Miyoko Olszewski: World Champion
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Miyoko Olszewski: World Champion

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Miyoko Olszewski

On Thursday evening, Miyoko “The Hawaiian Mongoose” Olszewski defeated Elena Reid to win the WIBA flyweight title.

Miyoko is a longtime friend and I was there, screaming and cheering in the audience. Those of us who had come to root for Miyoko wore leis, nodding to Miyoko’s Hawaiian origins. What a fight it was, all 10 rounds! Miyoko came out strong in the first few rounds, fighting in her trademark crisp, thoughtful style. For a few rounds in the middle, Miyoko seemed to conserve herself, and a few voices screamed, “Jab, Miyoko! Double jab!”

I laughed to myself when I heard the calls. I’ve sparred with Miyoko, and her jab is like a solid brick wall. There’s simply no getting through it. Miyoko’s jab is so tough and skilled that there’s not even the possibility of a few atoms making use of quantum tunneling to get through it.

Then in the 8th round, Miyoko brought it. She came forward with powerful, relentless punches and dominated the fight. By the 9th round, Reid’s face was swollen to twice its original size. It was a clear, decisive victory for Miyoko, and her fans yelled themselves voiceless.

Miyoko deserved this win: she has worked long, hard, and consistently to achieve World Champion status. She exemplifies values that I revere and that I try to teach my children: hard work, sacrifice, self-discipline. These are not glamorous values today. Our culture has been overly psycho-therapized into mediocrity; we think any old half-hearted effort is just swell. We teach our kids that losing soccer games is just as good as winning them. And while good sportsmanship is imperative, and everyone needs to learn to deal gracefully with defeat and failure–we’ve done our children a disserve. Losing is not the same as winning. Mediocrity is not okay.

Winning matters. Being the best matters. If being the best isn’t an option for genetic or other reasons, then hard work, self-discipline, and sacrifice still matter; those qualities differentiate between mediocrity and excellence. The 4000 failures that are required along the path to success matter. It’s a question of persistent integrity, another value that is not considered important in today’s moral relativism.

But people who persist in these terribly old fashioned values are world champions. Some of them win a belt and acclaim, as Miyoko did. Some just win a quiet internal sense of self-esteem.

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Bill Murray in TOOTSIE, and what a novelist wants

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Bill Murray in TOOTSIE, and what a novelist wants

Jeff the playwright, played by Bill Murray: “I don’t want a full house at the Winter Garden. I want people who just came out of the worst rainstorm in history. These are people who are alive on the planet… until they dry off. I wish I had a theater that was only open when it rained.”

Yesterday the mail brought me the return of IMMORTAL from a reviewer. She had emailed me a month ago saying that up to 200 people a day visited her book review website, and could she please have an ARC, an Advanced Review Copy. I responded that there were none left, but I did have a finished copy. I sent it on to her.
And it reappeared yesterday, with a note: “Although Immortal is beautifully written, I regret that I was unable to read it. As a former career nanny and mother of four, I’m just too sensitive to read about child prostitution and murder.” Her note was kind and it was a gracious gesture of her to return the book.
Part of me was disappointed: I am seriously promoting IMMORTAL right now. I am a new novelist and I am not just in the business of writing novels, I am in the business of selling them. Every review on the internet–or in print–builds my platform for selling copies. And earning $$.
But another part of me was pleased: my story affected this woman so deeply that she wouldn’t even finish the book! She put it down rather than confront what I wrote! In her turning away, she demonstrated the power of my words, characters, plot.
I think many artists have this deeply non-commercial instinct, where we care more about the impact on the audience than on sales. Where we want people to show up and be 100% present to experience our creation. Even if that means they’re dripping wet from a ferocious rain, or if they send a book back, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
That said, if you’re reading this blog, kindly go out and buy a copy of IMMORTAL for yourself!
Who do I read?
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Who do I read?

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People ask me what other authors I like to read. Richard North Patterson and Sue Grafton, for starters: two of the classiest writers of prose in the English language today. Line for line, Grafton’s prose stacks up against anyone’s in the history of the English language, and she’s a virtuoso with character development and story. Patterson is bringing to life ideas that we as Americans need to face, and he does it with elegance and heart-palpitating suspense. In “The Race,” the question is, Can an honest man become president?–And for those of us who voted for Obama in the primaries, as I did, the answer is: I sure hope so.
Lately I’ve been reading Daniel Silva. Another elegant writer who can tell a story. His painting restorer/secret agent Gabriel Allon is three-dimensional, human, and mesmerizing. I read Silva’s book and think, I wish I’d written that.
I read for pleasure and knowledge, I read fast, and I read everything. There’s plenty out there that I can’t believe actually got published. There’s a lot that’s great, too. I’ve become wary of current books touted as ‘literary’ because that usually means they are precious, self-congratulatory and unreadable, with unlikable characters. But if I look back fifty years or more, that wasn’t the case. Dickens is full, rich and satisfying, and Jane Austen never gets stale. And there are occasional evenings when I kick back with a glass of red wine and the Complete Works of Shakespeare in my lap, and I read aloud from his plays. What could be more fun than that?
Eat almonds & avoid corn syrup
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Eat almonds & avoid corn syrup

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Nothing in this post is intended to diagnose or treat disease. I am not a medical doctor and this blog contains personal opinions.

I have to make some sort of disclaimer because the FDA, which is a shill for the chemical, pharmaceutical, and biotech companies, and so protects their profits rather than the health of the American people, might harass me.
Edgar Cayce recommended eating 3 almonds a day to prevent cancer. Given the extraordinary accuracy of his more than 14,000 documented readings–I keep almonds and almond butter on hand in my home. I hear that nuts in general are good for us: walnuts alleviate seasonal affective disorder.
In this vein, a friend of mine with a PhD in chemistry went to the National Diabetes Association’s annual conference and heard the bad news about corn syrup. The graph charting the rise in obesity since the mid 1970’s and the graph showing the increase in use of corn syrup in processed foods are exact matches. For me, the directive was clear: read the label and avoid corn syrup! High fructose corn syrup is likely to make us fat!
Now, there is a “food additive” called stevia powder which I use to sweeten my morning cup of tea. The FDA does not allow stevia to be called a sweetener because that might interfere with the huge profits of the companies that make Nutrasweet and Saccharine. Of course, the FDA must zealously protect the profits of those products, even though saccharine is said to cause cancer and aspartame is implicated in causing MS like disease.
Stevia powder comes from a shrubby herb in Paraguay, where it has been used for centuries by the Indians in Paraguay with no ill effects. It’s been tested in countries all around the world, with no ill effects. It’s used extensively in Japan. It’s been said to inhibit the formation of plaque on teeth. It’s worth taking a look at; it comes in packets and liquid form at a health food store or better grocery store.
How Buddha erred, why Writer’s colonies are mistakes, and Maya Angelou
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How Buddha erred, why Writer’s colonies are mistakes, and Maya Angelou

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I have definite opinions. They’re idiosyncratic, but usually carefully considered. Take my stance on the Buddha, whom I revere. I’ve had palpable experiences during meditation of the Buddha’s radiant compassion. The Buddha is enlightened and I am not. Still, as much as I sense the holiness of this archetypal being, I think the human Gautama made a mistake when he abandoned his wife and child to seek enlightenment. God and liberation are eternal; They would have waited for Gautama’s child to go off to college and his wife to start a career as a caterer so she wasn’t stuck with empty nest syndrome. Maybe this life is an illusion, but the illusion must be lived with integrity.

The householder bears the burden of liberation. It’s we who live in the mundane world with jobs, snotty teenagers, and ex-spouses who snipe over money, who have the most exquisite task: melting into communion with the divine despite the entangling web of responsibilities, obligations, and relationships. Anyone can get enlightened meditating all alone in a cave. That’s Gut 101, science for English majors with a guaranteed A, the easy way out.
Writer’s colonies perpetuate the same myth: that the work should be separate from daily life. That you need to leave the world behind in order to create. Bull manure. A writer writes. A writer carves out space in his or her messy, hectic, ragged, intervening life to write. It becomes a ritual, a discipline, a practice. It’s the journey that counts. When artists and writers stop thinking of themselves as precious children who need to be coddled in order to produce, there will be better quality art and writing.
Now, because I am a householder with a teenager who thinks I am wrong 95% of the time, I get challenged a lot. My oldest daughter yelled at me recently about my opinions on Chinua Achebe.
“Mommy, white people can’t criticize anything black people do!” she scolded me. She’s taking an African-American literature course in school; right now, she is very sensitive to the sad plight of black writers and to what African Americans have endured. I didn’t respond because there’s no point. Currently this daughter is convinced that I am an unredeemed idiot. But it did make me wonder.
Am I supposed to praise every work that comes from a black author or artist, simply because they are black and I am white? (Mostly white; there’s quite a lot of Native American blood in my lineage.) Does this chicanery really help black people achieve the parity of opportunity and circumstance that they’ve been denied because of race? It’s unconscionable that these inequities have caused so much suffering throughout history. Yet it feels to me that pretending that “Things Fall Apart” is a great novel actually detracts from the accomplishments of authors such as, say, Maya Angelou, whose work makes my soul sing. I put her in the same literary category as Yeats and Rumi, and in the larger artistic category with Giotto, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, and Caravaggio: these artists exalt, uplift, redeem. Well, in Caravaggio’s work, the spirit is rotting, so redemptive isn’t the appropriate word. Nonetheless, I am so compelled to have a relationship with his work because of its virtuosity that I place him in the elite.
And it isn’t just Chinua Achebe whose work I have criticized. I am an equal opportunity disliker of bad literature. Dan Brown is one of the worst writers of prose to come along in a century. His success just shows how powerful story is, even when told so badly it makes you want to vomit. This said, I do hope my novel IMMORTAL makes 10% as much money as Brown’s book did. And the fact that Leonardo is mentioned in the first paragraph of IMMORTAL certainly helped my novel get picked up by a publisher at a time when the the mania over Brown’s badly-written novel was at its peak.
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Reflections after the road

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Reflections after the road

Last week I went to California to do readings in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Strikingly different towns, both fun. I got to reconnect with old friends and acquaint myself with some interesting new people. Best of all, I stayed in a gracious old hotel in Santa Monica where SOMEONE ELSE made the bed & tidied up.

People in LA like to be looked at, and they go to extremes to get to be the object of other people’s attention. It seems to me an exercise in narcissism at worst, at best an attempt to bolster a career, however sophomoric it looks. I’m used to that abrasive NYC question: “What are you lookin’ at?” I did the requisite red carpet photo op in honor of Trump vodka and Hadaka sushi, and attended a party where a pretty young woman laid atop a table, naked except for sushi. “Do you think her mother wants her doing that?” I said to my gorgeous, kind, funny LA publicist Michelle Czernin. “Should I ask her?” But Michelle whisked me away before I could commit a faux pas of that order.

The crowd in SF I stayed with was young, hard-working and hard-partying, intent on moving up in their careers. Bright young people, a pleasure to hang with.

And back home, there was an orchid awaiting me, given by my friend Debra Jaliman in honor of a reading in NYC. And four kids, each with her own needs.