JR Foley

Photo: special thanks to Rosalie Gancie

The universe of cyberspace is charged with blogs; but it is also, shall we say, a generous womb inviting all the cyber-spermatozoa that can to come seek the ovum of your imagination, charming reader. I don’t read blogs, and this is good for you, as reader, because I will host only the kind of blog I’d read myself. There is a lot in the world I don’t know – more than most of it – but I enjoy reducing my ignorance.

The primary purpose of this blog is to assemble an audience for the stories, essays, and plays attached to it, some of which involve Lee Harvey Oswald, St. Augustine, and even Norman Mailer, as pictured above piling saucers of coffee cups with me at the Cafe de Paris. This is now a prime requirement for writers who wish to be published in the obsolescing world of print publication. Print publishers won’t spend a penny to promote the books they publish by authors who do not already command a ready multi-million dollar market (like John Grisham, Doris Kearns Goodwin, etc., etc.). This has been true for some time now and will continue to be true, even for e-book authors. Publishers want you to have a big ready-made market before they will consider you, and following/anticipating them, literary agents now look for that too. You have to start promoting your book not only before it is published, and before you seek an agent – if it’s non-fiction (like Victory Garden Boys: Growing Up in a Suburb of the Cold War), you have to start promoting it even before it is written! If, like Victory Garden Boys, it is already written, you still need to write up a book proposal as though it is not yet written.

I suspect print publishers, on whatever reduced scale, will continue to publish printed books in the familiar format. Unlike granite walls, wax cuneiform tablets, and parchment scrolls, books are convenient to the hand; they’re very handy. There is a complex tactile sensation to holding a paper book, feeling its thickness or thinness, turning pages, inserting a bookmark, even idly gazing at the cover that is different in kind from handling a Kindle, or Nook, or iPad, or whatever will be new. I also suspect that, except maybe for university press books and/or coffee table books, the printing will get cheaper and cheaper, the paper pulpier, the glue less gluey – the hand-life shorter and shorter. I for one do not think this a catastrophe (as long as a writing is preserved somewhere, electronically or otherwise). I think of the kinds of paperbacks that used to be published in France: uniform plain yellow covers and roughly cut pulp pages for everyone – cheap to print in the tens and hundreds of thousands, cheap to buy, easy on the eyes, light in the hand, readily pass-aroundable. That past might be a useful future. (I’m not sure these editions are not still printed in France; but in the one big bookstore I explored on Place St. Michel last August the paperbacks were handsomely covered and pricey.) For the short run, and maybe not so short run, e-books are likely to be hastily consumable bestsellers, plus public domain titles. Other kinds of books, whether printed by a publisher big or small or printed via print-on-demand, will be books of paper.

So I hope Victory Garden Boys: Growing Up in a Suburb of the Cold War (which see under VICTORY GARDEN BOYS) — and for that matter The Short Happy Life of Lee Harvey Oswald and its brethren — will find a print publisher. And so — welcome to this blog!

Some observations about the writings showcased on jrfoley.com.

• “The Short Happy Life of Lee Harvey Oswald” tells the tale of the JFK assassination not as an event in American history but as an event in American imagination. Oswald does it alone, he does it with others, he doesn’t do it at all. It is actually at least two stories, or a main story and an anti-story, the anti-story running in the footnotes/endnotes against the current of the dominant story. The first time I read the two biographies of Lee Harvey Oswald in The Warren Report I was struck by how much the writing sounded like one of Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. It also turned out that the only major American writer Oswald ever said two words about — quoted in the epigraphs to “Short Happy Life” — was Ernest Hemingway. (The relation of Hemingway to Oswald — that is, the Warren Commission/U.S. House of Representatives Assassinations Committee Lee Harvey Oswald — is further expatiated upon, together with a review of Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale, in “Lee Harvey Oswald: Deep Classic American Hero”.) When after many failed attempts to get at the story of Oswald I finally let both my own impression of the Warren Report biographies and Oswald’s own words sink in, the story all but wrote itself. It’s Hemingway parodying the Warren Report, retelling the biographies as though, in fact, just three years after his own suicide, he had written them.
• “night patrol”: the night journey to Vietnam of one who hell no, does not go.

Victory Garden Boys: Growing Up in a Suburb of the Cold War, a narrative in linked essays, combines bird’s-eye (historical, political, economic, based on extensive research, including interviews) with one worm’s-eye view (my own growing up) on growing up during the Cold War 1950’s in “the greenest plateau which the American middle class had yet cultivated as a home and a school for its children” – a garden which was also a bull’s eye of any atomic attack on America. Analytical as well as narrative, it focuses on one suburb of Washington, D.C., Montgomery County, Maryland, which in different ways – thanks in part to the initiative of local politicians and businessmen – was itself a product of the U.S. Government. By 1960 Montgomery became the wealthiest county per median family income in America: “the greenest plateau ….” The bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye views join chiefly in the career of one of those local politicians, my father, who by the end of the 1950’s was elected as the County’s Representative to the U.S. Congress. This is what I tell agents: this is the first book on War Babies and Baby Boomers to bring this double focus to our peculiar contribution to history.
• “Prologue: Guns in the Field“ (time is, time was, time goes somewhere else)
• “Legends of the Victory Garden“ (an excerpt featuring Sam Eig and Col. E. Brooke Lee)
• “Did 13th Century St. Thomas Aquinas Make Straight the Path to 20th Century Atheism?” (excerpted from “Holy Redeemer,” a consideration of how the underpinnings of the notorious Baltimore Catechism #2 may trace a surprisingly straight line from the master theologian of the Catholic Church to the atheism of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre)
• “Running for Office in the Victory Garden” (an interlude, not uncomic, in which the erstwhile anti-E. Brooke Lee Machine John R. Foley explains to wife and brother why … he joined the Machine)
• “Our Friend the Atom: Walt Disney and the Atomic Bomb” (a rich Uncle Scrooge adventure, richly illustrated)

TRAVEL PIECES:

• “Lost in Mudlin: a first encounter with the city of L. Bloom and Stephen D.“: which says it all.
• “A Visit to SzoborPark”, in the suburban hills south of Buda, is not to be missed by any traveler to Budapest with the least curiosity about 20th Century Hungary. After “the political change,” as our urbane tour guide called it, all the Soviet-era public statuary was removed from the city, then retrieved and preserved in this strange, pretty garden-park. Especially to be beheld is the Bela Kun Memorial, a metal and concrete assemblage by Hungary’s leading sculptor Imre Varga, which in my opinion is not only a first rate work of art but the most fascinating public memorial I have ever seen.