Welcome to Toffy TV, it's the Tuesday topic. We've had a video in from Mark. Hi Bards, Peds. Discussion for Tuesday topic. I wanted to discuss the introduction of the video assistant referee for next season. Do you think that it might have a potential impact on the so-called top six in the Premier League in terms of league position? I think for me it should create a level playing field. Decisions that we see that always seem to go for the top six, especially at home, whether it's penalties, offsides or fouls on set pieces. I think if you take into consideration, if you look at Richardless and how many times he's fouled and how many times we actually get free kicks, and I think if you put that up against how many times Salah or Harry Kane gets fouled, I would have presumed to be able to have a lot more free kicks awarded. It was interesting that Matt, the t-shirt, tweeted. He said a lot of teams of the bigger teams seemed a little concerned about the introduction of VAR. So maybe there could be something in it. I was just wondering what your views were on VAR. Do you think it will change anything? It seemed to work in the World Cup. Nice one, Mark. Nice to get away from Thomas Evans. Thomas, something like that. Hopefully it'll benefit Evan in the future.  No, no. Obviously VAR's coming in next year. Will it create a level playing field? I think a lot of people feel like it won't. It's almost going to favour the big boys. I can understand that in a way because I suppose for, let's say, the FA Cup or something like that, it's almost the inconsistencies of times that help. The smaller teams, as such. I've just watched the FA Cup weekend there. City were playing at a new port and it's a terrible pitch and their referees may be not giving every decision. For some reason, the commentators all love it.  I can understand from that point of view. If that's a level playing field, then that gap is reduced. But in the Premier League, where teams are supposed to be within a certain level of each other, do you think it'll work the other way and go against those big teams? Yes, because they get some decisions that are outrageous because of who they are. Let's be clear, VARs only brought in for game changing decisions. So it's not every tackle that goes in. It's not like they're going to stop the game and go, that's a yellow card and you've missed a free kick that should have been. But I think when we see some of the decisions that the big side, the bigger clubs get, you look and just think, we've never get like, you know, mouse all that for arguing and say, flopping his arms back and going down and the games, that win Liverpool games that are keeping them at the top of the league and you're like, we just wouldn't get those decisions. So, and they wouldn't get them with VAR. We've seen city get decision benefit of the doubt with some stuff and it's natural, you know, United get decision, you've heard referees saying, not sure but I'd probably give it because it was a rampard or old trafford and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what do you mean? You do give it because you walk off that Liverpool rampard or United are old trafford. So that can only be a good thing for the game. And there's a tendency as a fan of a club outside the top six to go, you know, be paranoid, we never get those decisions. But you've got Matt Letissier, who's quite a high profile pundit on Skype. I quite like him. I think he's quite down the middle, I think, saying these big clubs are nervous about this VAR, trying everything to put it off for another because they don't want it coming in yet. You've got him saying it. It shows you that it's more than us just being sensitive. Pogetino said a couple of weeks ago, didn't he? He said, I'd leave it for another year. Oh, did he? Yeah, he said, I'd probably leave it. Probably needs more testing. Why doesn't it need more testing? As long as it's in and it's universal, see the big problem I've got at the moment is feeling with the FA Cup is the fact that, you know, we're not game again. Again, the handball. People are hunting things in there now. Yeah, the ref doesn't see it, doesn't give it. Well, VAR, that immediately cleans that up. And again, going back to what I was saying before about that, it's the fact that it's not a level playing field, helps those teams, helps the cup shocks, helps ultimately the magic of the FA Cup. But it's bollocks, isn't it? That's bollocks because at the end of the day, we all want a level playing field. You wouldn't say it's like goal line technology.


Welcome back to the rig review and today we're gonna take a look at the art of book of turning red Love the movie it was great. I just got this it's still wrapped got this today This is now before bedtime taking a look at this here now while unwrap this or maybe not well There'll be some noise behind my nice JD and I do product reviews like these that look at books and all bunch of hardware and tech and things also do animation lectures I do acting analysis clips I do animation analysis clips I do a bunch of stuff It's the bitch at the beginning the channel about all kinds of stuff animation Check it out. And if you like it subscribe that helps the channel grow And if not maybe I'll come in to you later or no, I don't know but let's check this out. Let's unwrap this first There we go. That's the front the back Spine and so on if we take this off We have that in the front The back the spine and there you go. I haven't seen this always since I just unwrapped this But I am sure it is full of awesomeness some of the the the previews that I saw online Look really cool in terms of character designs and just I'm just in love with the facial features and the the mouth shapes There's so much fun. So I can't wait to go through this. You got the introduction Ooh, it's already starting if you watch my clips, you know, I like this when you got rough sketches explorations different styles I'm already in oh, yeah, that's one of the ones that I saw look at that She is so much fun. I love it Always the best thing about those art of books or look at that. Look at those nice poses. I love this the twisting come on This is already great story artist notes Yeah, that's great. Let me go through this again I'm gonna go through it a bit faster since I haven't seen this. I will be prone to looking awesome maquettes and expressions But this is a flip through so you get to see what's in it and hopefully Get encouraged to get it as well That's cool. I'm always such a fan. I gotta stop you all the minutes that in terms of black and white when it's illustrated like this I'm such a fan of these types of Oh our pieces so great I was a big fan of all kinds of details in rooms not just in terms of easter eggs But in terms of just the detail and kind of it tells a story like everybody's room You know, I'm sure your room told a specific story of how how we'll kind of posters you had also love stuff like this Anyway, I love everything but It's always cool to see what people come up with in terms of just the set design and this the overall production design It's always fun to see. Got more boards Exploration of the school nice Oh, these are great that I love that moment in the movie the animation when she plays so great Her friends are great too. She cracked me up. Talk about facial expressions So good the voice was also great. It's so great. Uh, yes So much fun Oh, these were great. Such a fun group. Did I hold on to that skip? No Yes four town very catchy score and music I want Ludwig Gorenzen Gorenzen is pronouncing Apologize butchering names does an awesome score for the Mandalorian as well Oh Yes, what is this 120 sheet college rule notebook? Oh nice spoilers More boards and bring this up because of reflections which I should on one point fix A lot of these too in terms of color exploration definitely getting into Red territory and as I'm advancing we're definitely getting into Spoiler territory. It's so cute. Come on. Oh, these are great. Look at that It's awesome. I love it Love this too. That guy added coming More boards. That's cool to see always like the mixture of storyboards First version color keys Dad was cute. He was definitely very supportive. So great. Oh, I love also seeing the difference here in terms of artwork in the final render That didn't definitely didn't have that much to do It was all about them. They cracked me up too. It was great. Yeah, definitely getting into spoiler territory now Nice More boards. I love it That ending as we getting to it so bananas But in all the best ways. I just love how I just go bigger go home. Literally. Look at this I know spoiler, but it was so great It was so great The music how you got the score to pop song the chant all fused together. It's great. Ooh, I love these Yes, it was so good Oh, if you've never seen the movie, you know, I I'll I'll probably blend in next some spoiler warning in there Oh, these are neat too. Oh skip one So deep into spoiler territory Nice Yeah, the school's great too that that moment with her mom's spoiler It's really touching. It's really great. Yes. That was the moment So much reference. Look at this Color scripts are all great too Nice man.  So much awesome stuff. That is the end More sketches last two the end here And there you go. There you go. That was the flip through hopefully helpful in making potentially any buying decisions or not But I'm definitely going to watch the movie again. The music is just stuck in my head And just the life and the energy of the facial poses and when she had the very beginning goes through the town and goes home So good. Anyway, watch it. Maybe you've seen it. Let me know in the comments what you thought about it I thought it was really great really fun So expressive and the style was really cute and that's it And hopefully you think maybe that's not too bad. I want to see more. I don't want to miss any of those future Flip-throughs lots of books lots of tech in the background. There's more to come a lot more But that's it for me Thank you for watching if you're still watching thank you for your patience to watch this until the very end And hopefully I'll see you in my next upload


Now to take you back to that year that She's Come and Done was published, 1992, I was in the middle of a six-city book tour. That was pretty exciting stuff for somebody who had been a high school teacher all his adult life. Suddenly I'm being treated like an author and squared around here and there, and my travels took me to La Jolla, California. It was a Sunday, it was a day off from the bookstore circuit, and my agent and I were in an outdoor cafe for Sunday brunch, and we were having a great old time. It was a sun-splashed morning, the Chardonnay was flowing, and suddenly my agent pulled out from her big straw bag a sheaf of legal paper and I said, oh, what's that? She said, well, this is a second book contract. She said, the publisher would like you to write number two, and they're willing to give you advance money to do it, so you'll be able to take a leave of absence from teaching and write full-time. What do you think of that? I said, I don't know, it seems a little backward to me, taking money for work that you haven't done yet, but my agent, being a good agent, explained to me that yes, indeed, this wasn't a very good idea. I think she had 15% somewhere in the back of her mind. Anyway, more Chardonnay, and by the end of that brunch it was okay, I'll sign. So I signed the devil's agreement, the book tour ended, the summer ended. I did indeed get my leave of absence. My wife, who was an elementary school teacher, went back to school day after labor day. My kids went off to school, and it was just the cats and me. Had the house all to myself, I was a full-time writer, at least part-time, or temporarily. So I pulled up my sleeves, I put on my brand new computer. I had a dozen celebratory roses from my editor on one side of me, a dozen celebratory roses from my agent on the other, and there was only one problem.  I didn't have any characters, I didn't have any conflict, nothing. Now I had made a promise to myself that I was going to stay in that writing office, keep business hours, and that got trickier and trickier to do as the week went on. And by the end of that first week, I had gone up to the attic and resurrected from one of the kids' toy chests, one of those paddle ball things, you know, with a little rubber ball. And I want to tell you, I got frighteningly good at paddle balling. I found myself, by the second week, jumping at any excuse. The doorbell would ring in those young, earnest, conservatively dressed young men just out of high school, those religious missionaries who come to your door, you know, they would stand there. And prior to this, my busy life and I would always say, oh no, no, no, I'm too busy, thank you anyway. But now it was, come in, come in. I'd be happy to listen to what you have to say. Now the very worst it got was, I think, somewhere around the one-month mark after lots and lots of wheel spinning and increasing insomnia and thoughts about maybe returning that advanced money and the worst it got was something called the paper clip game in which I sat in the middle of my office flicking paper clips, the object being to try to hit the window pane. Now this is how bad it got. There were teams, there was a playoff series, pretty pathetic. Now on the day that the muse finally was merciful to me, finally decided that I had been humbled enough, what I saw was the beginning of my character. I got a first glimpse of the guy who would then become Dominic Birdsy. Now one thing I forgot to tell you is that when I signed that agreement, the book company said that, well here's a deadline also. You have two years to write this novel and I finished six years later. So I was only four years over the deadline. But what I saw that first day when the novel started to come in earnest, best way I can describe it was maybe like 10, 15 seconds of a little movie playing in my head. My first novel, she's come undone, it started as a voice, a character, the character who became Dolores, actually started kind of talking and I was kind of writing down what she was saying. But this novel, Dominic, before he was Dominic, he was just a guy driving a pickup truck on a back road in the middle of the night.  And so I began to play a guessing game with myself. Why can't he sleep? Who does he love? Who or what does he hate? And as I was seeing this guy on the pickup truck, I saw him begin to doze at the wheel.  Now basically what happened is that reluctantly, somewhat trepidatiously, I went over the bank after him. And when I came back six years later, came stumbling back up the bank, I was holding this big bulky novel. And I had written a story about, amongst other things, the effect of schizophrenia on a family and Sicilian immigration, early 20th century immigration. I had written a book about forgiveness and also a book about oppression, how misusing power over other people defeats not only the victim but also the oppressor. And finally I had written a book about identical twins, a subject that came to really fascinate me but I had none of this in mind when I started. For me, writing is a process of discovery and I like it best when I'm in waters that seem almost over my head because then I have to stop and learn about the subject matter I've begun to write about. The best research that I did on the subject of schizophrenia was sitting with people, family members and psychiatric nurses and in a couple of cases people with schizophrenia themselves sitting in coffee houses and at booths and learning, educating myself so that hopefully I could write it credibly. Now Dominic is the, he's the speaker of this novel and he is the well-twin. When I started researching, I came up with a fact that really fascinated me and that fact was that in the cases where identical twins, where one twin develops schizophrenia because they start out as a single entity that splits in half and because they share biochemistry in almost all of the cases, if one twin becomes schizophrenic, the other one will as well. But the research shows that there is this funny little seven, eight percent of the cases where that does not happen, where one twin has the disease and the other twin is somehow spared the disease. And it became clearer and clearer to me that that was the story that I wanted to write. And Dominic's story, he is the well-twin, it's a story of conflictedness. He wants to be his brother's keeper and yet all his life he's played a game of one upsmanship on his more docile brother, a game of survival of the fittest. And he's also angry that his brother has been for him like an albatross and he's also afraid that the disease is waiting to claim him as well. So this is Dominic's voice. I'm going to read a couple of sections, one from their childhood. One Saturday morning, when my brother and I were 10, our family television set spontaneously combusted.  We were supposed to help her outside with the window washing. Whenever Ray gave an order, my brother and I snapped to attention. But our stepfather was duck hunting that weekend with his friend Eddie Banus, obeying Ma was optional. She was outside looking in when it happened, standing in the geranium bed on a stool so she could reach the parlor windows. Her hair was in pin curls, her coat pockets were stuffed with paper towels, as she windexed and wiped the glass, her circular strokes gave the illusion that she was waving in at us.  What if she tells Ray? She won't tell, I said. She never tells. And it was true. However angry we could make our mother, she would never have fed us to the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room, rose to his alarm clock at 3.30 each afternoon and built submarines at night. Third boat, third shift. At our house you tiptoed and whispered during the day and became free each evening at 9.30 when Eddie Banus, Ray's fellow third shifter, pulled into the driveway and honked. I would wait for the sound of that horn, hunger for it. With it came a loosening of limbs, a relaxation in the chest and hands, the ability to breathe deeply again. One night my brother and I celebrated the slamming of Eddie's truck door by jumping in the dark on our mattresses. Freedom from Ray turned our beds into trampolines. Hey, look, Thomas said, staring with puzzlement at the television. What? And then I saw it, too, a thin curl of smoke rising from the back of the set. The Howdy Doody show was on, I remember, Clarabelle the Clown chasing someone with a seltzer bottle. The picture and sound went dead. Flames whooshed up the parlor wall. I thought the Russians had done it. That Khrushchev had dropped the bomb at last. If the unthinkable ever happened, Ray had lectured us at the dinner table. The submarine base and electric boat were guaranteed targets. We'd feel the jolt nine miles up the road in three rivers, then fires would ignite everywhere, and then the worst of it, the meltdown, people's hands and legs and faces, would melt like cheese. Duck and cover, I yelled to my brother. Thomas and I fell to the floor in the protective position that the civil defense lady had made us practice at school.  The noise and smoke brought Ma screaming back inside. Her shoes crunched glass as she ran toward us.  But we can't go outside. I shouted, fall out. It's not the bomb. She shouted back. It's the TV.  While Mr. Anthony made the call, Mrs. Anthony brushed glass bits off the tops of our crew cuts with her whisk broom. We spat soot flecked phlegm by the time we returned to the front sidewalk, Ma was missing. Where's your mother? Mr. Anthony shouted. She didn't go back in there, did she? Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Thomas began to cry, and then Mrs. Anthony and I were crying too. Hurry up! My brother shrieked to the distant sound of the fire siren. Through the parlor windows, I could see the flames shrivel our lace curtains. A minute or so later, Ma emerged from the burning house, sobbing, clutching something against her chest. One of her pockets was ablaze from the paper towels. Her coat was smoking. Mr. Anthony yanked off Ma's coat and stomped on it. Fire trucks rounded the corner, sirens blaring. Neighbors hurried out of their houses to cluster and stare. Ma stunk.  And when she reached out to pull Thomas and me to her body, several loose photographs spilled to the ground. And that's when I realized why she had gone back into the house to rescue her photo album from its keeping place in the bottom drawer of the china closet. It's all right now, she kept saying. It's all right. It's all right. And for Ma, it was all right. The house her father had built would be saved. Her twins were within arm's reach. Her picture album had been rescued. Just last week, I dreamt my mother, dead now from breast cancer since 1987, was standing at the picture window at Joyce and my condominium looking in at me and mouthing that long ago promise. It's all right. It's all right. It's all right. Whenever my mother underwent her chemotherapy and radiation treatments at Yale, New Haven, Ray drove her down there, kept her company, ate his meals in the cafeteria downstairs, and catnapped in the chair beside her bed. By early evening, he would get back on the road, driving north on I-95 in time for a shift at Electric Boat. When I suggested that maybe he was taking on too much, he shrugged and asked me, well, what the hell else was he supposed to do? Did he want to talk about it? What was there to talk about? Was there anything I could do for him? I should worry about my mother, not him. He could take care of himself. I tried to make it down to New Haven two or three times a week. I brought Thomas with me when I could, usually on Sundays. It was hard to gauge how well or poorly Thomas was handling, Ma was dying. As was usually the case with him, the pendulum swung irregularly. Sometimes he seemed resigned and accepting. It's God's will, he would sigh, echoing our mother herself. We have to be strong for each other. Sometimes he'd sob and pound his fists on my dashboard. And at other times, he was pumped up with hope. I know she's gonna beat this thing. He told me one afternoon over the phone, I'm praying every single day to St. Agatha. St. Who, I said, immediately sorry, I had asked. St. Agatha, he repeated. The patron saint invoked against fire and volcanoes in cancer.  Agatha had stopped the eruption of a volcano, had died a bride of Christ and blah, blah, blah, blah. One morning at six AM, Thomas woke me up with the theory that the special K that our mother ate for breakfast every day had been deliberately impregnated with carcinogens. The Kellogg cereal company was secretly owned by the Soviets, he said. They target the relatives of the people that they're really after. I'm on their hit list because I do God's bidding. Now that he was on to them, he said. He was considering exposing Kellogg's, rubbing it right in their corporate face. He would probably end up as Time Magazine's man of the year and have to go into hiding. Stalkers followed famous people. Look what had happened to poor John Lennon. Did I remember that song, Instant Karma? John had written that song specifically for him to encourage him to do good in the world after he had gone. Listen, my brother said.  And he broke out into a combination of song and shouting.  One Sunday afternoon when Thomas and I drove down to visit Ma, her bed was empty. We found her in the solarium, illuminated by a column of sun coming through the skylight, sitting by herself among clusters of other people's visitors. By then the chemo had stained her skin and turned her hair to duck fluff, had given her once again the singed look that she had had that day she emerged from the burning parlor on Tollyhawk Avenue. But somehow, bald and shrunken in her quilted pink robe, she looked beautiful to me. Thomas sat slumped and uncommunicative through that whole visit. He had wanted me to stop at McDonald's on the way down and I had told him no, that maybe we could go there on the ride back. In the solarium, he pouted and stared trance-like at the TV and ignored Ma's questions and her efforts at conversation with him. He refused to take off his coat. He would not stop checking his watch and I was angry by the time we left, angrier still when during the drive home, he interrupted my speech about his selfishness to ask if we were still going to McDonald's. Hey, don't you get it, asshole? I shouted, don't you even come up for air when your mother's dying? He ended his seatbelt and climbed over the front seat, squatting on the back seat floor. He assumed a modified version of the old duck and cover.  And when he refused to get up, I yanked him up and out of the car. He pulled free and bolted, running across the interstate without even looking. Horns wailed, cars swerved wildly. Don't ask me how he made it across. And by the time I got across the highway myself, Thomas had disappeared. I ran, panic stricken through woods and yards, imagining the ugly thump of impact Thomas ripped in half. His blood splattered all over the road. And I found him lying in the tall grass at the side of the highway, about a quarter of a mile up from where the car was. His eyes were closed, his mouth smiling up at the sun. When I helped him up, the grass was dented in the shape of his body. Like a visual aid at a crime scene. Like one of those angels he and I used to make in the new snow. Back in the car, I gripped the wheel to steady my shaking hands and tried not to hear and see those cars that had swerved out of his way. In Madison, I pulled into a McDonald's and got him a large fries, a quarter pounder with cheese, a strawberry shake. If he was not exactly happy for the rest of that trip, he was at least quiet and full. Thank you. Hi, Wally. I thought it was interesting. You started out with an exploding TV set and she's come undone. It opens with the arrival of a TV set. What's with the TV sets? Well, I am a member of the Baby Boomer Generation, wrecked by TV, I'm sure. I do remember distinctly the day that our first TV arrived. I was very excited about it. And I remember the vivid details of it still. And I always assume that I write pretty far away from my own life. But I'll tell you a funny story. About three or four years ago, my mother and four, there was a spring cleanup in their town, town where I used to live. And the deal was if you got everything out of the house that you wanted to throw away and put it on the sidewalk, the city workers came by and they took it all. And so my mother and father decided to clean out their attic and they needed help. So I drove down and as I was lugging things up and down, suddenly I saw that TV, this old Emerson TV, one of those old big boxy things. And I was startled because it was the exact television that I had described and she's come undone that arrived for Dolores and her family. So I sat there looking at that thing, scratching my head and saying, well, maybe you write a little closer to home than you realize when you're working with fiction. Do you really see things in color when you're writing or do you hear things or how are you perceiving? Both, when I was a kid, unlike a lot of the writers that I know and a lot of writers that I read about, I didn't love to read when I was a kid. I read, I wrote assignments for school but I didn't do a lot of it in my spare time. What I did was I drew, I drew constantly. My mother worked part-time at a printing company and my uncles were printers and so always coming into our home was all this great scrap paper. And I would sit there and I drew my own comic books and so forth. And I see now in retrospect that that was preparing me to be a fiction writer because I would draw, say, a scene of a bunch of people at the beach and next thing you know there'd be a tidal wave and I'd draw the results or I'd have a circus scene and everybody would be having a good time and then the lion's cage would be left open and chaos would ensue. So I think that was my early training and to this day I have a visual orientation into the fiction. Very often it's sort of movie-like for me and I do hear the character's voices and sometimes when the writing is going well I'm trying to keep up with what they're saying. It's coming quickly. Do you ever use drawing to help you when you're feeling stuck in your writing? Yeah, actually I do. She's come undone. I wrote mostly in longhand at the library. Here we are, not this library, but the University of Connecticut Library. And I think handwriting is somehow related to drawing. It's your sort of personal stamp on things. And my second novel was written more head to computer and in some ways it was a more bumpy ride for me. There was not a lot of that fluidity that I felt with the first novel. And a lot of times I do get stuck. I don't know where to go with the fiction and it keeps me up at night and so forth.  And if I begin writing again, and lots of times the writing breaks out into drawing. And the word fluidity really, I really mean that to the point where often while I was writing I know this much is true and in a hard place with it, I would take those pages and I would go to some place where there was water. And the sound of moving water, the river or the water spill on which there's a water spill in this novel called The Falls or Indian's Leap that is actually based on a place in my hometown. And I would go there and visit there. And something about the sound of water and the fluidity of the pen together would get things rolling. Did you plot out your stories in advance or were you just discovering as you go along? How does this work for you? I'm always envious when I hear about writers who know the ending at the beginning of the journey or who outline before they write the first sentence but it just doesn't work that way for me. I have to write myself into the discovery and my work is character driven rather than plot driven. And I have to fall in love and worry over a character in the case of the first novel Dolores who horrified me much of the time. And she was sort of like a troubled daughter who just wouldn't obey me. And in the case with the twins too, I mean a lot of Dominic's behavior and his cruelty to other people was really disturbing to me. But I seem only to be attracted to imperfect people as characters but people who have the potential and the desire to become better people despite all of those imperfections. And I think probably that comes from my long history of teaching because when I started teaching high school back in 1972 and just gave up that position a couple of years ago. And in all those years when I look back at the kids that I loved the best, usually it was those troubled kids, those kids that came from less than perfect home environments and but were struggling to make life and make themselves better.  How did you even do that? Not well. And I have three kids and a lot of demands on time. Some of you may be old enough to remember the Ed Sullivan show, Sunday night show and there was a, I guess he would be qualified as a juggler. There was an act that would come on every once in a while and this guy, he had rods, all these long skinny rods all over the stage and he would spin dinner plates on the rods and as the act went on, he'd spin more and more plates and you'd sit there and watch and one plate would start to wobble and get ready to crash to the floor and just when you thought, oh, there it goes, there it goes, he'd reach behind him and spin that one and then go on, make three more plates spin and they were all over the stage and that's sort of what my life is like because teaching is a full time job if you're doing it well and putting a lot of energy into it and so is writing, they require different things but I don't see one as more important or less important than the other. I wrote She's Come Undone while I was writing, while I was teaching full time and the way I did it was, I would set the alarm for 4.30, five o'clock in the morning and not all during the week but on weekends and I would drive up to the all night study room in the university library and I'd be the first idiot there, of course, with the gallon size coffee from the convenience store to wake myself up and there'd be maybe one or two kids asleep in their calculus notes or something and here I come with my notebooks and my fiction and I did it that way, I wrote very early and then I wrote during summer vacations and it was kind of wacky, I mean nobody promised me that I was gonna get anything published, I pretty much assumed that I would not get it published but this was when I was writing the first novel and I loved and worried over that character so much that I felt compelled to keep going, keep going, keep going because I wanted to find out what was gonna happen to her and there were no guarantees that she was gonna make it or not. And in both novels you've got really wonderful therapists, Dr. Patel. Thanks. He's terrific and the Dolores's therapist, Dr. Shaw. Dr. Shaw, yeah. Dr. Shaw, I mean at first when he started working with Dolores I'm like, oh my God, he's rebirthing, this is really bizarre but he really, he was really good, he really helped. He was earnest I think and it's funny because when I started writing Dr. Shaw I didn't know if he was gonna be a positive or negative influence on her either. I couldn't figure out Dr. Shaw and all that sort of way out there therapy that he was doing. But did you ever work with a therapist yourself to help you through hard times? I did a little short-term therapy, yeah. At a time, actually it was a time when I was having trouble sleeping and anxiety so but nothing major or nothing long-term but people ask me are the characters in the book like me and I would say if any of you have read, I know this much is true, Dr. Patel, his Indian psychologist, the Indian psychologist who starts working with Thomas Birdsey and then ends up working with Dominic. She's probably the closest thing to me just in terms of she and I are both sort of coaching the character to be a little bit more self-reflective and figure out why he's so angry and why, what the source of all that despair is. And she's also an advocate of using ancient myths to sort of cure yourself and I know that ancient myth is really important to me in terms of my fiction writing. I go back, I sort of see those old, old stories, those stories that have lasted through the ages, through the eons, that's like the wellspring for me. I once worked with a wonderful teacher named Gladys Swan and she put it to me. She said, well, she and I have boys like this and big, thick glasses that magnified her eyes and whenever she spoke it was like the oracle was speaking to you and she said, and you know, Wally, she was also the first person to tell me that when I started, she's coming down as a short story and I thought I was, that's what all that I'd written to that point and she was the first ones to suggest to me that it was a novel. She said, you know, I think with this one you got a few too many pots on the stove and I said, well, I said, what do you mean? She said, well, I think you're trying to tell yourself if you wanna write a novel and I said, I don't know how to write a novel. And that's when she said, go back and read the old stories because you're never gonna tell a completely original story. The best that you can do is put your original spin on a story that's lasted through the ages and the reason it's lasted through the ages is people need for it to be told. So that's when I began to discover the work of Joseph Campbell and Heinrich Zimmer and those guys. In fact, the closest thing that I had to any kind of a design with this novel was a story that I read in one of Heinrich Zimmer's books. It was an ancient Hindu myth that he called the king and the corpse and in that myth there's a sort of a proud but oblivious king and he has to be humbled in the story and it's a creepy, very non-western myth. There are corpses in there and the corpses are whispering riddles and the riddles are the keys by which the king can solve his dilemma and get out of the clutches of an evil sorcerer and by the end of that myth he saves himself by humbling himself by dressing in beggars rags and listening to the whispers of the dead. Now, when I wrote this, I used those whispers of the dead in the grandfather's story. Dominic and Thomas's grandfather, their Italian immigrant grandfather, dies the summer before they're born but he leaves behind a manuscript.  Just read my life and you'll know how to live. So he has a pompous reason for beginning but he sinned against people terribly in his life and what the grandfather's journal becomes is a sort of an extended confession and I had that, I had the grandfather's story very early on in the writing in the novel but I didn't know what it meant and in the actual story it ends up near the end and as I wrote the story I figured out what it meant that the grandfather's story is a story of failure. He could not be loved because he could not love and he could not stop exerting power over people and Dominic has some of those same sins and so the grandfather's story becomes sort of a cautionary tale for him. He can either repeat the sins of his grandfather or else he can evolve and so there's that king from the myth, humble yourself and do the hard work of self renovation and you can inherit a better world. I think that's one of the things that struck me about Dolores's work in the first book. She's Come Undone is that Dr. Shaw tells her that you can remake yourself and she does. She does but not in the ways that he prescribes and in that novel she abruptly leaves. She leaves to chase some guy up in Vermont before her therapist feels that it's appropriate for her to leave and of course she gets herself in more hot water. She does eventually evolve though but in some unpredicted ways. Now in the grandfather's diary and I know this much is true there's a monkey, where did this monkey come from? Because I see little monkeys kind of scratched throughout the book. Right, well again it's myth. When I started studying all these ancient stories one of the things that a lot of them had in common is that the hero on the journey or the heroine is guided along the path by animal helpmates. Animals sometimes that talked, sometimes that didn't but that guided them along the way and showed them the way at difficult times in difficult junctures. Now I used that same thing in She's Come Undone. Dolores's Totem Animal is the whale that sort of surfaces throughout the story in various ways and kind of helps her to figure out her life's journey. Now in I know this much is true Dominic's Animal is the monkey. Aggressive, curious, poking in around, pushing out, pushing the limits of things. His brother, his weaker and kinder, better half if you will, Thomas, his totem animal is the rabbit.  One timid, one always climbing out of the playpan and getting into trouble. One of the things that Dr. Patel really teaches Dominic I think is to embody the positive aspects of his brother. But I had read somewhere that you actually started writing this book as an antidote maybe to She's Come Undone which is from a woman's perspective? Well I wouldn't go so far as to say antidote but it was funny after I wrote She's Come Undone before it was published I went down to New York and the president of the book company brought me into his office and he had read the novel and he said well this is a very brave thing that you have done are you sure you wanna go ahead with this and publish it? And I didn't know what he meant and what he was talking about is a man writing a novel from the point of view of the opposite gender. And I hadn't thought it was that big a deal but then when I found it when it was published and there was a big deal made out of it. It was challenging certainly and I hit lots of false notes as a guy writing from a woman's point of view but I think probably the three things that allowed me to sort of take on the assignment and then go with it and stay with it. First of all I grew up with sisters. I have no brothers myself but I have older sisters, bossy older sisters and we had a whole family of girl cousins that lived just down the street from us and they had wild and crazy imaginative play and stuff and sometimes they would let me play with them but only if I would be the victim. Like they'd be out on a jungle safari or something and I would be captured and boiled in oil, that kind of thing but usually I was the observer. It was all this wild and crazy play and I'd sit on the sidelines and watch them and then working with high school kids, half of whom are girls and inviting them to write down what they wanted to write about and so you're on the receiving end of lots and lots of young female voices and then also I work in a writers group and as a member of that group I would bring sections of She's Come Undone and the women in the group were never shy about speaking up when it didn't sound right and when it sounded false and so little by little I was able to sand the edges off of that. Anyway, the book gets published and every review mentions, oh this is, how did he write this from the opposite viewpoint or he did a good job and then that was always the first question at bookstores and libraries and so forth at Q&A time. Mr. Lam, now why did you choose to do that? And I don't know, I don't particularly buy into this thing that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. I mean that is, I think that's a kind of a shield that people hide behind so they can say, see, he just doesn't get it or she has a car she's that way, she's a woman and all that kind of stuff. I don't know, if men are from Mars and women are from Venus I guess I'm an intergalactic traveler. But with all those questions in my head to get back to your question and all that sort of focus on writing from the opposite gender, I started this novel with a question, well are men and women all that differently or all that different? And so I was very interested in examining traditional male behavior which has a lot to do with anger lots of times. And I think if I came to any conclusion at all it's that women sometimes when they have pain tend to implode, go inward and Dolores grows to kind of gargantuan size as a result of some of the trauma she has. Whereas men I think, and I guess it's probably more socialized than anything else, maybe also partly genetic. But I think that men, whereas women sometimes are implosive, men tend to be explosive. So you punch the guy in the bar stool next to you rather than eating three bags of Lay's potato chips. I have a question that may be irrelevant but at one point Thomas says that he started hearing things through the fillings in his teeth after he went to the dentist and that's how he was hearing his voice and I've heard that from a lot of schizophrenics. Have you got any notions about that when you were doing research on this? Was there any? No, but not specifically about fillings. But I tell you, when I started learning and talking to people about schizophrenia there was a doctor at the Norwich Connecticut State Hospital that I buttonholed and was very early into the writing. And he was the first person who said, I said, you know, I've got this character and he's acting this way and he's saying this and doing that, what would be a diagnosis for him? And he says, sounds like paranoid schizophrenia. He says, not true schizophrenia, that's those are the terms he was using. And I said, well, what's the difference? And he said, well, the true schizophrenic is so his world, his life, his voices, everything is so random that he sort of lives in a state of chaos when he's not medicated. But the paranoid schizophrenic will try to impose some kind of order over the chaos. And so the fantasies have to do with, you know, Martians or, you know, the Iraqis have, you know, put the fillings in the teeth and that kind of stuff. In other words, if I'm feeling this threatened there must be a reason for it. And when he said that, that struck me as such a sad and noble thing to try to do, you know, to take, you know, the effect of this terrible disease and try to make sense out of it. Even in this kind of, you know, this far out exaggerated way. Yeah, there was something that struck me as I was reading the book where Dr. Patel is talking to Dominic about grandiosity. Yeah. And that that was, that that's kind of a theme that Thomas is obviously grandiose, the whole world is out to get him and he's gonna be on the cover of Time Magazine. He can stop the Persian Gulf War from happening. Bike chopping off his hand. And Dominico Tempesta, he's the great man. Is that something that's very male, this grandiosity or is just something that's just a theme that's or very human or do you all do that? I don't know, I don't think I can really speak for all men on that, but certainly those characters, they had that in common. And again, it's that theme of humility. That, you know, that you have to stop believing that you are God and stop playing God. You know, one of the major themes in this novel and one of the things that Dominic has to learn how to do is to forgive and also to ask forgiveness. And in order to ask forgiveness of somebody, you've got to humble yourself. And if you withhold forgiveness from people, from someone, you are in a sense playing God and saying, no, I am not, you know, you do not deserve this and so I will not forgive you. And I don't think that's appropriate. Interesting. Why don't we just open this up? I'm sure you guys have a zillion questions. So who would like to ask something? And Daphne will bring you the microphone, okay? And then the next person raise your hands so that Daphne will see you. First of all, thank you for your fine work. Oh, thank you. I saw an interview with you. Couldn't have been more than a week ago. I think it was C-Span. It was book notes. Do you recall doing that? Yes, yeah. I caught the tail end and by the tail end, I mean, your last sentence, which I'm gonna ask you to elaborate on, your last sentence was, your advice was to write the story and let the story find its own audience. Do you recall saying it? Yeah. Thank you. Well, again, I have to reference Gladys Swan, my mentor from years back, because when I started writing, I was about 30 years old when I began trying to write fiction. And very shortly into that, I came to the end of what I knew about how to write fiction. And so I entered this MFA program and as a high school teacher and who had worked with some books that really succeeded with kids. I started working with Gladys and I said, well, my intent is to try to write a story that means as much to young people as to kill a mockingbird has meant to my students. That's one of the novels that students year after year really loved or came to love as they got into the story. And Gladys said, well, my dear, you need to chase out any thoughts of audience because she said, you need to write it true to yourself, true to your own vision, your own voice. And if you do that, the audience that's meant to hear it or read it will do so. But you need not to think about them, chase them out of the room and write it for yourself. Now, I have a vivid imagination, but I never could have imagined something like the Oprah Book Club and how a television show of all things could be the messenger to get me that offer to the audience. But that, oddly enough, that's what happened. Life is crazy sometimes. But I still follow that advice. I still remind myself of that all the time. When I'm sure when I sit down, right now my third novel is in this form. It's in a shopping bag on the backs of ATM slips and envelope flaps and stuff stuffed in that bag. And I have time this fall, I'm gonna start writing that third novel. And so I have to dump that thing out onto the rug and begin to make those connections between those bits and pieces. But I'm gonna need to remind myself because first book did well, second book did well. And that's kind of intimidating in some ways. And I'm sure I'm gonna be saying to myself, okay, can I write a third book that is meaningful to people? And I have to keep saying, uh-uh, you know, out the door, write it for yourself and whatever audience is meant to find it, we'll find it. Anybody else? Someone raise a hand who, oh, okay. Daphne's coming. One of the things that really impressed me about She's Come Undone was that you're the first author I've ever read, male or female, who's ever been able to write about movingly about eating disorder like compulsory overeating. And I just, she's, I mean, it's usually when the author's write about it, it's something I either, it's either unconvincing, they don't really allow themselves to get into it and write about it. Or I just wince, you know, at it. I can't bear to read it. And you wrote about it very graphically and yet very movingly. And I just wondered how you were able to do that. I think probably partly because I was a fairly fat kid while I was growing up. I was not the size, the proportion of Dolores, but you know, I was chubby enough to be kidded about it sometimes in elementary school and have that really hurt.  I was the entertainer in my classes growing up. But you know, I carry that, carry that with me and have that knowledge. And also, when I was, the year that I was student teaching, just learning, learning the ropes, I worked with a young woman who was obese and she sat in the back of the classroom. She came late every day to class and she had permission for some reason that I can't remember to leave early. And it was one of those, in this classroom there were those desks that sort of, one little desk top swings out from one of the sides and she was too fat to fit into one of those desks. So they had a special table for her set up in the back of the room. Now the students in that classroom were not mean to her. This was, these were seniors in high school but she clearly made them feel very uncomfortable. And so, because she came in late and left early and never said anything in class, she, if you didn't, as long as you didn't turn around you could pretend she didn't exist. You know, she could be invisible to you. And she was complicit in that. Now she had beautiful handwriting that I still remember. And because I was inexperienced and because I had gone into teaching to save kids' lives and to free them from the shackles of oppressive education and all that kind of stuff, I was all over her like a dog. You know, I was gonna save this kid. Speaking of grandiose, you know, I'm with her for 50 minutes, four times a week and I'm gonna turn her around and everything. And of course I didn't. She had her walls, her defenses built up and they stayed up. And so, my first teaching thing was a failure. And I worried about her from time to time. I wondered about her. And when I started, she's come undone. I had that voice, that sort of self-deprecating, funny, sarcastic, snotty voice of Dolores for about two, three weeks. And then all of a sudden one day I thought of that young woman whose name was Sharon sitting in the back of that classroom hadn't worked with her for nine, 10 years. And it was the marriage of that voice that I already had with that image of her sitting in the back of the room at her special desk, special table that sort of jet-propelled the novel in a way. I'm a pretty empathetic person. I can read people pretty well. And one of the things I can read is students' pain. So thank you, thank you very much. But some of that is based also on my own fatness. When you just talked about that student, it reminded me of the guidance counselor character when she was in high school. Oh, Mr. Pucci? Yeah, would you base him on yourself in that book? No. I base Mr. Pucci kind of on my Uncle Bruno, who was a dentist in town and closeted gay man, and was great with kids. He was, my mother was one of 11 children and there were three of her brothers and sisters who never married but were great to all of us kids, my cousins and my sisters and I, and would take us places and so forth. And he was always a really good guy to talk to, kind of meek. And so I was sort of thinking about him when I was writing Mr. Pucci. Do you know that you always wanted to write and write as being a writer and it took you a while to get around to it or did it just kind of come to you that this is what you really needed to do? I had no clue that I would ever, if I could, as my 25 year old self, if I could have looked into this future, I would have been absolutely flabbergasted. And for me, fiction and fatherhood came at the same time. That my oldest son was born on Memorial Day 1981, just turned 18. And my wife Chris and I were up all night in the delivery room, exhausted. I just couldn't believe this, you know, little miracle and so she was gonna try to get some rest and Jared went back into the nursery and I was gonna rush home, take a quick shower, do a couple of errands, make a couple of calls and then get back to the hospital so I could see him again. And it was that very morning that I got my first fictional impulse, the first fictional voice. It was in the shower, in that shower. And I heard a wise guy, high school student who'd just gotten a job as an ice cream truck driver, a Mr. Softy truck driver. And he was just kinda crabbing about his lousy summer job. And I didn't even know it was fiction.  And I forgot about it. My wife and the baby come home. I get pretty good at car seat straps and diaper pins and all that kind of thing. And then later that summer, you know, summer vacation for a teacher, I'm cleaning my desk and I see that piece of paper. And I go, oh, I know what that is. I remember when that happened. And I sat down and I got sucked in whole into the process and I haven't stopped since, but I didn't plan it. But for me, fiction writing and fatherhood have been intertwined because they started at the same time. So I'm curious, I'm an identical twin. And I'm curious, this was one of the few books I've read that captures I think a lot of the issues all twins have. And people ask me a lot what's it like to be a twin. And I came to the conclusion that I just said, you have to be a twin to know what it is. To know what it is. And I'm wondering how you are really able to capture I think just the issues of finding your identity and good twin, bad twin and aligning with different parents. And I was fascinated by that. Thank you. Are you an identical or a fraternal? Identical? Well, I have to say that all my life I've been jealous of twins. I think many of us who are not twins are. Because there, I used to have this fantasy that somewhere in the world was, I was a kid when I had this fantasy, was a little boy who looked exactly like me and one day we would be walking on the street and we would run into each other, right? And what I was looking for because I was the only boy with older sisters in a pretty geriatric neighborhood with not a lot of other kids to play with. What I was really fantasizing about was a soulmate. Somebody who would understand me and be my partner. And so I had that envy all my life. And I've always been interested in students of mine who were twins. And then when I realized, I had these guys as brothers before I realized they were twins. And when I started writing them as twins, then I needed to do my homework. And so I read a lot of pretty fascinating literature. And that's when I understood that in some ways it's really difficult, I think, to be a twin. In some ways it's wonderful and it is a really special arrangement. But there's difficulty there too. And part of that comes from that pull, that push and pull, I think. And also from that survival of the fittest thing. Now one of the books that I read about twins said that there are three basic twin relationships. In one, and I think speaking more of identicals than fraternals, they said in one typical type, the twins are each other's best friends. But they have a real strong sense of themselves as individuals. But they're good companions. And that's the easiest of the identical twin relationship. One of the other types, in one of the other types, the twins are basically competitors. They live their lives quarreling and fighting and competing with one another. Lots of times they end up not speaking and so forth. And then there's a third type of relationship where the identical twin feels like half of something as opposed to an individual whole. And those are the twins that quite often dress alike into adulthood and have a stronger relationship with their twin than they do with their spouse and that kind of thing. And they feel only like half of something. Now, when I wrote Dominic and Thomas, the part of their problem, I think, is that Dominic is always at war with Thomas because he's afraid Thomas is better loved by their mother. So he's always having to play that one upsmanship and Thomas feels like that half of something. He's always clinging to his brother. He's more passive, but passive aggressive in that he doesn't wanna let go of Dominic. And so they're in line some of the conflict of their relationship. If it rings true, you couldn't validate me in a better way. Thank you, thanks. Do we have one more question? Okay, one more question and then. You mentioned that she's come undone. You wrote in longhand that in this much I know is true, you wrote in a computer and then it was a little bit bumpier and I'm wondering why you continued writing on a computer if you found it harder and then if your third one you're gonna actually write in longhand again and kind of go back to the old way of doing it. I'll answer the second part first. I think probably, and who knows how the third one is gonna come out, but I think probably what I'll try to do is incorporate both methods rather than one way or the other. And I can't really answer the first part of your question. It just kept coming that way. I just kept going back to that computer. I think probably part of it is because I don't like to write. I again, I find a character that I need to find out about. But I'm a great one for finding all manner of ways to avoid getting to the apartment where I write. I used to write in the home and in the wake of all the Oprah stuff, the phone wouldn't stop ringing and it became a great excuse for me to get up from the desk and stuff. So in order to solve that problem, finish the second book. I had to, I rented a little apartment, one town over from the town where we live and I drive there and it's a second floor apartment. I have a landlady downstairs, Bunny. And there's no phone there, which is a real asset. And there's no furniture with the exception of a table where the computer is. The room has to be boring and blank so that if anything interesting is gonna go on, it's gonna be on the screen or on the page. I think probably one of the reasons why I use computer is avoidance. If you sit there and forever play with the sentence and flip the clauses around and tamper with this adjective, no change it three or four times, then you don't have to write the second sentence. You can keep revising. And the computer, I work with students and the computer is a godsend as far as encouraging students to revise and they really need to revise as do I. But it's these little games that writers can play with one another or with themselves and that's one of the games that I play. If I'm on the computer, I can keep fixing that paragraph because I'm not sure where the next paragraph is gonna take me. Wally's gonna be available to sign books in the back and if you'd like to buy a book, Stacey's gets, will give the library 10%. So I want to thank you Wally Lam for being here. Thank you so much. What a nice warm audience you've been to chat with. Thanks.


Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is a movie you can learn from. And this is about the movie, actually, TV serial called Jaguar, which is a Spanish TV serial. There are the players. It's a team of five. And there are Nazi hunters in Spain in 1962, looking for some designated Nazis who fled from Germany to Spain after the war. It's a very interesting serial for many, many reasons. George, welcome to the show, George. Why don't you give the environment of this series? What are we talking about here? She said in 1962 in Spain, and this is depicting a unit of former prisoners at the mouse. It was a concentration camp in Austria where the Spanish Republicans who were against Franco had been sent and were tortured and killed at that camp. So these are survivors who have come and they're seeking these former Nazis who have been sent, come to Spain, that are being protected by the Franco government and they're living normal lives. They're even open to who they are. They're not concealed in any way, and they want to take them to be in a court of law, an international court of law, to be brought to justice for what they did in the Third Right. And that's the justice, you've got about five, four men, three were formerly in the concentration camp, and one of them was the son of a person who was taken and murdered in the concentration camp. And lo and behold, there's this single-agent woman who she saw her father shot in Germany, in the camp.  In the series, he's called Bachmann, but it's actually a takeoff on another German name, on a real character who really did do those things for the SS. Precisely. And she wants to kill him. He's plotting to kill, in some way, poison him or shoot him. And these other four realize that she's doing this and they don't want to kill this guy. They want to take him to court and bring him to justice, which is pretty smart, because if you kill him, that's the end of it. But if you bring him to court... There's one other element there. They want to use him as bait for the Butcher of Malthausen, which is where he worked. His name was Dr. Dest. And it was really his name. This is no change in the name of this character. And they figured that through Bachmann, they will get all of Dr. Dest. Exactly. So they're able to stop her from killing Bachmann. And then they grab her and they tell her, what are you up to? What are you up to? And she says, I want to... She actually saw Bachmann kill her father.   So they can bring them to... They want to bring this Dr. Dest to justice. So the whole six episodes pretty much goes from there. The first two episodes are really, really good. The last two after that took the first three, maybe, the fourth and the fifth, too much gunning, shooting, not really that much but just a lot of minutes of shooting. And then the sixth episode, really profound where she's actually in this lighthouse or something. And she's facing Dr. Heim. Dr. Dest, his name is Arobert Heim.  He really was Dr. Dest at about 1000 or Gussin, you know, which is the subcamp, the mouse housing. And, okay, so he's there. And we have her in that episode with him in this old lighthouse. And she's, he's actually, she's confronting him about what he did. And he's completely not remorseful at all. He says that he was helping science. And then he's trying to get her to go cook. So she does something crazy. So he can release himself. And he talks about her brother, 15 year old brother, that he actually skinned him alive. And the Spaniards held out the longest that her brother was the one who held out the longest being tortured and being skinned alive. And he never broke, right? So this is pretty much near the end. And then they show a good Sarah, who was the leader of this pack, being electrocuted.  I mean, some of the reviewers said he died. But no, at the last moment, they show him moving his hands.  There was supposed to be a season two, but it was decided that too. And even though it was really like dislike in Spain, it was very well watched. Because the United States, people got tired of the episodes petered out until episode six. So there was no season two. So this is how it ends with Sarah, who was the leader of this little group, coming back to life after being electrocuted by Bach.  Maybe you could share some more things that I'm missing. Yeah, I think you got to go into it with a certain great assault. This is a pretty dramatic and violent series. And it didn't get good reviews by the Spanish reviewers. Every character is Spanish, except the Germans. The Germans, the names of the players who played the Germans are all German names. And indeed, they speak German. So the series is in Spanish, translated to English, and in German, translated to English. And I find that interesting. And it was hard to get a handle on why the reviewers in Spain didn't really like it that much. I think it's probably because, there's two things. One is because it was a copy of an American melodramatic, melodramatic series. They really have had enough of that. But the other was that I think, you know, the whole Nazi story in Spain is not known to the Spanish people. It's very interesting how history has hovered it over, like the Red Sea. And I don't think they want to hear about it. And likewise, they don't want to hear about the Holocaust, because it's a certain, you know, thread in the Spanish culture that still lives in the Inquisition in the 15th century. So they don't really care too much about the Nazis and about the prison camps, the death camps, and the Holocaust. But to me, this is really interesting because, and the write-ups all say that this is something the Spanish people do not know about, but should know about. Because there were tens of thousands of Spaniards who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939, and Franco won that. And he captured a lot of his adversary Republicans, they call them, and he didn't know what to do with them. So he made a deal with Hitler, who was his friend, to give these prisoners, these Republican Spaniards, to Hitler to be incarcerated, tortured, and killed in prison camps and death camps that Hitler had organized for the Holocaust. And most of them went to Mauthausen.  And they were Catholic Spaniards, they weren't Jewish or anything. I don't think they were Gypsies, they didn't fall in the normal patterns of the Holocaust. They were Franco-Republican, anti-Franco-Republican Spaniards. And it was unknown to the Spanish people, it was unknown to me, I didn't know that. And the movie, the series, shows you this group of people who were all associated one way or the other, personally, others and family, with what were going on in Mauthausen and came back to Nazis. Now that art, according to what I've read, that art isn't true. There were no Nazi-Hunters in Spain in 1962. But there were Nazis in Spain in 1962, which was what, 20 years after the war. And so what you get is a Dr. Drummer with only half the story. The Nazis were there, as you said, they were protected by Franco, and they were given many benefits. Some of them, like Bachmann, as I said, Bachmann, who was his name, Otto Bachmann, is his stage name here. Otto Bachmann made a lot of money to see Franco. Franco connected him to deals. And he made a lot of money there. He was a real person, but not his real name. And so it was a soft landing for the Germans, the Nazis, who had to find a place that was somewhat sympathetic to them. And Spain was sympathetic. Remember that Franco stayed in charge in sort of an autocratic leader of Spain until from 1939, when he won the Civil War. And he was very brutal in the Civil War against his own people against the Spaniards until 1975. That's a long time. From 39 to 75, he ruled. And he was certainly in charge in 1962, when he was giving the Nazis a good time in Madrid.  And for that reason, it is very provocative on a historical level. And for me, I was really interested to find out that this was going on and how brutal the Nazis were in Spain, a sympathetic country to them, and how much trouble it was to try to tie them down. The Doctor of Death, the Arab time, real person, that's his real name. It really was a real badass in that thousand, skating people and torturing them and injecting them with various, you know, noxious chemicals and fluids to see how long they would last. How much pain was it? Well, I kind of a doctor. It's this guy escaped. You know, however in the series ended, the fact is that he escaped. He went to North Africa. Somehow somebody got him out of there. We don't know. And people were supporting the Nazi ex-patriots. They were giving them money. As he wound up in Egypt, changed his name to an Egyptian name. He became a Muslim and disappeared into the woodwork. He may be alive today. And he is definitely a war criminal. So this is really a whole war crime story that was not followed. Nobody did anything about it because they had a soft landing in Spain because they could escape Spain and go elsewhere. And, you know, the American war criminal trials didn't reach them. So that's why the movie was very interesting to me. You know, the bottom line on that is that we knew that there were death camps all over Europe.  And I'm afraid I don't think that Spain did. In the case of Spain, they sent their Republican adversaries to Austria instead. But so we knew that there were a lot of prison camps, death camps. What we didn't know was that this Holocaust and these camps affected lots of other countries, lots of other people. France was involved in in spiriting, you know, the fishy government was involved in spiriting these Spanish prisoners into Austria. So there was a kind of collaboration. They were collaborators in the French use of the term. And so, you know, you have to see Europe during the war as completely right with these camps and with collaborators who helped Hitler move people in and out of these camps and kill people. It was not as simple maybe as the media have told us. It was all over the place and every country somehow was involved. That's why the movie is so interesting. There are some of the scenes, you know, as I was reading each of the last episodes six, there's some really profound scenes. As I was saying, the interaction between Dr. Heim and Elizabeth. There is a lot of other side plots there. It seems that the young kid, Astro, while they were reading, he was leaving, you know, and exposing them potentially, you know, because they could have been under danger, you know, because they were obviously in Franco's vein and, you know, everybody's being watched, you know, with all these soldiers walking around. So there was that subplot. And then also, they show her as a little girl when she was a servant of these Nazis. So she remembered Bachman's scar and she remembered Dr. Heim's scar. But she wasn't really sure because Dr. Heim had grown a beard. If that was really him, this was, of course, 20 years later than the English, right? So then she gets to the point where she shaves, right?  And then she knows it's him.  And as you're sitting, then he got to Egypt, he'll be in real life, right? And she disappeared just like in South America. So many of the southern Nazis disappeared and missed the normal life span, you know, some of them being in luxury, you know, in Spain and South America, which is really sad if you think about it, that after they did such horrible things that they were able to get away. Yeah, it's not only that they could lead normal lives, they could lead normal Nazi lives. They said this restaurant was called Haus, which is a German word, meaning house.  They were out in the open in Spain. They weren't even hiding. And they were capable of doing very bad things to anybody they felt was adverse to them or trying to hunt them. And that was one of the threads in the series. Don't mess with these people because they have impunity.  And they have impunity to use the law enforcement of Franco to assist them. So it was really a bad time in the 60s. I didn't know that. I went to Spain for the first time in 1965. Only a short time after the date this movie, this series is set. I had no clue. And I think most people in Spain had no clue. They wanted to forget the Spanish Civil War. It was a bad time and people, especially Franco, were very brutal. And they didn't like Franco, but they never spoke against him because he was still running things and he was an autocrat. He shows you what happens in a modern-day country where an autocrat is running everything. You can't speak against him. And they don't say anything. We never talk about Franco. That sort of thing. And I was there in 1965. And that's what I saw. That's what they told me, the people I was with. So Spain is a special place. And this sort of takes the covering off it. And you can see it more clearly now through this serial. So I give credit then to come to find that there have been other movies made, George. I don't know if you noticed that, about the same subject, some documentaries about the same subject, about the Spanish Republicans who were taken away to the death camps and a good number of them were killed in death camps. And very resentful and all that. But hey, the Spaniards have been through a very brutal war, especially here at two before, 39. And so they were used, they were hardened by all of that. So it teaches you about Spain and the Spanish character and the Spanish history, which leads you right up to current times. Did you feel that some of the historical inaccuracy, basically that there was no real group like that that could never operate in Franco-Spanish, like the group that just depicting. And then that this doctor death, Dr. Heim, has actually escaped and gone to Egypt and disappeared. When you see the end of these six episodes that I watched, you really don't know that they did that. Because if you don't understand that this is fictitious, you would think that, oh, they'll get him. And they'll get him. But, you know, he was never brought just. Well, there's a lot of material that they didn't extend on and ended short. So many of these schedules are not renewed, right? The investors don't want to renew it. The producers don't want to do it again. But stop short. I can't tell you how many I've seen where it stops just nowhere. There was one not too long ago called Lady Ambassador. I don't know if you saw that where you go through this really interesting experience of an American ambassador in Britain. And it ends with an explosion. That's it. You never find out what happened. And I don't know if it's going to be renewed or not. It's kind of unfair.  And then they stop it short and they don't renew it. And that's what happened here. As I said, they didn't get great reviews. But they were playing on mostly this actress called Bianca Juarez, who played the role of Isabel Garrido. What an interesting character that was. She was tough as nails. She was beautiful. Beautiful woman, yes. But she had this persistent scar on her forehead where the Nazi struck her with his gun. And she was an incredible character and very athletic. I don't know if you noticed, but when she was running away from people down the dark streets of Madrid, she was really running fast. She's an athlete. The actress was an athlete. Come to find that she is one of the most popular stars in Spain. Spain, of course, has a, you know, a robust TV and movie industry which continues to operate despite the screen writers right going on in LA. So we'll see more. We'll see more of European and Spanish movies now and TV serials like this. But she had been in dozens of shows and not that old. dozens of shows. She must be very popular. She's very pretty and she's a good actress and all that. She was the star. The other Luciana, Luciana played by Ivan Marcos. I thought he was excellent playing the role he played. In fact, the whole Hunter team was very excellent. They played roles that you were fascinated to see what they did and how they interacted together. So I don't know about all of the episodes, because although I saw them all originally, I didn't look at all of them again. And maybe they weren't as good as the first few, but the first few really took your attention. I gotta follow this. I gotta see what she does and see how impervious she is and how she engages. And of course, there's a love thing between Bianca Suarez, that is, Isabel Guerrita, and Ivan Marcos, Luciana. But it's just ever so nuanced. It's just the slightest kind of reaction shot with the camera. And you really can't tell that there's any kind of affection there because they're Nazi hunters. They don't fool around. They're willing to give their lives at a moment's notice. So to the extent that he may touch her or throw a glance, it's not enough to make a conclusion that they got something going. So you never actually see that ripened into a relationship. If it was an American series, you had to see romance. There would be romance. But there was no romance here. It was a matter of doing the job, however brutal the job was. Different. And that's another reason I like these European movies and series, because although they copy the American style and this one successfully copied the American style, as far as I'm concerned, it's still different. The way it's produced and directed, the way the actors deal with each other, it's different. And so it gives you a kind of a view into their different culture, which it's like going on a trip, isn't it, George? You know, one of the things I was going to suggest is that if we can do one of the documentaries that's all the historical acts of what happened in Spain, it would sort of be a sequel to this, because as much as the acting was good and everything was good about the film in terms of presentation, we really should get our public here to understand the reality that this was a fantasy that they could not have operated because it was so tight. Yeah, you're right. The reason there was no Nazi hunter organization is that they wouldn't have been found out and killed. That's why, in fact, there was no Nazi hunter organization. It wasn't worth the risk. And that's what happened in Vichy France, all this, the resistance, all of them were actually found out and killed while the Nazi edition government was still out. So yeah, interesting. I think that's a good idea, George, because in my reading anyway, there were a number of, there's been a lot written about this. So I don't think the average Spaniard on the street of Madrid knows about it. Certainly the average American doesn't know about it. I didn't know about it. But there's been plenty written about it and there's been a bunch of documentaries made over it. I'm not sure you're going to find those documentaries on Netflix or Prime or any cable movie channel, but it's worth looking. And it's worth using this Jaguar series as a kind of keyhole into that whole area of European history and trying to find out war. It's another way of looking what the Germans did. Another way of looking at how the Germans ran. It doesn't make you feel good about them. And it doesn't make you feel good about Franco. But we need to know war. This is not what we've been brought up on. This is different. One last thing. The name Jaguar, Lucera, was explaining to Isabel that it was from South America. I think that there were two groups.  But there was a higher level. I got the name that Lucera was saying. They were never touched. So the Jaguars were the ones who put their lives on the line for their nation for the justice. And that's where the title Jaguar is. It's from Native South American Incas or those that move. Who's the other one? Inca and the other Native American tribes in South America. Lion. The lion, I think the lion and the Jaguar. So they were the Jaguars. And they're the ones who put their lives on the line. That's how the title changed. So George, folding all that together, the power of these episodes, the power of the characters, the writing was really good. And the production value is really good. But also considering that the Spanish regiors didn't sink too much for whatever their reasons. And considering that, you know, the story ended short and did not cover what happened to Dr. Dess in Egypt, I suppose. And it was not renewed for whatever their reasons. But also, you know, the whole appeal effect of looking at this series and realizing there's something more we need to know, something more we need to study about the Spanish Civil War, about Franco's relationship with Hitler, about Mao Towson, and about life in Madrid in 1962. You know, considering all of that, what rating would you give this series? You know, the first two episodes were rated by the public really high. You know, I don't know if it's the American public or the Spanish public. So I saw those ratings. Well, you can give a bifurcated rating to it. You could say that the first ones to be rated at distance and the latter ones is that. What do you think? Yeah, the first two, or maybe part of the third, I would give it, nine and a half minutes. The next two, four and five, I would give it maybe seven and a half or eight because I really wasn't happy. A lot of shooting, very little plot. I mean, minute after minute, they're shooting each other with the Nazis.  There's nothing to it. There's no substance to it. And then number six, I would give it a ten. Oh, wow. Because just the scenes between Isabel and Dr. Kahn, which is so profound, you know, and I really touched me, you know, when she was talking and then how he could blatantly lie, you know. Totally lie. He's got to save his own skin, right? So that, I would give that a ten. That last episode is really rude. And it's sort of a crescendo. That's why if they, if that's, if the fourth, four and five had been as good as six, maybe they would have had a second season. But the other thing is, because there was no second season, as you said, there were a lot of strings that are just left there, you know, didn't get anywhere. You know, there's a lot of things that were alluded to in this first few episodes, six seconds, that could have been carried into a second season, never got them. So you just leave them there hanging. Then one thought about that is that just as in the US, the people who put the different episodes together may not be the same. In other words, you could have episode one and two were written and directed by, by one team and then three or four by another team and five by somebody else and so forth. I know, I know that, that happens in US serials. It's disturbing because you have an uneven quality as you go down through there and so you're being heated in a way because, you know, you expect there to be some kind of continuing value from one to two to three to four, but, you know, you don't find that. And the deteriorates, I can't tell you how many serials I've stopped watching because I realized that they weren't maintaining a consistency with the, what grew me in in the first place. But if I take the whole thing and try to apply one rating to it, and mind you, it's really important to me about, you know, the keyhole, looking through the keyhole into history that you didn't know before, I would give everything a nine. I would balance it out at a nine. It's not exactly what you did, but I feel that the, any kind of serial that teaches you something, any kind of movie that teaches you something or to get credit for teaching you that. And this did teach me. So, yes, we will try to find those other documentaries about this period in time in Spain and throughout Europe and see if we can examine it more from a maybe a more documentary part of you. Thank you very much, George, for this discussion. I'm so glad we were able to look at this critically and in detail and against the background of true history and it's very valuable to us to have this experience. Thank you so much. Thank you, Joey. Very interesting, hoping live line to some things I really didn't understand. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.


theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Welcome back to Spain, everybody. We're here at the FIERA live at MWC23. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage. This is day two. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin is also in the house. John Furrier, out of our Palo Alto studio, covering all the news. Check out siliconangle.com. Okay, we're going to dig into the core infrastructure here. We're going to talk a little bit about servers. Mania Rustogi is here. She's in technical marketing at Dell Technologies. And Abdel Begegni is technical program manager at the Telecom Infra project. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you. Abdel, what is the Telecom Infra project? Explain to our audience. Yeah, so the Telecom Infra project is a U.S.-based non-profit organization, a community that brings together different participants, suppliers, vendors, operators, SIs together, to accelerate the adoption of open-ran and open-interface solutions across the globe. Okay, so that's the mission, is open-ran adoption. And then, when was it formed? Give us the background and some of the milestones so far. So the Telecom Infra project was established five years ago from different vendor leaders and operators across the globe. And then, the mission was to bring different players to work together to accelerate the adoption of open-ran. Now, open-ran has a lot of potential and opportunities, but at the same time, there's challenges that we work together as a community to facilitate those challenges and overcome those barriers. And we've been covering all week just the disaggregation of the network. And we've seen this movie sort of before, playing out now in Telecom. And Manya, this is obviously a compute-intensive environment. We were at the Dell booth earlier this morning, poking around, beautiful booth, lots of servers. Tell us what your angle is here in this marketplace. Yeah, so I would just like to say that Dell is kind of leading or accelerating the innovation at the Telecom Edge with all these ruggedized servers that we are offering. So, just continuing the mission, like Abdul just mentioned for the open-ran, that's where a lot of focus will be from these servers will be. So XR8000, it's going to be one of the star servers for Telecom with offering various workloads. So it can be V-ran, open-ran, multi-axis edge compute. And it has all these different features with itself. And if we can talk more about the performance gains, how it is based on the Intel CPUs, and just try to solve the purpose, like along with various vendors, the whole ecosystem, solve this challenge for the open-ran. So Manya mentioned some of those infrastructure parts. Does, and do you say TIP or TIP for short? We say TIP, TIP is fine as well. Does TIP or TIP have a certification process or a set of guidelines that someone like Dell would either adhere to or follow to be sort of TIP certified? What does that look like? Yeah, of course. So what TIP does is TIP accredits what solutions that actually work in a real commercial-grade environment. So what we do is we bring the different players together to come up with the most efficient, optimized solution. And then it goes through a process that the community sets the criteria for and accepts. And then once this is accredited, it goes into TIP exchange for other operators and the participants and the industry to adopt. So it's a well-structured process and it's everything about how we orchestrate the industry to come together and set those requirements and guidelines. Everything starts with a use case from the beginning. It's based on operators' requirements, use cases, and then those use cases will be translated into a solution that the industry will approve. So when you say operator, I could think of that sort of traditionally as the customer side of things versus the vendor side of things. Typically when organizations get together like TIP, the operator customer side is seeking a couple of things. They want perfect substitutes in all categories so that they could grind vendors down from a price perspective. But they also want amazing innovation. How do you deliver both? Yeah, I mean that's an excellent question. We be pragmatic and we bring all players in one table to discuss. MNOs want this, vendors can provide a certain level and we bring them together and they discuss and come up with something that can be deployed today and future proof for the future. So I've been an enterprise technology observer for a long time and I saw the attempt to take network function virtualization which never really made much of an impact. But it was the beginning of the enterprise players really getting into this market. And then I would see companies, whether it was Dell or HPE or Cisco, they take an x86 server, put a cool name on it, edge something and throw it over the fence and that didn't work so well. Now it's like, Mania, we're starting to get serious. You're building relationships. I mentioned we were at the Dell booth. You're actually building purpose, built systems now for this segment. Tell us what's different about this market and the products that you're developing for this market than say the commercial enterprise. So you're absolutely right. Like you know, kind of thinking about the journey there has been a lot of, it has been going for a long time for all these improvements and towards going more open, disaggregated and overall that kind of environment. And what Dell brings together with our various partners particularly if you talk about Intel. So these servers are powered by the latest 4GEN Intel Xeon processors. And so what Intel is doing right now is providing us with great accelerators like Vran Boost. So it increases performance, like doubles what it was able to do before. And power efficiency, it has been an issue for a long, long time and it still continues but there is some improvement. For example, 20% reduction overall with the power saving. So that's a step forward in that direction. And then we have done some of our own testing as well with these servers and continuing that it's not just telecom but also going towards edge or inferencing. Like all these comes together, not just XR8000 but for example XR5610, 7620. So these are three servers which combines together to form telecom and edge and covers all together. So that's where it is. Great, thank you. So I mean I think generally people agree that in the fullness of time all radio access networks are going to be open. It's just a matter of okay, how do we get there? How do we make sure that it has the same quality of service characteristics? So where are we on that journey from your perspective and maybe you could project what it's going to look like over this decade because it's going to take years. It's going to take a bit of time to mature and be a kind of a plug and play different units together. I think there was a bit of over promising in the last few years on the acceleration of open run deployment that what a tip is trying to do is trying to realize the pragmatic approach of the open run deployment. Now we know the innovation cannot happen when you have a kind of closed interfaces. When you allow small players to be within the market and bring the value to the run areas, this is where the innovation happens. I think what would happen on the run side of things is that it would be driven by use cases and the operators. And the minute that the operators are no longer can depend on the closed interface vendors because there's use cases that fulfill, that are requires some open run functionality be the RIC or the SMO layers and the different configurations of the R use, getting the servers to the do you side of things. This kind of modular scalability on this layer is when the open run would boost. And this would happen probably, yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, it would happen in the next few years, not next year or the year after, but definitely something within four to five years from now. I mean it does feel like it's a second half of the decade and you feel like the ran intelligent controller is going to be a catalyst to actually sort of force the world into this open environment. Let's say that the RIC and the promises that were given to the SON 10 years ago, the RIC is realizing it and the closed run vendors are developing a lot on the RIC side more than the other parts of the open run. So it will be a catalyst that would drive the innovation of open run, but only time will tell. And there are some naysayers. I mean I've seen some, you know, very few, but I've seen some works that, oh, the economics aren't there, it'll never get there. What do you say to that, that it won't ever, open run won't ever be as cost effective as closed networks? Open run will open innovations. That small players would have the opportunity to contribute to the run space. This opportunity is not given to small players today. Open run provides this kind of opportunity and giving that it's a path for innovation, then I would say that, you know, different perspectives. Some people are making sure that, you know, the status quo is the way forward, but it would certainly put barriers on innovation and this is not the way forward. Yeah, you can't protect the past and the future. My own personal opinion is that it doesn't have to be comparable from a TCO perspective. It could be close enough. It's the same thing with, like you watch the adoption of cloud. Like cloud was more expensive. It was always more expensive to rent, but people seem to be doing public cloud, because of the innovation capabilities and the developer capabilities. Is that a fair analogy in this space, do you think? I mean, this is what all technologies happens, right? It starts with a quite costly and then the cost will start dropping down. I mean, the cost of a megabyte two decades ago is probably higher than what it costs you with a terabyte. So this is how technology evolves. It's any kind of comparison, either copper or even the old generation, the legacy generations, could be a valid comparison. However, they need to be at a market demand for something like that. And I think the use cases today with what the industry is looking for have that kind of opportunity to pull this kind of demand. But again, it needs to go work close by what happens in the technology space, be it, you know, we always talk about when we used to talk about 5G, there was a lot of hypes going on there. But I think once it realizes in a pragmatic, in a real life situation, the minutes that governments decide to go for autonomous vehicles, then you would have limitations on the current closed-run infrastructures and you would definitely need something to top it up. I mean, 5G needs open-ran. I mean, that's not going to happen without it. Yeah, but what would you say the most significant friction is between here and the open-ran nirvana? What are the real hurdles that need to be overcome? There's obviously just the, I don't want to change, we've been doing this the same way forever. But what are the real, the legitimate concerns that people have when we start talking about open-ran? So I think from a technology perspective, it will be solved. All of the, I mean, there's smart engineers in the world today that will fix these kind of problems and all of the interoperability issues and all of that. I think it's about the mindset. The interfaces between the legacy core and the run has become more fluid today. We don't have that kind of a hard line between these kind of different aspects. We have the mech coming closer to the run. We have the run coming closer to the core and we have the service-based architectures in the core. So these kind of things make, it needs a paradigm shift between how operators would need to tackle the open-ran space. Are there specific deployment requirements for open-ran that you can speak to from your perspective? For sure. And going in this direction, like, you know, evolution with the technology and how different players are coming together. Like, that's something I wanted to comment from the previous question. And that's where like, you know, these servers that Dell is offering right now, specific functionality requirements, for example, it's a small server. It's short depth, just 430 millimeters of depth and it can fit anywhere. So things like small form factor, it's crucial because if you, it can replace like multiple servers 10 years ago with just one server. And you can place it like near a baseband unit or to a cell side on top of a roof, wherever like, you know, if it's a small company and you need this kind of 5G connection, it kind of solves that challenge with this server. And then there are various things like, you know, increasing thermals, for example, temperatures. It is classified like, you know, a kind of compliant with the negative 555 degree Celsius. And then we are also moving towards, for example, negative 20 to 65 degree Celsius, which is kind of great because in situations where, which are out of our hands and you need specific thermals for those situations, that's where it can solve that problem. Are those statistics, in those measurements, different than the old Neb standards, network equipment building standards, or are they in line with that? It is a next step. Like, so most of our servers that we have right now are negative 55 degree Celsius for especially the extremely rugged server series. And this one, XR8000, which is focused for the, it's telecom inspired, so it's focused on those customers. So we are trying to come up, like, go a step ahead and also, like, offering this additional temperatures testing and, yeah, compliance. So it is. Awesome, so, I said we were at the booth earlier today, it looks like some good traffic, people poking around, the different, you know, innovations you got going, some of the private network stuff is kind of cool. I'm like, how much does that cost? I think I might like one of those, you know. Private 5G home network. Yeah, why not? Guys, great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for sharing. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Okay, for Dave Nicholson and Lisa Martin, this is Dave Vellante, the Cube's coverage of MWC23 Live from DeFita in Barcelona. We'll be right back.