Put a Sock in It

The last proper post I put up here - and apologies for vanishing like that but life, that fickle jade, intervened - was this one on the antics of Stephen Leather. A healthy debate followed, in which Mr Leather appeared, I'm glad to say, to give his side of the story. His response was addressed by Steve Mosby and Jeremy Duns, who were at the forefront of exposing Leather's behaviour, so allowing readers to judge the merits or otherwise of Leather's explanation. I remain firmly wedded to the belief that his online behaviour was appalling. Nothing I have read or seen since has altered that view.

Elsewhere, notably here, I've seen the argument made that giving yourself five-star reviews under assumed names or paying people to give you a good review isn't that serious an offence, and it's not a crime. Well, actually, in the UK it is. Go here for a good response to the previous link, and you will see  that it actually is an offence for a business to pose as one of its customers.

Both those blogs deal with this open letter, to which I've been happy to add my name. We can nitpick over the wording and phrasing all day if we like - and Barry Eisler has - but the truth is that this sort of behaviour is rife, it is wrong - and saying that doesn't make you some kind of sanctimonious prig - and the time was ripe for a group of authors of all sales and sizes to condemn it in some way and promise not to indulge in it themselves. As I said in my Rogue Author post, there's a swaggering Wild West feel to some corners of self-publishing industry at the moment, where a group of Wild Bill Bigcocks swagger around bragging incessantly about sales, about money, and sticking it to the legacy-published man. Believe me, I'm no slavish devotee of traditional publishing, but trying to argue that deception and fraud are in some way acceptable, or not that bad really, is ludicrous.

I also don't believe traditional publishing is clean and pure. The blurb system is one area where I agree with Eisler; it means well, but it has become corrupted. I have blurbed and been blurbed and I still don't really like it. Yes, authors are allowed to like other authors' books, but many of them - and I know this from experience - do it as a way to curry or pay back a favour, rather than out of genuine enthusiasm for the work. It's also difficult to avoid the impression you're log-rolling even when you're not. I've given one of Leighton's books a good review on Amazon because I thought it was great, and because they're not published in the UK I want people over here to discover them, but I doubt anyone will believe me.

I also understand how difficult it is for self-published authors to make their voice heard above the din, and why some might be attempted to amplify their voice by making up or paying for reviews. They must look at traditionally published authors and envy the promotional heft of their in-house publicity department (really, they shouldn't: most in-house publicity departments are staffed by overworked freelance fashion journalists who couldn't sell a five-star review to Roger Ellory.) The trick, I think, is to write a really good book, the best one you possibly can, push it through viable, legal online means if you want, and hope people like it, review it, and tell other people about it. Not try and game the system.

The No Sock Puppet letter came in response to further allegations of which I'm sure you're all aware: first John Locke revealed that he had paid people to review his books, then the indefatigable Jeremy Duns, acting on a tip-off, uncovered the scandal of RJ Ellory puffing his own works under a pseudonym, and worse, rubbishing those of other bestselling authors. Ellory has subsequently apologised, but it led to lots of people to wonder why someone so successful as Ellory felt the need to skulk around giving himself a good review and slagging off Mark Billingham and Stuart McBride's efforts.

A writer's ego can be a pretty dark place. I've also, through my journalism and non-fiction, encountered and occasionally worked with some famous people, enough to realise that for some, success and celebrity are no cures for insecurity. In fact, in many cases they make it worse. Some people feel their success has not been recognised, or they crave respect from their peers and critics more than shedloads of cash or the fact their work gives people lots of pleasure. Grudges can develop, particularly with those deemed to be as or more successful than they are. I once knew an seemingly affable children's entertainer who achieved moderate success with a dog at his side. The dog proved to be more of celeb than he did; the last time I saw the entertainer, he was kicking lumps of out the poor bewildered beast for the mildest misdemeanour, to the point where someone had to intervene and report him.

There's going to be a lot of hogwash written and said about the sockpuppet scandal. In amongst it all, people will forget the simple fact that knocking other writers anonymously or pseudonymously, and for no other reason than spite and envy, is morally wrong, and that deceiving readers by writing fake reviews, and creating fake identities to discuss your book online, undermines the whole system of online reviewing and discussion and is wrong too, no matter whichever you want to spin it and however angry you might be at traditional publishing. We're all trying to make a living and trying to entertain our readers: making up reviews good or bad, or buying good ones, and conning those very same readers makes that more difficult for all of us. You can't level the playing field by scorching the turf. Some of us, self-published and traditionally published, need readers to be able to rely on reviews as an honest way of judging whether to buy our work, or they become mere puff. Abusing and undermining that system is selfish and self-serving.

In other words: It's possible to promote your work and look after number one without acting like a dick.

cheers

Dan - Friday

The night I danced with Bobby Kennedy

When I was a student in the 1960s at the University of the Witwatersrand (known as Wits) in Johannesburg, I became involved with the anti-apartheid movement.  For all my life from when I entered high school, I could never quite understand two aspects of South African life.  The first was how people could justify treating people of different colours so differently from themselves.  Apartheid applied mainly to Blacks, but also to an ever-increasing extent, to South Africans who had Indian, Chinese, or Malayan heritage, as well as to people who were of mixed blood (called Coloureds, in South Africa).

The second puzzlement was how the Whites could expect the current situation to remain in place.  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that suppressing 75% of the population and restricting the rights of another 10-15% was not a viable long-term strategy.  Yet most Whites either believed that it was or found it inconvenient or uncomfortable to wonder about it.

My family, in a conservative sort of way, was always against the Nationalist government, and for the most part, against apartheid too.  My mother was a member of one anti-apartheid group – the Torch Commando – and worked for the Progressive Party in our constituency, helping to send Helen Suzman to parliament many times.  My aunt, Jean Sinclair, founded a woman’s group – the Black Sash – that proved to be a thorn in the government’s side both or its consistent opposition to any law that discriminated and its steadfast provision of advice and support to those hurt by apartheid.

But it was the education system that really first caught my attention.  It made no sense to me that any government could, as a matter of policy, deny access to decent education to anyone, let alone the majority of the country.  So when I went to university, I joined the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and started to become involved in an effort to change things. 

Apartheid supporters - probably Special Branch police. Left sign reads "Send NUSAS leader and hangers-on to jail". The other reads "Keep your land clean, South Africa, from NUSAS and Communists".

In between playing cricket, rugby, and field hockey, I protested, marched, and wrote.  I edited the newspaper of the Johannesburg College of Education, called Campus, where I tried to draw the attention of future white teachers to what was happening in the education system in the country.  But, in reality, I probably had little impact on anyone.

However, there was one benefit to being editor.  I received invitations to events and, as I was also one of the photographers, I had the ability to wander around.  

It was one such invitation that led me to dance with a star.

Invitation signed by Bobby and Ethel Kennedy

In 1966, the president of NUSAS, Ian Robertson, invited Bobby Kennedy to visit South Africa to energize the opposition to apartheid.  I suspect it was to everyone’s surprise that he accepted.  I also suspect that the government was pressured by the USA to allow him to come.

Kennedy made five major speeches in his brief visit to South Africa.  The first, at the Day of Affirmation at the University of Cape Town on June 6, 1966, is regarded as one of the best speeches he ever made.  I attended his last speech on June 8, 1966, at Wits University.  It was the most political speech of his visit, probably because it was his last.  My invitation put me in the front row.  Although I do not have the article I wrote, I do still have some photographs I took.  The prints are worn and I can’t currently find my negatives to reprint them.

After the speech, there was a party at the home of Clive and Irene Menell.  Both were very active in the fight against apartheid.  Clive was a founder of the Urban Foundation in 1977, an organization created to improve the lot of black South Africans in Soweto and other urban areas.  

Despite government restrictions that made multiracial gatherings very difficult (for example, it was illegal to serve alcohol at multiracial gatherings), the after-party was mixed.  The atmosphere was electric – the enthusiasm that Kennedy’s presence and speeches had unleashed was incredible.  So what did we do?  We couldn’t drink, so we danced – not couples, but groups, lines, circles.  And Bobby and Ethel Kennedy danced with us.  And it was absolutely amazing.  For a moment we were free.

At the after-party

1966 is a long time ago.  But I remember Kennedy’s speech at Wits, and I remember vividly the emotions that flowed during the after-party dancing.  I’ll remember them for the rest of my life.

You can read or listen to Kennedy’s South African speeches at http://rfksafilm.org/html/speeches/speechrfk.php.

Stan - Thursday

Found in Translation

Transferring text from one language to another is a tricky thing. Meanings are lost. But sometimes found.

If a good translator did not need to have mastered the artistry of words then novels would be run through a refined edition of Google Translate and that would be that. But this is by no means the case and not only because of the ridiculousness that would ensue. A word might be a word but well strung together words have to power to inspire, evoke happiness, fear, hurt and any other feeling imaginable. A new feeling, not previously recognised, might even result. Badly constructed, sentences fall flat and dull, reading or sounding like footnotes on a tax return. So translators sure have their job cut out for them.

But as fond and in awe as I am of what translators do so well ,what I wanted to mention are examples of ridiculously bad translations that one sometimes comes across in the Icelandic media. Before I give examples I should note that errors in news translations usually make the article more interesting than the original version, certainly funnier.

 

What has prompted me to approach this subject is Justin Timberlake. Obviously. Last week the online edition of one of the Icelandic newspapers reported that Justin uses Microsoft Excel for everything regarding his personal and professional life. The article noted him as not getting through the day without entering everything into a spreadsheet and that the actor/singer would not want to live without Excel. As I work as an engineer I am no stranger to this particular computer program. I find it quite useful but would not consider suicide if it went off the market, unlike Justin. The day this was on the web he did however get a lot of respect at the office and it was mentioned more than once that he must be pretty smart for a singer/actor. His ranking amongst my engineer co-workers did however fall drastically when it came out that this whole article was a misunderstanding. The seed that inspired the fabulation turned out to be an English gossip headline where Justin’s girlfriend was quoted as saying: “Justin excels at everything!”

The Icelandic version of the headline: "Could not live without excel-spreadsheets".

Another example is when the Icelandic TV reported news from a vote in the English House of Commons. The Icelandic subtitles reported the votes as having fallen: 317 eyes and 300 noses. The ayes and nos had taken on a new meaning, leaving the Icelandic public amazed at how disproportionate the number of eyes were compared to the noses when it came to English parliament members. Didn’t someone, somewhere say that in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king? Not that I consider England to be the land of the blind. Far from it.

When discussing the Justin debacle a friend of mine reminded me of another translation news mix-up.  This one originated from the US where American scientists made a brilliant scientific advance, managing to create a living organism in a lab. In Iceland the translated article ended up telling us that foreign scientists had finally been able to create a living, breathing orgasm. It was hailed as one of the most important scientific breakthroughs in recent centuries. When reading this one must remember that the Icelandic word for orgasm (fullnæging) does not look like the Icelandic word for organism (lífvera), at all. And neither bears any resemblance to the English words so inference was not a given. The readers of this article were thus left scratching their heads in amazement at how far science has come.

When googling for other examples I found a sum-up of such errors, also inspired by the now very-famous-in-Iceland Justin Timberlake and the whole excel debacle. This was written by a reporter at Iceland Review (Jóhannes Benediktsson) and he mentioned the winner in my opinion. The translation bummer he remembered and I had not, was when the TV here began showing Law and Order – Criminal Intent. The name of the show in Icelandic: Lög og Regla - Glæpamaður í tjaldi.

Law and Order – Criminal in a Tent

Yrsa - miðvikudagur

La Rentrée and Salon des Livres

It's that time - la rentrée! September means everyone's tanned, relaxed and back from a month long vacance (usually) to school, work and the everyday rhythm of France. While some take their month off in July basically no business gets done from end of May until this week. Kind of a mental vacance.
 La rentrée for the children begins today the first day of school. 
The famous back to school shopping list for all public school students will be given out the first week of classes, and can contain such specifics as dimension and page number of notebooks, along with the required blue, red, black and green ball point pens.
 Students are told precisely where to draw a line on a page and what color pen to use. The French school system emphasises following the model, and not coloring outside the lines.

But these days you'll find a plaque this outside many Paris elementary schools

 A LA MEMOIRE DES ELEVES DE CETTE ECOLE
DEPORTES DE 1942 A 1944 PARCE QUE NES JUIFS, VICTIMES INNOCENTES DE LA BARBARIE NAZIE AVEC LA COMPLICITE DU GOVERNMENT VICHY.
ILS FURENT EXTERMINES DANS LES CAMPS DE LA MORT.
140 INFANTS VIVAIENT DANS LE 2EME.
3 Avril 2004
NE LES OUBLIONS JAMAIS

In memory of the students in this school deported from 1942 to 1944 because they were born Jews, innocent victims of Nazi barbarism with the complicity of the Vichy Government. They were exterminated in the death camps. 140 infants lived in the 2nd arrondissement. 
April 3, 2004
Never forget.

These plaques - after decades of work navigating Paris officialdom - were organized and paid for by associations of survivors and victims of the Deportation. Not the French government.
But François Hollande's speech at the commemoration of Vel d'Hiv roundup that the plaque reminds us of says more about his thinking and France's responsibility today.
____
Cara - Tuesday

Guest Author James R. Benn

It's always a delight, here on Murder is Everywhere, to receive guest author Jim Benn. Jim, now writing full-time after thirty-plus years in the library and technology businesses, is the author of the Billy Boyle series, published by by Soho Press.

DEATH'S DOOR is his latest, and a cracker-jack book it is too.
In it, Benn continues Billy's adventures as a World War Two grunt, dropping him down, this time, in Rome in 1944. The eighth opus, tentatively titled ANGRY SMITH, is the next one up.
But you going to have to wait until 2013 to read that one.

Jim is also the author of two excellent standalones, ON DESPERATE GROUND and SOUVENIR, available exclusively in ebook form.

He lives in Hadlyme, Connecticut, with his wife Deborah Mandel.

Leighton - Monday

GOLFING FOR CATS

In 1976 I was working as a public library director and enthralled with my new duties as acquisitions librarian, as well as chief custodian and handyman. Even though the town was small and the pay even smaller, it was heaven for a liberal studies major. I got to buy books, for crying out loud!

I recall reading a review about a book of short stories by Alan Coren, an editor at Punch magazine. He had determined that the most popular books of the day were about golf, cats, and Nazis. He also thought that authors should stop whining about lack of support from their publishers and help promote their books in new and creative ways. To that end, he titled his rather thin (160 pages) book Golfing For Cats. The bold red cover had nothing but a huge swastika on it.

I loved the concept and bought two copies for the library. Apparently few others shared my enthusiasm. Perhaps the fact that there was no golf, not a single cat or even a mention of Adolf created confusion for the book-buying public. Still, I always remembered this cheeky bit of attempted author marketing fondly, hoping one day I could also write a book about cat-loving Nazi golfers.

This year, with the upcoming publication of the seventh Billy Boyle novel (Death’s Door -- pictured above) I finally had my chance to score one out of three of Coren’s sure-fire cover strategies. This book is set within Nazi-occupied Rome, where Billy is sent disguised as a priest, to investigate the murder of an American monsignor within neutral Vatican territory. There is a scene set in Piazza Navona, near Bernini’s famous sculpture Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi or Fountain of the Four Rivers. Billy, in his priestly garb, is being observed by a German officer. I was entranced by the figure in the sculpture representing the Nile River, with a cloth pulled over his eyes symbolizing the unknown source of the river. It seemed the perfect image for a mystery, the journey toward the unknown.

The Nazis, of course, were fond of their swastika symbol, and it is an easy matter to find images of the red banners hung from buildings throughout occupied Europe. So the Piazza Navona scene with a red banner was proposed to the artist, who put together a quick sketch.

I liked it immediately. My small homage to Alan Coren actually worked as a cover image. The final (or so I thought) color image was striking.

Everyone was happy.

Except for the sales representatives, who said the swastika had to go. Apparently German and Austrian laws make the public showing of the Hakenkreuz (swastika) and other Nazi symbols illegal. The same is true of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and Brazil, and the European Union as a whole has drafted similar laws, none of which have yet passed. Alan Coren never had to worry about online images showing up on Amazon in 1976. So the advance reading copies went to print with an empty red banner, which was fine, but we needed to put some kind of image there. Who would hang a plain red banner in Piazza Navona?

I proposed several ideas, including the fasces symbol of the Italian Fascist Party (the Italians don’t seem to care one way or the other about this sort of imagery), the ancient Roman symbol of imperial authority. Nope. Looked too much like a pencil. Then I found images of the symbol of the Italian Fascist Army, an eagle clutching the fasces in his claws. Not bad, I thought, and sent that off.

With the publication date not too far off, this was the artwork designed to fill in the banner:

This attempt looked more like the eagle from the Polish national coat of arms. Oops. Since Poland had not conquered Rome, I resent the image for the Italian Army Eagle.

Almost there. Except this eagle looked a little bit like a chicken, maybe a roaster with yummy drumsticks.

With a  bit of artistic tweeking, the roaster became an actual Fascist emblem, and the banner came alive.

The odd thing is that one of the characters in the book is Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, a real-life Irish priest who saved the lives of thousands by hiding escaped POWs, Jews and Italian anti-fascists within the Vatican and throughout Rome. He’s worth a Google search. Before the war, he had engaged in his hobby whenever he could. Can you guess what it was?

Yup.

And this last photo is one of the gentleman himself.

Growing Old Together

Here's a sobering fact.  The Amazon Kindle was the first major piece of technology in history whose early adapters were fifty or older.

The traditional path of leading-edge tech, from the PC to Tumblr to Instagram, is that it's been sold to, and bought by, young people first.  Until the Kindle, the phrase "early adapters" was almost completely synonymous with the demographic group comprising people in their teens and reasonably early twenties.  The general techno-view of people much older than that was of doddering geezers and geezerettes in cardigans and sensible shoes fussing unproductively with the TV remote, trying to find Bob Barker.

But the Kindle sailed off the shelves and into the hands of people too old for new technology -- the people television doesn't even bother with because the TV industry has been persuaded--in what has to be the most flawed piece of research ever to dictate trillions of dollars' worth of commercial buys--that older people never change their favorite brands.

Nope. According to the research, people over 50 (in other words, above the treasured 18-to-49 TV demographic) place brand loyalty on a plane with religion.  If you're in your fifties and you use Bounty towels, the research says, you'll go on using Bounty towels until you depart the census, even if a new towel comes along that does all the scrubbing itself.  Even if all the paper-towel user has to do is say, "Over to the stove now," and "Scrub harder and then wring yourself out and hop into that wastebasket," people fifty and older would still be wondering why the folks at Bounty can't get the towels to tear on the perforation and whether superstring theory will somehow allow the Bounty towel manufacturers to impregnate the towels with even more lint.

(This explains practically everything, by the way, about television programming on the commercial networks.  Shows like "Two and a Half Men" and "Jersey Shore" are designed not only to appeal to the young and poorly educated, but positively to repel those of us who will probably be buried with a wadded-up Bounty paper towel in our hands.  They don't want us.  We won't try anything new.)

Except the Kindle and the Nook.  And, when it became apparent it would make a good e-reader, the iPad.  And therein lies the melancholy aspect of all this.  People over fifty are about the only people who read novels.  And this is especially true of the genre produced by the writers on this site.  No matter how young, hip, vital, and energetic our leading characters are, the people who read mysteries and thrillers are almost uniformly over fifty.

Any dues-dependent organization that suddenly realized that its membership is fifty or older would sit up quite straight and begin to fret.  It doesn't take trigonometry or complex spreadsheets to realize that such an organization faces a rocky, and probably brief, future.  (I'd talk about this in terms of the Republican Party, but I've been asked to keep a lid on American political discussion.)  But the Kindle tells the tale, and recent studies bear it out: the novel-reading public is aging, and that's been the trend for some time.

Those of us in the biz drew hope from the sight of all those toddlers lugging around 700-page Harry Potter books and from the explosion of young adult lit, until recently a genre that existed primarily in the realm of wistful hope.  But it hasn't happened.  The toddlers closed the cover on Hogwarts, read a few more books about wizards, and then turned to creating haiku while texting, and the YA readers -- well, all anyone can say for sure about the YA readers is that they haven't moved on to Lee Child and Sue Grafton, much less Hilary Mantel and Richard Russo.

The thing that's so paradoxical about this to me is that we're in a golden age of crime fiction.  I think there's more good writing being done right now, and over a broader spectrum of genres and sub-genres than at any time in the past.  But somehow, it would seem, the people gathered for nourishment around this phenomenally bright fire are an aging tribe.

Everyone I know in publishing talks about this issue as a marketing problem--what's needed, they seem to feel, is some way of breaking through to this vast younger audience with decades and decades of book-buying in front of them.  The idea ten years ago was that great younger writers would do it; but we have a lot of great younger writers now-- Megan Cabot comes to mind, Lou Berney, Sara Gran, Gregg Hurwitz, Stephen Jay Schwartz, to name just a few--and they're being read mainly by older people.

So it's a conundrum.  I'm not saying the genre is going to vanish from the face of the earth; it's existed at least since "Oedipus Rex."  But it does seem as though we should probably get used to the idea that we'll be sitting here by the fire for a while, sharing books we love, and growing old together.

Tim -- Sundays

A Brief History of Mykonos Yields a Perspective on its Future

I returned from Greece to New York late Monday night and left yesterday for San Francisco to attend my nephew’s nearly weeklong wedding celebration (Congratulations Steven and Kelsey:)).  A different sort of celebration will be held September 7th at 7PM at Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Readers Salon in Berkeley when I appear along with some guy named Hallinan.  I sure hope he’s funny because it takes me quite awhile to get over that east to west jet lag thing.

 

And, yes, there is that bit of an emotional down that comes into play each time I think about spending September on book tour instead of free diving in the Aegean (for a more detailed self-pitying rant, please see last Saturday’s blog).  But I perk up at the thought of bringing along my spear gun to fend off all those “rogue authors” sharking about these days.  Yes, I made up “sharking.”  So what?  If writers can make up reviews why can’t I make up one itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy little word?

Oh well, while my mind is still on (and in) Mykonos, let me share a thought or two with you.  But first, a little history:

Neglected Mykonos on far right

Mykonos wasn’t always a tourist paradise, though it’s said that during the hot summers of 250 BCE or so, when the neighboring holy island of Delos’ was in its heyday as the commercial trading center for the ancient world, Delosians would send their wives and children to Mykonos.  Not so much to holiday, as many wealthy Athenian husbands send them today, but to save them from the advances of thousands of anonymous sailors and traders passing through the island looking for ways to spend their time.  (I doubt Mykonos would qualify as a sanctuary for virtue these days, but perhaps you might want to check that out for yourself––on Trip Advisor, of course).

The history of Mykonos, as with everything in Greece, is wrapped up in the gods. Some say the island’s name comes from Apollo’s grandson, Mykons, though others claim it just meant “a pile of rocks” in keeping with the myth that Heracles fought the Giants in aid of Zeus and after defeating them threw the Giants into the sea where they turned to rock that is now Mykonos.

Hercules/Heracles battling the Giants

The first evidence of inhabitants on Mykonos dates back to 4000 BCE, but for most of the following six-thousand years its proximity to the more commercially developed islands of Delos, Syros, and Tinos, as well as the foreign dominator then in control––Carians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Minoans, Ionians, Athenians, Macedonians, Romans, Venetians, Turks, Russians, and others all dominated at some point––determined whether the island prospered or not.

Two other significant elements played a part in Mykonos’ development: piracy and plague.  The island was haunted by pirates virtually from antiquity, so much so that it became home to many and legend for its able-bodied seamen willing to sail to wherever there was commerce or battle.

But sea travel brought with it many perils, including plague.  As recently as the mid-19th Century (1854 according to the Mykonos historical society) plague so badly ravished the population that those who survived and did not flee to other islands or the mainland, were too few to work the fields or take care of the animals.  That’s when the Church induced immigrants from islands such as Crete, Naxos, Santorini, and Folegandros to move to Mykonos, offering the promise of a new start for them and the hope of a new beginning for the island.

A flicker of promise appeared after World War I that tourism might take root, but World War II crushed it.  The German army’s program of taking everything for themselves and leaving nothing for the occupied people brought devastating famine and death to Mykonians on a scale greater than almost anywhere else in Greece.

All old Mykonos photographs courtesy of Dimitris Koutsoukos

After World War II came war on the mainland between the left and the right, and in the fifties and early sixties a mass exodus of the island’s youth to Athens and far off lands in search of a better life.

Against that six thousand years of struggle it is amazing indeed how in little more than a single generation Mykonos was transformed into its present day wonder and the long-impoverished Mykonians became among the wealthiest per capita people in Greece.

So, what does all that history portend for the future of the island?  Some may think it presumptuous of me to offer an opinion, but since I have one, why not give it?  Besides, I’m safely out of the country.:)

Almost forever, Mykonians were an overlooked people living in poverty under a range of different foreign occupiers, some good, some not.  They saw their families slaughtered, carried off as slaves, die from strange diseases brought to their island from foreign lands, and starve to death.

Mykonians also witnessed the rise of the greatest civilization of its time within a mile of their island, a place one twenty-fifth their size, where hundreds of years before the birth of Christ more than twice as many people lived as do now on their island.  In its day Delos was the place to be and to party, filled with lavish homes, temples, theaters, athletic facilities and places of commerce far outstripping any comparable lifestyle on Mykonos today.

 

But in the blink of an eye all of it was gone.  Leveled, destroyed, wiped off the face of the earth for having made an unwise political choice.

 

Mykonians live amid constant reminders of that precipitous past.  The marble and much of the carved stone that embellishes their homes and churches today came from Delos’ razed civilization of two thousand years ago.

Delos

Today, in the midst of Greece’s deepening financial crisis, Mykonians still prosper far beyond anything they could have imagined two decades ago, let alone two centuries. But they have not forgotten what it was like in the bad days, and their stories are passed along in cafenions and around family dinner tables everyday.  It is a part of their cultural history, demonstrating the strength of will and resilience of which they are justly proud.

  

All of which leads me to one inevitable conclusion: Fame is fleeting, all glory fades.  In time, change will come to the island. When that will occur and whether the transition will be glorious or not, who can say?  But it will happen.  Always has, always will, and when it does Mykonians will persevere as they have for six thousand years.  They will because it is their nature, as expressed in the adage used to describe their relationship with the magical place on which they’re blessed to live: Our rocky island is not made up of its people; our people are made up of its rock.

God bless you, my friends (including Steven and Kelsey).

Jeff—Saturday