A RANT NOW AND THEN IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL!

A RANT NOW AND THEN IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL!

Oppose not rage while rage is in its force, but give it way a while and let it waste.

Shakespeare

In the mood of Shakespeare's sentiment, my rant suffices to satisfy my anger. It is in expressing what is eating into us that we release its venom to an ephemeral state.

It is like the angry letter never sent, or the rant that is directed at four naked and silent walls.

I chose instead to send this to the Editor-in-Chief of the IOWA ALUMNI MAGAZINE for the slight. Why? Because many far more gifted than I am have suffered for similar exclusions. How did I feel after writing this? Amused and light hearted. There is a certain heady freedom in playing the heavy. We are programmed to abide our passions and to behave, and thus be consumed by them. A long time ago, I rejected such programming.

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I received my issue of the IOWA ALUMNI MAGAZINE (December 2006) today and there is a prominent review of Bill Bryson's new book THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID.

The book is written in the style of the humorous and internationally acclaimed travel writer that Bryson is, but I wager to say it lacks the depth, ambiance, character, sense of place that my earlier book IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (AuthorHouse 2003) had.

As I've said, perhaps too many times, I have not understood why my book has not been reviewed more extensively. I thought it was because it was a PRINT ON DEMAND book, or God forbid to say, "a self-published book."

With eight books to my credit and new ones coming out, and more than 300 articles published in respected journals, periodicals, newspapers, and a constantly visited website (www.fisherofideas.com), and having written extensively in my corporate and academic appointments, I am not new to the printed word.

But I increasingly wonder if it is because it is clearly the book of an Irish Roman Catholic boy, immersed in the trauma, faux pas, and confusion of coming to terms with his religion, his time (WWII) and his increasingly disparity with his country and culture. It is an honest book as memory will allow of a child of his times. It is perhaps for this reason that it was included in Senator Edwards' book HOME (November 2006).

We are a celebrity culture skin deep, and I am neither a celebrity nor a skin deep person. In every other sense, I am quite ordinary, and that is the sum and substance of what is deep and meaningful. I raise my voice here, when everyone is high on the Holiday Season, wondering at this fact.

Perhaps it is too heavy a book in the sense that it brings up real issues that not only gnaw at the psyche but disturb the central chemical factory of the bone marrow. It is a period piece but generic to young people of every time if differing circumstance.

I am, and this may sound self-serving, but I don't care, as good a writer in every since of the word that Bryson is, but I am clearly a spec of dust off the polished brogues of James Joyce, no doubt about that.

One of my lifelong friends, who has a son-in-law in the book business, claimed in a cursory review of the book that there was not enough about a character that the narrator especially respected.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE was about a time and place and circumstance seen through the narrator's eyes, and not about this or that character. It was written in the Joycean tradition, but without pretense of genius.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE has had a parochial audience, and even you might say, a proprietary one, namely, Clintonians from Clinton, Iowa, and by extension, about the globe.

I thank God for that audience, but it deserved and deserves a much wider audience, not because I wrote it, but because it captures something that will never be again. Clinton, Iowa in 1941 - 1947 was small town America and as American as America ever was.

I predict on this day, December 7, 2006, precisely 65 years after Pearl Harbor and the start of WWII, a day that shook the narrator to his bone marrow, and made him a preteen age student of that war through the pages of THE CLINTON HERALD, that long after Bryson's book is forgotten, this book will be read. Why?

Because it is a book of the heart and not the head; of the spirit and not the fancy. Humor is of the head to calm the heart. This book is of the heart with the full scope and pain and confusion of that heart through the eyes of an Irish Roman Catholic boy.

I took every honor that an academic scholar could take at Iowa (Phi Eta Sigma, Omicron Delta Kappa, Phi Beta Kappa, Suma Cum Laude, Merit Scholarship, Academic Athletic Trophy) and my book got mention only in the "People" section of the 1950s of the IOWA ALUMNI MAGAZINE. No review or acknowledgment of the book I sent.

Something is wrong with this picture, and it is my nature to express it in the first person rather than have it boil me alive.

Always be well,

Jim