HOW MANY MISSIVES HAVE YOU WRITTEN & OTHER QUESTIONS

HOW MANY MISSIVES HAVE YOU WRITTEN & OTHER QUESTIONS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 21, 2012

TO MY READERS:

I have been asked many questions about "the peripatetic philosopher" over the years.  I don't always respond and for that I apologize. 

Like others who have jobs that are of a specific number of hours, I write or read or walk most of my waking hours.  Of late, I have not been walking because of plantar fascia problems.  What follows quite briefly are answers to common questioned asked of me.

(1) Why something so weird as "peripatetic" and then "philosopher" as the title to your website? 

Peripatetic means "wandering," and I got it from reading Aristotle who generated his ideas walking around.  Philosopher is the wondering part of the wanderer, and seems fitting.

(2) Do you have a specific frame of reference to your missives? 

No.  They are eclectic but often thematic as it takes several of a type to complete my thought on a given subject.  Readers remind me that I am long winded and that they are not.

(3) What generates your missives? 

Something I have seen, heard, read or observed that triggers my wondering and compels me to write.  I often compose as I wander (walk).  Recently, I have been writing about Soren Kierkegaard’s take on the common man, remembering some of the things he once said, and realizing they were consistent with how I see the present situation and the plight of the common man.

(4) Who is your audience? 

Myself.  That may seem narcissistic, and, indeed, it is.  But this is also true of as contrasting thinkers as Kierkegaard and Krishnamurti.  

We only come to know ourselves by an extensive internal conversation, as these and other thinkers have pointed out.  It is a painful process but necessary to lead to a more than superficial life. 

It is quite distressing to discover that most of what we have been taught, most of how we have been programmed to think, has been to protect us from self-discovery.  This is done in an effort to control us by celebrating a collective conscience that is external to us.  This led George Orwell to write “1984” (1948). 

Most individuals run into themselves when they face a fatal illness and a possible premature death.  My fatal illness was South Africa’s apartheid policy, and the death of my conscience.  I was introduced to my psychosexual self, and to my commonality with humanity, which I thought I had successfully blocked out through discipline and the strength of my will.  What I had thought was my great strength was my debilitating weakness, and what I thought was my great control was my collective submissiveness to the will of others.   

I was quite a disturbed young man when I came back from South Africa in 1969, and found I had to totally reconstruct myself or go mad.

I wandered into the Haslam Bookstore in St. Petersburg, Florida and found myself examining a book by Krishnamurti.  Some thirty of his books later, I realized he had been my constant companion for my retreat from youth into middle age, and hopefully, sanity.   

Obviously, I read many others including Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Heiddeger, Kierkegaard, Orwell, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Kafka, Goethe, Milton, and many others.  It occurred to me that these authors projected their internal dialogue into a solution for us all, when what they were actually doing was introducing me to myself.  Now, I am attempting to introduce the reader to himself in my writing.

(5) Do you publish many of your missives? 

Not anymore.  At one point, nearly 80 percent of my missives were picked up by journals and periodicals.  I stopped that when one publisher published without my permission. 

(6) I think I see writing similar to yours in some things I read.  You have told me before that you don't publish anymore, but I suspect I have seen works that seem to have the Fisher imprint without the Fisher credit.  Is this possible?  If so, what have you done about it? 

Others have told me that they still see my stuff "out there."  If it is, it is not authorized.  People who publish without permission of the copyrighted author are just asking for trouble.  It is their quicksand, not mine.  And no, I don't worry my mind about it. 

On the other hand, having published nearly a million words, it would not be too much of a stretch to suggest that someone reading me has recognized the same rhythm in their own head, and quite innocently, has written words that have the same cadence.  There is no such thing as an original writer, as there is no such thing as an original inventor.  We all piggyback on each other.

(7) Do you make a great deal of money writing? 

Not like an NBA baseball player.  Actually, given the time I’ve put into writing, I doubt if I have earned 10 cent an hour.  I know people consider how much money they make writing as indicative of writing talent, and they may be right, but that does not concern me. 

Certainly, it did concern Samuel Johnson, the author of the Oxford English Dictionary.  His biographer, James Boswell, has him saying, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”  What is not apparent in Boswell’s biography, and something that Johnson wanted desperately to hide, is that he (Johnson) was essentially self-educated, while wanting to be seen in association with privileged members of British society that had a birthright to attend Oxford and Cambridge.  Look under the rocks and you see us all.

(8) Do you write for money or write because you have to? 

The fact that you ask that question assures me that you don't read me.

(9) How long have you had a web site? 

Since the 1990s, after I came back from Europe where I worked for Honeywell Europe, Ltd. 

My life and writing has been blessed with a marvelous wife, Beautiful Betty, who has supported me, and who is largely responsible for the success of my first book on management, “Work Without Managers” (1991), as she systematically collated all my research.  The book wasn’t meant to be prophetic, but that has proven to be the case with many of its dispositions and perturbations unraveling right before our twenty-first century eyes. 

My nephew, a computer expert, is the architect of my website, and to him should be given credit for its success. 

 

(10) How would you describe your writing -- journalist, essayist, novelist, biographer, autobiographer, historian, others? 

I would describe my writing as that of a peripatetic philosopher.

(11) You have tantalized us with a novel of South Africa seemingly forever.  Are you going to publish, or are you just playing with the idea of writing the novel? 

The novel is in its final editing and rewrite stage.  It will be published.

(12) How long have you been working on the novel? 

For more than forty years.  If you read the novel, you will see that I was writing it in my head and in code that long ago while experiencing South Africa. 

When I came back to the United States, I retired from work, and lived on my savings for two years, reading, attempting to write short stories, and playing tennis, letting my four children pretty much do as they pleased.  Some fifty years later, I realize I was not a great father. That is one of my disappointments in life.  A person who lives in his head best be a priest or a professor or a hermit, but not a father.  A father is a full-time job, and I was not wired to be that person.

When I returned to university and graduate school in a totally different discipline, I did so primarily to understand why I had been so successful in life so early, doing most of what I did intuitively.

I tried to capture this in “Confident Selling” (1970), which became a runaway best seller. 

In that same year (1970), at university, I had the good fortune to run into a professor who enabled my recalcitrant personality to breathe.  Dr. Billy G. Gunter taught industrial social psychology.  One of the assignments was to write about sociological theories in the context of our industrial experience.  I wrote a 78-page paper (single spaced), and he asked to see me.  We have been friends ever since. 

Dr. Gunter rescued me again when the university tried to make me behave, and although I was a straight “A” student, was going to deny me my degree by sabotaging my defense of my thesis.  He intervened and not only rescued me from that fate, but may have save my life. 

It was 1976 and not that many years from the trauma of South Africa.  Thanks to Dr. Gunter, my fragile personality was buoyed up by his kindness.  If my writing ever comes to have meaning to others, Dr. Gunter and Beautiful Betty deserve the credit. 

(13) Is your novel on South Africa, then, biographical? 

Is the pope Catholic?  Novels that are not formula novels cannot help but be biographical.  Even formula novels have a penchant for biography as novelists write from experience.

(14) Are you afraid of hurting those in your novel or being sued? 

My sense is that most people who appear in my novel are likely to be dead.  If they are not dead, chances are they will not see themselves as they are in the book.  My experience, and I’ve written about this, is that if you have twenty people write profiles of each other (as I did in one executive intervention), and then display them and ask them to pick out the one that best describes them, that less than 10 percent can.

(15) Are they accurate portrayals in your novel?

Of course not, not even close.  It is, after all, a novel and everyone, including the main protagonist, is a composite.  Events may have historical significance but the characterization of those events and activities are largely inventions.

(16) Are you proud of the work? 

I don't think of my writing in terms of pride, but in terms of truth.

(17) Are you an angry or pessimistic writer? 

That seems a loaded question.  In any case, it is for the reader to decide.  I think I answer that question from my perspective in my last remark.

(18) If the South Africa novel is your longest writing project in terms of pages and time, what was your shortest? 

Obviously, you do read me.  “A Green Island in a Black Sea” is more than 600 pages in manuscript form. 

“Confident Selling” (1970) was less than 200 pages, which was written in six weeks, and accepted immediately by Prentice-Hall, Inc. But the shortest book was “The Worker, Alone!” (1995), which was 104 pages.

I ghost wrote another book in four weeks for a guy who gave me a box of his experiences with no idea or interest in doing the work to make it a book.  I was paid in five figures.  Others have asked me to ghost write for them, but I have declined. 

You haven't asked, but some authors have asked me to collaborate with them.  I am not a collaborative writer.  Still others, who are professionals, who cannot write, but would like to have a book to promote their work, have asked me to take my commission by a percentage of the royalties.  I've declined that offer as well.  President Kennedy was known for authoring books he never wrote, even won a Pulitzer Prize for one. 

Writing is a craft like carpentry, and you get better at it, like you do in carpentry, by writing, not by publishing.  Writing is very hard work, and people who think that they have a book in them have no idea what a commitment that writing demands of them.  That is why those with means or reputation or celebrity, dodge the reality of writing, by having someone else do the hard lifting.  

(19) Do you have a favorite book that you have written? 

Yes, "The Worker, Alone!" Going Against the Grain" (1995).  I dedicated it to my brother-in-law, William Waddell, who is the salt of the earth, and I think the book is, too.  The book anticipated the intrusive world in which we now live.

(20) What is your least favorite book? 

Probably, it is "The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (1996).  It needed serious editing, and to be cut by at least one-third.  It also needed a more appropriate title.  A better title would have been, "Be Your Own Best Friend,” something positive.  Ironically, it has a lot of good writing in it, but it is buried, unfortunately.

The other unfortunate thing is that I was mesmerized by the success of an article of mine in The Reader’s Digest (June 1993), which the periodical said generated 20,000 reprints in the month after publishing.  The article begins, “To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself.”

(21) What will you do after your South Africa book is published? 

You mean besides dying?  I will continue to write, probably missives and continue to read.  I don't know about another book much less a novel.  This will be my eleventh book, and eleven is my favorite number. 

(22) Do you think future generations will discover you? 

My dear reader, I am writing for future generations.  I am suspicious of my own generation and of that of my children and grandchildren. 

They have had the luxury of being insulated from the reality of a world that is starving, going up in flames, lacking sanitized water and adequate sewage treatment, a world of disease and conflict, without adequate housing, a world in which those in power kill their own kind, a world carpeted by the mindset of fear. 

They have their electronic toys, and their bizarre games and live in virtual reality, while five billion of the seven billion souls on earth struggle every day just to breathe another. 

(23) Are you a suspicious or pessimistic person?

How could you be intellectually alive and not be pessimistic?  As to suspicion, I smell flowers and look for coffins.

(24) You claim you are your own audience.  Then are you saying you don't write to an audience? 

I'm not saying that at all.  If you write honestly to yourself, as you have the God given talents to see the world clearly, you are writing to a wider audience, an audience, hopefully, that doesn’t have its head in the sand.  Every age in the history of man has been in denial, and most everyone who points this out in boldface terms is likely to be ignored.   

(25) Then you don't write for money? 

My dear reader, again, it is obvious you don't read me.

(26) I like statistics.  You say this will be your eleventh book, how many missives have you published on your blog? 

I would not know this but google is such a careful bookkeeper.  According to google, since the 1990s, I have published 721 missives totally 40,944 pages.  What is also not unusual for a writer, I have more than ten fully written manuscripts that have not been published, and partial manuscripts to another ten.  Should my writing have some kind of clout, posthumously, they may find their way into print, but I won’t be around to defend or take the flack for them.

(27) 40,944 pages are on your blog? 

Yes, according to google.

(28) Do you have a wide readership? 

No.

(29) No?  How come?  Doesn't that bother you? 

To your first question, perhaps my missives are too long, and then too, they might be found boring. 

My sense is different.  My writing tends to bore into the comfortable cutaneous of skin-deep thinkers. 

Life is a constant hassle to most people.  It is perhaps why they prefer fast foods and empty calories to fill their bodies and constant texting to fill their empty minds.

The frenetic pace of life to succeed, to excel, to keep up with others, to stay employed, to be in tune with what others claim important, has to be exhausting.  I don’t blame them.  It is very hard, perhaps even impossible for most people to get off the treadmill.  Consequently, few venture beyond the expected. 

(30) This may seem presumptuous, but don't you think you're wasting your time, and the readers, too, and just taking up space with what I would call some of your missives as diatribes? 

You do read me!  Excellent!  I plead guilty to all the charges.

(31) Do you plan to do anything about it? 

No.

(32) Do you think you are a good or great writer? 

It isn't for me to decide, but I would rather think I have been some kind of useful in my long life.  "Good" and "great" don't have much purchase with me.  I would go for not getting in the way of others.

(33) The title of your novel, “A Green Island in a Black Sea,” what is the origin of the title?

To me, South Africa was paradise, a green island essentially insulated and isolated from the rest of the world.  A slender minority of white people, but not terrible people, but terribly misguided people, the Afrikaners, who ruled the majority population of a vibrant physically beautiful black people.  The colonial Brits counted the coins that the Bantu (blacks) and Afrikaners generated.  It was for a totally unprepared young executive, yours truly, to step into this world and to experience the misguided policy of apartheid. 

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