and Paris, Davos and Nairobi, feed the ravenous paper its content. Devoted editors and tyrannical staffers ensure that all twelve pages of the paper are crammed with the activities of the world and presented daily, to a circulation of 10,000. They are all perfectly imperfect, smart and sassy people giving their all to do something meaningful and right. Beyond news however, the paper is just an item on the balance sheet of the newspaper’s corporate owners, nitwit offspring of the original founder, nested safely in far away Atlanta.

Meanwhile in Rome, Herman Cohen has created an encyclopedic style guide with which he tortures his editors. Editor in chief Kathleen Solson enjoys the sophisticated patina of living abroad, even as she discovers her husband having an affair. Copy editor Ruby Zaga is a spiteful, friendless staffer who secretly hungers for connection. Business editor Hardy Benjamin is so desperate for a boyfriend that she supports her loser of an Irish lover to shield herself from living alone.

The terribly important international English language newspaper is fading by the hour. It’s gushing red ink. Its loyal readership is dying off. It’s not even on the Internet, for pity’s sake! The ship is going down, yet each character has a vested interest in believing that the ship is unsinkable. At a publishing conference at the Cavalieri Hilton in Rome, Kathleen Solson is asked if the newspaper will survive.

“Absolutely,” she tells the audience. “We’ll keep going, I assure you of that. Obviously, we’re living in an era when technology is moving at an unheralded pace. I can’t tell you if in fifty years we’ll be publishing in the same format. Actually, I can probably tell you we won’t be publishing in the same way, that we’ll be innovating then, just as we are now.” Unfortunately for Kathleen and her crew, the paper is doomed. Fortunately for the reader, it’s a heck of a ride down the rails.

Review by Cynthia Gregory/ceegregory@aol.com

From the Land of the Moon

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Cynthia G.

I love a book that includes landscape as an important character almost as much as I love a story with an unreliable narrator. I also adore Italy, so for me From The Land Of The Moon, written by Milena Agus and translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein, is the trifecta of great literature.

A small book, From The Land Of The Moon is a big story of love and belonging. Our heroine remains unnamed throughout, and this is important because without a name she is no one and she is everyone. Significantly however, she is the grandmother of a girl who traces her family history as she is about to be married and create a family of her own.

Grandmother was eccentric and beautiful, and who at thirty remained shamefully unmarried. This was scandal enough to Great-Grandmother, but to make matters worse, the daughter was also a poet. She prone to kidney stones and what we would now call depression, and probably she was a little mad also. A sensitive artist, Grandmother had survived World War II in her native Sardinia, but had been unlucky in love. To her family’s great relief, a widower from Cagliari came to the family home one day, and they married their troublesome daughter off to the stranger as quickly as possible, effectively removing the taint of crazy from the family name.

Though hers was a loveless marriage, Grandmother’s husband was kind to her. He had a good job and he built her a beautiful home. Still, she felt that she was missing “that essential thing.” This, she reasoned was why she kept getting pregnant and then miscarrying: her life lacked that essential thing.

This all changed, when one year her husband sent her to the mineral springs to ‘take the cure.’ At the spa, she befriended a handsome war Veteran who had also come to take the cure at the mineral springs. Though they spent a very short time together at the spa, Grandmother fell deeply in love, and from then on the veteran played a central role in the grandmother’s life. In him, she felt that she had found what she had been missing.

Upon returning to home, Grandmother discovered that she was once again pregnant, but this time it held, and she delivered a son. She gave the boy everything and when he grew up to be a famous musician and married another musician, he left his daughter with to be raised by his mother. Lucky girl.

“My grandmother was over sixty when I was born. I remember that as a child I thought she was beautiful, and I’d watch, enthralled, when she combed her hair and made her old-fashioned crocchia, parting the hair, which never turned white or thin, then braiding it and coiling the braids into two chignons.”

To the girl, Grandmother was, and had always been beautiful and strong. Grandmother may have been delusional, her history may have been imagined, but her love was real and sustaining, and shines through as the essential thing in this sweet story.

Review by Cynthia Gregory/ceegregory@aol.com

Wench

Posted on July 3, 2011 by Cynthia G.

History is a funny thing. From a narrow view, we get only a single version of the truth, somewhat like a house with just one window. But when Dolen Perkins-Valdez gave us Wench, she created an historical architecture as big as a resort hotel, thrown all the windows open to astonishing ideas.

Wench is the story of four women born to slavery in the pre-Civil War South, women who by virtues of intelligence, cunning, and beauty carve something beautiful for themselves in a life that is a virtual prison. Lizzie Drayle is a house-slave on a plantation in Tennessee. She lives a life of relative comfort compared to the field slaves, but that luxury comes at a price. When she was just 13, Master Drayle came to her in the night, and made her his lover.

In 1853, reward posters for runaway slave women referred to them as wenches, a half-truth. But in this novel, the term means more than wanton, it refers to slave women who are not merely the commercial property of landowners, but women who are sisters and daughters, lovers and mothers of children. There may be stirrings of abolition and an underground railroad to help slaves escape to freedom, but it is a faint cry, and one of impossible odds.

One year, Master Drayle takes Lizzie to Ohio, to a resort called Tawawa House, a retreat for Southern white men who want to vacation with their enslaved black mistresses. This year, while their owners enjoy the amenities of the resort, the slaves mingle, share stories and histories, tell what they know of where they came from, the families they knew, and the families they create from circumstance. There is Lizzie, accompanying the man she believes she loves and with whom she has two children. Fearless Mawu is a light-skinned, red-haired woman with a mind of her own and a cruel owner who beats her viciously. Sweet is true to her name and a mother of five by her master. Reenie is older than the rest and is captive to her brother-master and mother of a daughter-niece.

Over the course of three summers, the women gather, support one another and watch and wait patiently for the moment when freedom might open like a sly, narrow door. The question is whether they will take the offer of freedom. It seems a simple choice to make, except that the laws are rigid, the consequences brutal, and even a choice for freedom requires tragic sacrifices.

Wench is really about Lizzie. Drayle is kind to her, mostly, though there are conventions that even he won’t challenge. He seems to care for Lizzie, but he also considers her to be his property, just as he does their two children. In the end, Lizzie surrenders her own freedom by negotiating her children’s. When given the opportunity to flee one summer in Ohio, she accepts instead, a life of humiliating bondage, a bargain for the lives of her children.

Wench is a deeply moving story of dignity and survival. It is a story of our shared history, part of who we are.

Review by Cynthia Gregory/ceegregory@aol.com