Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 16
April 26, 2023
WHAT I WATCHED IN 2022 - HORROR FREE EDITION
Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken. -- Duke Leto Atreides
Every year I keep an accounting not only of what I read, but what I watched -- the new stuff, anyway. I do this not because I suffer from glazomania, but rather as a goad to make sure that I continue to expand my horizons. As I have stated here before, one surefire way of battling anxiety is to engage in repetitious behavior where the outcome is known. Thus, just as I reread books, I rewatch movies and television shows. The downside of this technique is that one becomes a bit of a ghost while still alive, endlessly repeating old experiences without accumulating the new ones necessary for growth. And so I make a list of everything I have seen which I have never seen before, and make sure that list is of sufficient length to prove to myself that I am, in fact, still among the living.
In 2022 I did a better-than-usual job of seeking out new entertainments, the caveat being that thirty of the films I watched were horror movies consumed during October. Since I have already shared most of those films and my take on them here, I won't do so again, and have also eliminated some very genre-specific stuff such as very old episodes of "Doctor Who."
That having been said, let's examine my weird and eclectic tastes:
Trapped (1949) - This is an excellent detective thriller with strongly Noirish elements starring Lloyd Bridges as a counterfeiter who escapes Secret Service custody and proceeds to raise hell while trying to put together One Last Deal. The dialog in this film is delivered with the rapid-fire assurance of a machine gun, the pace never lags, and the climax is sufficiently violent to satisfy any fan of the genre.
The Lady Confesses (1945) -- This is a Film Noir flick which is so predictable and by the numbers I nearly switched it off until a completely unexpected twist changed the entire direction of the movie. I confess to being completely unready for the course this movie took about halfway through, though sharper wits may not be as surprised.
The Winter War (Extended Edition, 1989) -- Thanks to Vladimir Putin, this "director's cut" of a Finnish war movie about Stalin's brutal invasion of Finland in 1940 is now timelier than ever. It follows a group of Finnish men called up into the army to oppose the Soviet attack, and the horrors they endure as they are streadily ground down by the Red hordes. It's a lively, extremely brutal depiction of war, but curiously removed from its protagonists. It's the story of an event, and a very unpleasant one at that.
Exorcist III: Legion (1990) -- I forgot to mention I rewatched this last year during my October-fest. I hadn't seen it since its original theater release, and had forgotten a great deal of it, largely with good reason. Though almost carried by George C. Scott's memorable performance as a crusty, spiritually bankrupt cop forced to come to terms with the supernatural, and an even more memorable turn by Brad Dourif as a serial killer possessed by the devil, the movie is ultimately a mere jumble of scenes (some quite effective, I grant you) that borders on the incoherent and never really comes together. A classic example of a film destroyed by reshoots ordered by the studio brass. I am somewhat sentimental about it because I practically grew up in Georgetown, where the movie is set: my high school crew team used to run the infamous "Exorcist steps" as part of their daily workout.
I, Claudius (1976) -- A Who's Who of British actors who would later become famous, the miniseries follows the improbable rise of Claudius, a shy little bookworm with a terrible stutter and a limp who probably suffered from cerebral palsy, to the throne of the Roman Empire. The only knock on this dusty masterpiece is that all the intrigue, perversion, betrayal, power-lust and casual cruelty become wearisome after a time, though Claudius' relentless innocence in the face of all this guile is therefore all the more charming. A young Patrick Stewart excels as the horribly sadistic plotter Sejanus: John Hurt is similarly terrifying as the mad Caligula.
For the Rights of Mankind (1934) -- this piece of Nazi-era cinema is a look at the brief but savage German civil war which followed their defeat in the First World War. Directed by arch-Nazi Hans Zöberlein, and scathing in its anti-communism, it is nonetheless an entertaining and well-made film, meant to glorify the "Free Corps" who crushed the Communist uprisings of 1919. Like most German movies of the Weimar/Nazi era, it has a fractured narrative, so the characters do not stand out, but it is subtler in its political approach than one would expect from a man like Zöberlein. Nazi cinema is by and large a very good place to study the intersection between propaganda and pop culture.
Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) -- OK, I have seen this movie before, but so many years ago I'd forgotten most of it. This is a lavish, beautiful, operatic, tragic depiction of the downfall of the Romanov Dynasty, which walks the tightrope between sympathy and disgust at the naivete, haplesses and incompetence which ultimately doomed the last of the Russian Tsars. In the end it is a romance between Nicholas II and his bride Alexandra, who loved each other so much they destroyed one another. (Tom Baker excels as the legendary degenerate Rasputin: this performance got him the role as Doctor Who #4 in 1974.)
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). I'd never heard of this movie, and I can't understand why. Despite its central flaw -- extremely unlikeable characters all around -- this is a very memorable story about the infamous charge made by British cavalry against the Russians at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. A scathing, black-comic take on life in the brutally class-ridden British army, it depicts rotten-hearted officers obsessed with personal honor and glory who treat their men worse than livestock when they aren't balling each others' wives. There's nobody to like in the movie, but this is the cruelly treated, ill-paid mercenary army of 19th century Great Britain as it undoubtedly was, full of drunkenness, adultery, and venereal disease. Forget romanticizing the past, this is deromanticizing it.
In Battle With the Enemies of the World (1939) -- A Nazi propaganda film depicting the activities of the Legion Condor during the Spanish Civil War, this is more of historical and technical interest than it is actually entertaining. The Legion Condor was a military force of Germans sent by Hitler to fight for Franco's Nationalists, and returned in triumph to Germany following Franco's victory in 1939. Proflific Nazi director Karl Ritter put together this noisy, technically innovative, not terribly resonant piece of cheerleading for Hitler, and it's worth watching for its historical interest.
Ukraine In Flames (1944) -- Flipping the propaganda coin, UKRAINE IN FLAMES is a wartime Soviet documentary about Nazi crimes in Ukraine during Hitler's occupation of same. It is a graphic, unsettling, sometimes disgusting depiction of the aftereffects of war, looting, deliberate starvation, scorched-earth policies and casual killing. Wrecked towns, rotting corpses, dead horses harvested for their meat, sobbing mothers holding starvation-bloated babies crawling with flies -- the whole horror of Nazism in practice is laid bare. The film seethes with hatred for the "Hiterlites" but lays out a surprisingly disciplined case against them, mostly letting the horror speak for itself. There is, of course, a strong tinge of irony in watching this movie now, given what the Russians, inheritors of Stalin's mantle, are doing to Ukraine even as I write these words.
Perry Mason: Seasons 6 & 7 (1961 - 1962) -- I have been slowly working my way through all 271 episodes of this legendary lawyer show over the past three or four years now, and enjoying every moment thoroughly. Probably the best legal show ever made, it was never better than during its sixth season, featuring innovative stories, strong performances, crackling courtroom confrontations, and liberal doses of wink-wink humor. The rigid formula of the show never got in the way of a good time, and the depiction of late 50s-early-mid-60s L.A., with its huge steel-chassied convertibles, its women in furs and pearls, its Martini and cigarette culture, is worth the price of admission by itself. (Living in L.A. for many years, I saw glimpses of this extinct world here and there in old buildings and old cars, but here it comes alive in all its romantic, slightly tawdry beauty.)
Simon and Simon: Season 8 (1988) -- I truly loved SIMON & SIMON when I was growing up, and I'm happy to say that 30+ years have neither dated the show out of watchability nor lessened the joy of watching Gerald McRaney (Rick) and Jameson Parker (A.J.) play brothers running a private detective agency in San Diego in the 1980s. Despite living in the shadow of MAGNUM, P.I., this spirited, often hilarious show was never stunted in its growth, and while the plots were often fairly pedestrian in nature, the chemistry between the actors and the often brilliant dialog never failed to elevate the material. Season 8 was the finale, and I'm happy to say the formula was working just as well if not better in these final episodes as it was in the first season.
The Last Full Measure (2019) -- This movie was so well-reviewed on Amazon that I had to see it for myself. The result, however, is highly underwhelming, flat and predictable. The story of a selfish modern-day Pentagon flunky tasked with investigating whether a Vietnam soldier killed in battle should receive a posthumous Medal of Honor, it is a well-crafted movie which holds one's interest, but fails to resonate, mainly because the arc of the protagonist is so badly telegraphed. The best part, by far, is a brief appearance by Samuel Jackson, who underplays himself deliberately to produce a memorable effect.
The Gauntlet (1977) - This is a dumb, plot-hole-ridden mess of a Clint Eastwood movie which nevertheless manages to be modestly entertaining and surprisingly memorable. Eastwood plays a drunken, broken-down cop charged with escorting a prostitute back from Vegas to Phoenix for a Mafia trial. On the way, every manner of assassin shows up, leading to one of the more improbable if visually arresting finales I can recall, where Eastwood plows an armored bus through hailstorms of police gunfire to get to City Hall. It's a brutal, silly, extremely vulgar film, but there is a memorably evil performance by a misogynistic deputy (Ron Chapman) and a hilarious, profane rant by Sandra Locke in which she puts Eastwood firmly in his place.
Obi-Wan Kenobi (6 episodes, 2022) -- As much as I abominate live-action Disney Star Wars, I was looking forward to being reunited with Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christiansen, Jimmy Smits, and various others from the prequel series and praying to the Force that Kathleen Kennedy wouldn't fuck this up the way she has everything else. The Force sadly wasn't listening, because this miniseries, despite some promising moments here and there, is a bloated, poorly conceived, poorly written, Wokeist bait-and-switch of the very worst kind. The story, such as it is, revolves almost entirely around Reva, arguably the worst character Star Wars has produced since Rose Tico, and a 10 year-old Princess Leia who is exploited for cute points almost as badly as "The Mandalorian" mines Baby Yoda. Obi-Wan spends the entire series backseating to various "strong female characters," all of whom are smarter and savvier than he is, and the plot is so riddled with holes, inconsistencies, and pointless characters that you could cut this by 2/3 and actually improve the product. An embarrassment that should never have been made, any second season of this lifeless trash should pretend the first one never happened.
Father Dowling Mysteries: The Complete Series (1989-1991) -- There is a place for "family entertainment" in everyone's literal or figurative DVD cabinet, and when I've had a tough day, nothing relaxes me more than to sink into some unchallenging cozy mystery show from the 80s. This short-lived series stars Tom Bosley as a kindly, cuddly priest who solves crimes in Chicago when he ought to be praying. It's predictable, silly, under-funded, and riddled with the tropes and cliches of the era: I still enjoyed it.
Downton Abbey: Series 1 -- I wanted to see what all the fuss was about viz this series, so I watched the first season. It's an entertaining if very soap-opera-ey depiction of a titled British family and their "help," both of whom struggle to find places in the rapidly changing world of the 1910s-1920s. I wasn't blown away, and it already seemed to be running short of ideas come the beginning of the second season, but I get why some people found it addictive: it's a steady look at a largely vanished era full of glamour, hypocrisy, snobbery, duty, tradition and scandal. Kind of like the Royal Family now!
Sundown (1943) -- This is a surprisingly offbeat WW2 movie set in Africa, in which a Canadian colonial official spars with his British military colleagues and a mysterious and beautiful local princess, while battling Axis spies trying to encourage the natives to revolt. A surprisingly complex look at the ethics of colonialism in a war supposedly fought for freedom, it's far less heavy-handed than I was expecting, and touches lightly on the hypocrisy of the British "fighting for democracy" while simultaneously ruling over a vast empire held together by economic extortion and brute military force.
Raid 2 (2014) -- The original RAID is something of a legendary martial arts action movie, featuring incredibly brutal, elaborate, and lengthy fight scenes between actors who, in the Indo-Asiatic tradition, actually do their own stunts. The sequel is more of a conventional action picture, drenched in blood and betrayal but lacking in impact. It will hold your interest, and the fight scenes are of course epic, but it won't linger with you. Too much action and violence are in my mind the same as not enough.
The Six Million Dollar Man: Season 5 (1977-1978) -- The ultimate season of this classic, campy superhero series was just as much fun as the ones which preceded it, the main difference being that Lee Majors did more of his own stunts this time around. Some of the plots are past absurdity even for a 70s kids show about an ex-astronaut with robotic body parts, but in this cynical age, it's fun to see an unconflicted, old-style hero in action. No politics, no preaching, just good guys fighting and ultimately beating bad guys without anyone ever getting killed.
Brideshead Revisited (1981) -- A dissolute, depressed English lord and his social-climbing middle-class friend, who exist in perpetual homoerotic tension with each other, fumble through life in Jazz Age England as the shadow of WW2 begins to fall. Sound dull? It often is, but it's also a strangely compelling look at the last gasp of the old British aristocracy as seen through a man who benefits from the association, but isn't blind, and in fact shares, all of its faults. Rife with suppressed sexuality of every kind, and full of characters who are absolutely useless to society and subconsciously aware of it, it's also a story of the search for sincere faith amid well-mannered, white-tie-and-tails depravity. Jeremy Irons is brilliant as Charles Ryder, who allows himself to be seduced by a wealth that isn't his, and pays a curiously terrible emotional price.
The Octopus: Series 5 & 6 (1990 - 1991) -- This longrunning 80s-00s Italian series was a ruthless, fictionalized expose of the Mafia's domination of Italian and Sicilian politics, and ruffled so many feathers that the government actually stepped in following the sixth season to prevent any further embarrassment. Season 5 - 6 follow the new hero cop, Davide, and his love interest, the scrappy prosecutor Silvia, as they battle the Mafia with the usual mixed success at the cost of heavy casualties. Relentlessly violent and full of twists, turns and betrayals, "The Octopus" is always entertaining, and features one of the most complex and fascinating villains I've ever seen: criminal mastermind Tano Carridi, portrayed by Remo Girone: a solitary, misanthropic crook who is at once chillingly amoral and deeply pathetic.
Streets of Fire -- This 1984 Walter Hill film, a "rock 'n roll fable," died a quick death at the box office, but has rightfully won cult status. Set in an alternate, Noirish, 50s-style reality, it's the story of a rugged loner-mercenary (Michael Pare') hired to rescue his former flame, a rock singer, from the clutches of an evil biker gang leader (Willem Defoe). Just sheer fun from beginning to end, the best performance in this music-laden rock opera is actually Rick Moranis as a nerdy, obnoxious, but absolutely fearless band tour manager determined to get his "property" back. This movie is way ahead of its time in terms of imagination and casting, and employs a Who's Who of "familiar face" actors, including a young Bill Paxton.
Tales of the Jedi (2022) -- "The Clone Wars," being mostly free of Disney's slimy clutches, were some of the best Star Wars to come out in God knows how long. "Tales of the Jedi" is a series of stand-alone episodes that fills in certain still-lingering blanks, such as how Count Dooku fell to the dark side and what happened to Ashoka Tano after she left the series. Very enjoyable if you're already a fan of the prequels/Clone Wars universe. It continues to fill in gaps in the fascinating but not always well-told story of the downfall of the Republic and the Jedi.
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) - This is the latest cinematic adaptation of Remarque's antiwar classic. A purely visual exercise, it abandons the novel's detailed character studies of the soldiers in favor of using its hero as a mere eyewitness to the pointless massacre that was WW1. Visually stunning, well-edited and extremely graphic, it nonetheless lacks the humanity of the 1979 version starring Richard Thomas. With the exception of Kat (Albert Schuch in a fine performance), there are no real characters in the movie, just bodies waiting to be destroyed. I get the point, but it hits harder when you know who they are and care about them.
Andor: Season 1 (12 episodes, 2022). "The best Star Wars since Empire Strikes Back" ? No. Like "Rogue One," the movie from which it devolves, "Andor" is dreary, slow and has too many unmemorable characters. Even Andor himself is just sort of there, an emotionless plot device without charisma or a quest we really care about. That's the bad news. The good news is that when it finally finds its groove, it's extremely well-done and even riveting. "Star Wars" really has nothing to offer us at this point but immersive visitations into the already-established lore, and "Andor" is quite good at depicting life under the Empire -- a slow slide into corruption and oppression.
Soviet Victory in Ukraine : A gory propaganda movie released in 1945, this documentary gloats over the Soviet Union's successful campaign to drive the Nazis from the soil of the Ukraine in the summer of 1944. It's graphic in its depiction of dead men, burned villages, wrecked locomotives, abandoned tanks, and even features a lingering shot of a severed German head laying in a road. If you want a one-sided, historically flawed, but nonetheless vivid depiction of how violent and destructive the Eastern Front was during WW2, this is it. But it's not a fun watch, and lacks the humanity that drove "Ukraine in Flames."
Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Season 1 (16 episodes) "The Bad Batch" was a spinoff of "The Clone Wars" and after a stumbling beginning, became a highly entertaining continuation of that series. Set immediately after the end of the Wars, with the Jedi exterminated and the Republic fallen, it depicts a small band of "defective" clone troopers on the run from the newly-established Empire, and explains how the first years of Imperial rule changed the face, and the history, of the galaxy. Lucas & Co. built a huge world with the prequel series, but only gave us a glimpse of it: "Bad Batch" continues the deeper exploration "Clone Wars" began. Its main weakness is too many filler episodes, but the non-fillers, such as "The Solitary Clone" are simply superb.
The Fabelmans (2022): Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical movie about a plucky Jewish kid obsessed with moviemaking has definite impact, thanks to some strong performances, especially by Paul Dano as his saintly but oblivious father. Unfortunately, it's also bloated, sluggish, self-indulgent, and seems unsure of whether it's a comedy with dramatic elements, or a drama with an undertone of comedy. We were promised, in trailers, a laugh-laden movie about a cinematic obsession that ultimately led to cinematic greatness: instead we get a film about the slow death of a marriage with some anti-semitic school bullying thrown in for good measure. The flick hints here and there at some of Spielberg's old magic, but ultimately fails to capture it.
And that about wraps up my non-horror watches of 2022. As you can see, it's a fairly eclectic mess, almost bereft of modern cinema: and I'm enormously behind on contemporary TV series that don't involve wookies or lightsabers, too, but I suppose I'll get there eventually. Hell, one of these days I may even finish "The Walking Dead."
Every year I keep an accounting not only of what I read, but what I watched -- the new stuff, anyway. I do this not because I suffer from glazomania, but rather as a goad to make sure that I continue to expand my horizons. As I have stated here before, one surefire way of battling anxiety is to engage in repetitious behavior where the outcome is known. Thus, just as I reread books, I rewatch movies and television shows. The downside of this technique is that one becomes a bit of a ghost while still alive, endlessly repeating old experiences without accumulating the new ones necessary for growth. And so I make a list of everything I have seen which I have never seen before, and make sure that list is of sufficient length to prove to myself that I am, in fact, still among the living.
In 2022 I did a better-than-usual job of seeking out new entertainments, the caveat being that thirty of the films I watched were horror movies consumed during October. Since I have already shared most of those films and my take on them here, I won't do so again, and have also eliminated some very genre-specific stuff such as very old episodes of "Doctor Who."
That having been said, let's examine my weird and eclectic tastes:
Trapped (1949) - This is an excellent detective thriller with strongly Noirish elements starring Lloyd Bridges as a counterfeiter who escapes Secret Service custody and proceeds to raise hell while trying to put together One Last Deal. The dialog in this film is delivered with the rapid-fire assurance of a machine gun, the pace never lags, and the climax is sufficiently violent to satisfy any fan of the genre.
The Lady Confesses (1945) -- This is a Film Noir flick which is so predictable and by the numbers I nearly switched it off until a completely unexpected twist changed the entire direction of the movie. I confess to being completely unready for the course this movie took about halfway through, though sharper wits may not be as surprised.
The Winter War (Extended Edition, 1989) -- Thanks to Vladimir Putin, this "director's cut" of a Finnish war movie about Stalin's brutal invasion of Finland in 1940 is now timelier than ever. It follows a group of Finnish men called up into the army to oppose the Soviet attack, and the horrors they endure as they are streadily ground down by the Red hordes. It's a lively, extremely brutal depiction of war, but curiously removed from its protagonists. It's the story of an event, and a very unpleasant one at that.
Exorcist III: Legion (1990) -- I forgot to mention I rewatched this last year during my October-fest. I hadn't seen it since its original theater release, and had forgotten a great deal of it, largely with good reason. Though almost carried by George C. Scott's memorable performance as a crusty, spiritually bankrupt cop forced to come to terms with the supernatural, and an even more memorable turn by Brad Dourif as a serial killer possessed by the devil, the movie is ultimately a mere jumble of scenes (some quite effective, I grant you) that borders on the incoherent and never really comes together. A classic example of a film destroyed by reshoots ordered by the studio brass. I am somewhat sentimental about it because I practically grew up in Georgetown, where the movie is set: my high school crew team used to run the infamous "Exorcist steps" as part of their daily workout.
I, Claudius (1976) -- A Who's Who of British actors who would later become famous, the miniseries follows the improbable rise of Claudius, a shy little bookworm with a terrible stutter and a limp who probably suffered from cerebral palsy, to the throne of the Roman Empire. The only knock on this dusty masterpiece is that all the intrigue, perversion, betrayal, power-lust and casual cruelty become wearisome after a time, though Claudius' relentless innocence in the face of all this guile is therefore all the more charming. A young Patrick Stewart excels as the horribly sadistic plotter Sejanus: John Hurt is similarly terrifying as the mad Caligula.
For the Rights of Mankind (1934) -- this piece of Nazi-era cinema is a look at the brief but savage German civil war which followed their defeat in the First World War. Directed by arch-Nazi Hans Zöberlein, and scathing in its anti-communism, it is nonetheless an entertaining and well-made film, meant to glorify the "Free Corps" who crushed the Communist uprisings of 1919. Like most German movies of the Weimar/Nazi era, it has a fractured narrative, so the characters do not stand out, but it is subtler in its political approach than one would expect from a man like Zöberlein. Nazi cinema is by and large a very good place to study the intersection between propaganda and pop culture.
Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) -- OK, I have seen this movie before, but so many years ago I'd forgotten most of it. This is a lavish, beautiful, operatic, tragic depiction of the downfall of the Romanov Dynasty, which walks the tightrope between sympathy and disgust at the naivete, haplesses and incompetence which ultimately doomed the last of the Russian Tsars. In the end it is a romance between Nicholas II and his bride Alexandra, who loved each other so much they destroyed one another. (Tom Baker excels as the legendary degenerate Rasputin: this performance got him the role as Doctor Who #4 in 1974.)
The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). I'd never heard of this movie, and I can't understand why. Despite its central flaw -- extremely unlikeable characters all around -- this is a very memorable story about the infamous charge made by British cavalry against the Russians at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. A scathing, black-comic take on life in the brutally class-ridden British army, it depicts rotten-hearted officers obsessed with personal honor and glory who treat their men worse than livestock when they aren't balling each others' wives. There's nobody to like in the movie, but this is the cruelly treated, ill-paid mercenary army of 19th century Great Britain as it undoubtedly was, full of drunkenness, adultery, and venereal disease. Forget romanticizing the past, this is deromanticizing it.
In Battle With the Enemies of the World (1939) -- A Nazi propaganda film depicting the activities of the Legion Condor during the Spanish Civil War, this is more of historical and technical interest than it is actually entertaining. The Legion Condor was a military force of Germans sent by Hitler to fight for Franco's Nationalists, and returned in triumph to Germany following Franco's victory in 1939. Proflific Nazi director Karl Ritter put together this noisy, technically innovative, not terribly resonant piece of cheerleading for Hitler, and it's worth watching for its historical interest.
Ukraine In Flames (1944) -- Flipping the propaganda coin, UKRAINE IN FLAMES is a wartime Soviet documentary about Nazi crimes in Ukraine during Hitler's occupation of same. It is a graphic, unsettling, sometimes disgusting depiction of the aftereffects of war, looting, deliberate starvation, scorched-earth policies and casual killing. Wrecked towns, rotting corpses, dead horses harvested for their meat, sobbing mothers holding starvation-bloated babies crawling with flies -- the whole horror of Nazism in practice is laid bare. The film seethes with hatred for the "Hiterlites" but lays out a surprisingly disciplined case against them, mostly letting the horror speak for itself. There is, of course, a strong tinge of irony in watching this movie now, given what the Russians, inheritors of Stalin's mantle, are doing to Ukraine even as I write these words.
Perry Mason: Seasons 6 & 7 (1961 - 1962) -- I have been slowly working my way through all 271 episodes of this legendary lawyer show over the past three or four years now, and enjoying every moment thoroughly. Probably the best legal show ever made, it was never better than during its sixth season, featuring innovative stories, strong performances, crackling courtroom confrontations, and liberal doses of wink-wink humor. The rigid formula of the show never got in the way of a good time, and the depiction of late 50s-early-mid-60s L.A., with its huge steel-chassied convertibles, its women in furs and pearls, its Martini and cigarette culture, is worth the price of admission by itself. (Living in L.A. for many years, I saw glimpses of this extinct world here and there in old buildings and old cars, but here it comes alive in all its romantic, slightly tawdry beauty.)
Simon and Simon: Season 8 (1988) -- I truly loved SIMON & SIMON when I was growing up, and I'm happy to say that 30+ years have neither dated the show out of watchability nor lessened the joy of watching Gerald McRaney (Rick) and Jameson Parker (A.J.) play brothers running a private detective agency in San Diego in the 1980s. Despite living in the shadow of MAGNUM, P.I., this spirited, often hilarious show was never stunted in its growth, and while the plots were often fairly pedestrian in nature, the chemistry between the actors and the often brilliant dialog never failed to elevate the material. Season 8 was the finale, and I'm happy to say the formula was working just as well if not better in these final episodes as it was in the first season.
The Last Full Measure (2019) -- This movie was so well-reviewed on Amazon that I had to see it for myself. The result, however, is highly underwhelming, flat and predictable. The story of a selfish modern-day Pentagon flunky tasked with investigating whether a Vietnam soldier killed in battle should receive a posthumous Medal of Honor, it is a well-crafted movie which holds one's interest, but fails to resonate, mainly because the arc of the protagonist is so badly telegraphed. The best part, by far, is a brief appearance by Samuel Jackson, who underplays himself deliberately to produce a memorable effect.
The Gauntlet (1977) - This is a dumb, plot-hole-ridden mess of a Clint Eastwood movie which nevertheless manages to be modestly entertaining and surprisingly memorable. Eastwood plays a drunken, broken-down cop charged with escorting a prostitute back from Vegas to Phoenix for a Mafia trial. On the way, every manner of assassin shows up, leading to one of the more improbable if visually arresting finales I can recall, where Eastwood plows an armored bus through hailstorms of police gunfire to get to City Hall. It's a brutal, silly, extremely vulgar film, but there is a memorably evil performance by a misogynistic deputy (Ron Chapman) and a hilarious, profane rant by Sandra Locke in which she puts Eastwood firmly in his place.
Obi-Wan Kenobi (6 episodes, 2022) -- As much as I abominate live-action Disney Star Wars, I was looking forward to being reunited with Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christiansen, Jimmy Smits, and various others from the prequel series and praying to the Force that Kathleen Kennedy wouldn't fuck this up the way she has everything else. The Force sadly wasn't listening, because this miniseries, despite some promising moments here and there, is a bloated, poorly conceived, poorly written, Wokeist bait-and-switch of the very worst kind. The story, such as it is, revolves almost entirely around Reva, arguably the worst character Star Wars has produced since Rose Tico, and a 10 year-old Princess Leia who is exploited for cute points almost as badly as "The Mandalorian" mines Baby Yoda. Obi-Wan spends the entire series backseating to various "strong female characters," all of whom are smarter and savvier than he is, and the plot is so riddled with holes, inconsistencies, and pointless characters that you could cut this by 2/3 and actually improve the product. An embarrassment that should never have been made, any second season of this lifeless trash should pretend the first one never happened.
Father Dowling Mysteries: The Complete Series (1989-1991) -- There is a place for "family entertainment" in everyone's literal or figurative DVD cabinet, and when I've had a tough day, nothing relaxes me more than to sink into some unchallenging cozy mystery show from the 80s. This short-lived series stars Tom Bosley as a kindly, cuddly priest who solves crimes in Chicago when he ought to be praying. It's predictable, silly, under-funded, and riddled with the tropes and cliches of the era: I still enjoyed it.
Downton Abbey: Series 1 -- I wanted to see what all the fuss was about viz this series, so I watched the first season. It's an entertaining if very soap-opera-ey depiction of a titled British family and their "help," both of whom struggle to find places in the rapidly changing world of the 1910s-1920s. I wasn't blown away, and it already seemed to be running short of ideas come the beginning of the second season, but I get why some people found it addictive: it's a steady look at a largely vanished era full of glamour, hypocrisy, snobbery, duty, tradition and scandal. Kind of like the Royal Family now!
Sundown (1943) -- This is a surprisingly offbeat WW2 movie set in Africa, in which a Canadian colonial official spars with his British military colleagues and a mysterious and beautiful local princess, while battling Axis spies trying to encourage the natives to revolt. A surprisingly complex look at the ethics of colonialism in a war supposedly fought for freedom, it's far less heavy-handed than I was expecting, and touches lightly on the hypocrisy of the British "fighting for democracy" while simultaneously ruling over a vast empire held together by economic extortion and brute military force.
Raid 2 (2014) -- The original RAID is something of a legendary martial arts action movie, featuring incredibly brutal, elaborate, and lengthy fight scenes between actors who, in the Indo-Asiatic tradition, actually do their own stunts. The sequel is more of a conventional action picture, drenched in blood and betrayal but lacking in impact. It will hold your interest, and the fight scenes are of course epic, but it won't linger with you. Too much action and violence are in my mind the same as not enough.
The Six Million Dollar Man: Season 5 (1977-1978) -- The ultimate season of this classic, campy superhero series was just as much fun as the ones which preceded it, the main difference being that Lee Majors did more of his own stunts this time around. Some of the plots are past absurdity even for a 70s kids show about an ex-astronaut with robotic body parts, but in this cynical age, it's fun to see an unconflicted, old-style hero in action. No politics, no preaching, just good guys fighting and ultimately beating bad guys without anyone ever getting killed.
Brideshead Revisited (1981) -- A dissolute, depressed English lord and his social-climbing middle-class friend, who exist in perpetual homoerotic tension with each other, fumble through life in Jazz Age England as the shadow of WW2 begins to fall. Sound dull? It often is, but it's also a strangely compelling look at the last gasp of the old British aristocracy as seen through a man who benefits from the association, but isn't blind, and in fact shares, all of its faults. Rife with suppressed sexuality of every kind, and full of characters who are absolutely useless to society and subconsciously aware of it, it's also a story of the search for sincere faith amid well-mannered, white-tie-and-tails depravity. Jeremy Irons is brilliant as Charles Ryder, who allows himself to be seduced by a wealth that isn't his, and pays a curiously terrible emotional price.
The Octopus: Series 5 & 6 (1990 - 1991) -- This longrunning 80s-00s Italian series was a ruthless, fictionalized expose of the Mafia's domination of Italian and Sicilian politics, and ruffled so many feathers that the government actually stepped in following the sixth season to prevent any further embarrassment. Season 5 - 6 follow the new hero cop, Davide, and his love interest, the scrappy prosecutor Silvia, as they battle the Mafia with the usual mixed success at the cost of heavy casualties. Relentlessly violent and full of twists, turns and betrayals, "The Octopus" is always entertaining, and features one of the most complex and fascinating villains I've ever seen: criminal mastermind Tano Carridi, portrayed by Remo Girone: a solitary, misanthropic crook who is at once chillingly amoral and deeply pathetic.
Streets of Fire -- This 1984 Walter Hill film, a "rock 'n roll fable," died a quick death at the box office, but has rightfully won cult status. Set in an alternate, Noirish, 50s-style reality, it's the story of a rugged loner-mercenary (Michael Pare') hired to rescue his former flame, a rock singer, from the clutches of an evil biker gang leader (Willem Defoe). Just sheer fun from beginning to end, the best performance in this music-laden rock opera is actually Rick Moranis as a nerdy, obnoxious, but absolutely fearless band tour manager determined to get his "property" back. This movie is way ahead of its time in terms of imagination and casting, and employs a Who's Who of "familiar face" actors, including a young Bill Paxton.
Tales of the Jedi (2022) -- "The Clone Wars," being mostly free of Disney's slimy clutches, were some of the best Star Wars to come out in God knows how long. "Tales of the Jedi" is a series of stand-alone episodes that fills in certain still-lingering blanks, such as how Count Dooku fell to the dark side and what happened to Ashoka Tano after she left the series. Very enjoyable if you're already a fan of the prequels/Clone Wars universe. It continues to fill in gaps in the fascinating but not always well-told story of the downfall of the Republic and the Jedi.
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) - This is the latest cinematic adaptation of Remarque's antiwar classic. A purely visual exercise, it abandons the novel's detailed character studies of the soldiers in favor of using its hero as a mere eyewitness to the pointless massacre that was WW1. Visually stunning, well-edited and extremely graphic, it nonetheless lacks the humanity of the 1979 version starring Richard Thomas. With the exception of Kat (Albert Schuch in a fine performance), there are no real characters in the movie, just bodies waiting to be destroyed. I get the point, but it hits harder when you know who they are and care about them.
Andor: Season 1 (12 episodes, 2022). "The best Star Wars since Empire Strikes Back" ? No. Like "Rogue One," the movie from which it devolves, "Andor" is dreary, slow and has too many unmemorable characters. Even Andor himself is just sort of there, an emotionless plot device without charisma or a quest we really care about. That's the bad news. The good news is that when it finally finds its groove, it's extremely well-done and even riveting. "Star Wars" really has nothing to offer us at this point but immersive visitations into the already-established lore, and "Andor" is quite good at depicting life under the Empire -- a slow slide into corruption and oppression.
Soviet Victory in Ukraine : A gory propaganda movie released in 1945, this documentary gloats over the Soviet Union's successful campaign to drive the Nazis from the soil of the Ukraine in the summer of 1944. It's graphic in its depiction of dead men, burned villages, wrecked locomotives, abandoned tanks, and even features a lingering shot of a severed German head laying in a road. If you want a one-sided, historically flawed, but nonetheless vivid depiction of how violent and destructive the Eastern Front was during WW2, this is it. But it's not a fun watch, and lacks the humanity that drove "Ukraine in Flames."
Star Wars: The Bad Batch: Season 1 (16 episodes) "The Bad Batch" was a spinoff of "The Clone Wars" and after a stumbling beginning, became a highly entertaining continuation of that series. Set immediately after the end of the Wars, with the Jedi exterminated and the Republic fallen, it depicts a small band of "defective" clone troopers on the run from the newly-established Empire, and explains how the first years of Imperial rule changed the face, and the history, of the galaxy. Lucas & Co. built a huge world with the prequel series, but only gave us a glimpse of it: "Bad Batch" continues the deeper exploration "Clone Wars" began. Its main weakness is too many filler episodes, but the non-fillers, such as "The Solitary Clone" are simply superb.
The Fabelmans (2022): Steven Spielberg's semi-autobiographical movie about a plucky Jewish kid obsessed with moviemaking has definite impact, thanks to some strong performances, especially by Paul Dano as his saintly but oblivious father. Unfortunately, it's also bloated, sluggish, self-indulgent, and seems unsure of whether it's a comedy with dramatic elements, or a drama with an undertone of comedy. We were promised, in trailers, a laugh-laden movie about a cinematic obsession that ultimately led to cinematic greatness: instead we get a film about the slow death of a marriage with some anti-semitic school bullying thrown in for good measure. The flick hints here and there at some of Spielberg's old magic, but ultimately fails to capture it.
And that about wraps up my non-horror watches of 2022. As you can see, it's a fairly eclectic mess, almost bereft of modern cinema: and I'm enormously behind on contemporary TV series that don't involve wookies or lightsabers, too, but I suppose I'll get there eventually. Hell, one of these days I may even finish "The Walking Dead."
April 22, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: RED FLAGS
Today is Saturday, and as promised -- or threatened -- I have returned to discuss personality red flags. Nowadays, everyone is so-well versed in pop-psychobabble terminology that this might seem pointless, but these are red flags which might be less familiar to you: they are things that I have noticed nearly always indicate the bearer is a jerk, a monster, or just a defective personality generally. And this is coming not from a denizen of the psychiatric ivory-tower, but a man who has encountered every type of criminal known to man: murderers, robbers, arsonists, rapists, thieves, wife-beaters, con artists. I grant you that a few of these fall into my own personal pet peeve category, but that does not make the dye in the particular flag any less red.
OVERTALKERS. Chronic overtalking is more than rude and annoying, it is a sign that the person in question is a) uninterested in anyone else's opinon, b) feels a need to dominate and control situations. It is a sign that they care very little for other people and don't respect them. Overtalkers are dangerous because they often bully themselves into positions of authority without being able to lead. What leader can make informed decisions without listening?
PEOPLE WHO WON'T TAKE YES FOR AN ANSWER. This is a person who may seem perfectly normal and sociable, but in reality is simply a contrarian. They will oppose any firm opinion you express, even if they actually hold the same opinion themselves. An example from my own experience would be when an acquaintance at my gym saw my boxing T-shirt and said, “Man, that was a great fight.” I replied, “Best I've ever seen.” He immediately said, “It wasn't that great.” I'd had it with the son of a bitch by this point and replied, “Yes, it was – the best fight I've ever seen and maybe the greatest fight ever.” He looked like I'd shot his dog and never spoke to me again. Contrarianism stems from a deep-seated fear of other people's strong opinions. It is found in people with big but fragile egos who feel insecure in the face of security and want to bully anyone who displays it.
PEOPLE WHO CAN'T LAUGH AT THEMSELVES. The ability to rib yourself, and be ribbed, over the blunders, stupidities, and fooleries that we all commit on a daily basis says a great deal about your ability to see your own life in perspective, and to efface your ego. The inability to do this is a gigantic red flag: I've never met a snob, bully, egomaniac or narcissist who found the slightest humor in themselves, or could make the distinction between being kidded in good fun or being insulted and attacked.
PEOPLE WHO CAN'T READ THE ROOM (OR A FACE). I'm aware some people have conditions that make it impossible for them to read social cues, facial expressions, and tones of voice, and I genuinely do feel sorry for them. However, such people are generally intolerable and having to deal with them regularly is infuriating: more than that, they may be showing signs of something else: narcissistic dickbagery. A person who tries to hold an unrelated conversation with you when you are visibly exhausted, in pain, or upset is – at best – someone who doesn't give a damn about you, your health, your sanity, or your feelings.
MONOMANIACS. “A monomaniac is a person who can't change their mind and won't change the subject.” Anyone who has but one topic of conversation is to be avoided at all costs, for the simple reason they are crashing bores. They are also obnoxious: they will always seek to turn any conversation in the direction of their obsession, and then control the conversation. Such people have no interest in any one else's opinions, thoughts, or feelings, nor can they read the social cues, or act upon them if by chance they can read them. This leads me to....
HIJACKERS. Hijackers are people who are unable to get others to listen to them, usually because they are unpleasant or uncharismatic: so they hijack social occasions planned and organized by others for their own selfish purposes. A person who announces their engagement at their sibling's sweet sixteen party is a hijacker; so too is the person who comes on the social media platform of a much more popular friend or relation and posts something guaranteed to shift conversation from the intended topic to themselves and their agenda. Hijackers are devious, manipulative, selfish people who try to compensate for their weakness through sly action.
PEOPLE WITH NO SELF-AWARENESS. A lack of self-awareness is often considered amusing in company: such people are viewed as entertaining. This tendency is however a sign of deep-seated narcissistic traits. Narcissists, as a rule, lack a sense of shame, so when someone behaves very badly, or says foolish things or lies or boasts outrageously without seeming to be remotely aware that they have done so, the red flag is flying like Old Glory on the Fourth of July. This entertainment you don't need.
PROJECTORS. One of the largest red flags you'll encounter is the person who thinks, because they are suspicious, mean-spirited, loveless, vindictive, petty, jealous, etc., that everyone else is, too. They project their own misanthropy onto everyone else. They do not believe in goodness, love, friendship, altruism, self-sacrifice, etc.: they view such things as con artistry used to disguise the base, selfish motives they themselves harbor and possess. These people also have a nasty tendency to assume that since everyone is going to betray them anyway, they had best strike first.
PEOPLE WHO HEAR WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR. I once took a photo of a woman in front of the Hollywood sign, using her camera. Later, she sent me the image, and I remarked, “Good picture.” A little while later we were talking and she said, “Remember when you said how hot I looked in that picture?” Wishful thinking is one thing. Delusion is another. But some people have brains like prisms, which refract what they actually see and hear into things they want to see and hear, so that they exist in a reality all their own, a fantasy world. You say, “You're pretty crazy,” and they will hear “You're pretty!” These folks are straight-up, stone cold psychos and have to be avoided at all costs.
PEOPLE WHO DON'T LEARN LESSONS. In college, I encountered a girl complaining bitterly that "every time I move into a house, my roomates always seem like cool people at first, but it turns out they're assholes and they all end up hating me." She admitted this had happened at least four times in her collegiate career. When I suggsted she might be the problem, she looked as if I had just sprung a second head. An inability to learn lessons or make conclusions from obvious evidence is generally a sign that the person, in addition to possibly being profoundly stupid, has zero self-awareness and cannot take responsibility for their actions. These types leave a lot of wreckage in their wake.
OVERSHARERS. I was once at a party and met a girl who, within moments of me being introduced, began to dive into the most intimate details of her past without any prompting and without any conversational context. Throughout the course of the evening I overheard her do this at least a half-dozen times to other people, totally heedless of the discomfort these details were causing the complete strangers she was evidently trying to impress. This sort of thing is more than mere social awkwardness: it indicates a deeper inability to understand how human interaction actually works, a tendency toward feeding on pity or attention, and, once again, a complete lack of self-awareness.
PEOPLE WHO HAVE TO WIN AT EVERYTHING. Did you ever have a slight disagreement with someone over some unimportant matter, and days later, get an e-mail from the person you were arguing with, featuring five links to websites proving they were right and you were wrong? Have you ever had someone stop everything they are doing, turn the car around, and pull a book off a shelf, just to show you there are 54 and not 53 countries in Africa? Worse yet, have you ever experienced someone who, having been proven wrong on a very minor point, will continue the argument, even after you have dropped it? These walking red flags are simply bullies of a more complicated variety than the sort that wanted your lunch money in fourth grade. They are the types who, if finally crushed in a dispute, will sulk, brood, give you the silent treatment, and plot petty acts of revenge for months or years, all over nothing. Seeing their self-worth in a perfection they don't possess, they will go to outrageous lengths to be right even when they are wrong.
PEOPLE WHO MAKE SUPERFICIAL JUDGMENTS. I once knew a man who prided himself on sizing up and appraising others on the scantiest possible information. Once arrived at, his opinions were inalterable: nothing people actually did after the fact mattered more than his hasty initial estimation of them. This is actually the essence of bigotry, and indeed, people who make decisive snap judgments about everything, usually with almost nothing to base those judgments upon, are bigots even if their metrics are not based on race, ethnicity or sex. What they see as “decisive” is really just moral and intellectual laziness coupled with the mean-spiritedness all bigots have at the core of their souls.
PEOPLE WHO ARE RUDE TO THE WAITER. A person who is as a rule rude to waiters, clerks, tellers, fast food employees, and service staff generally is a person who is a) a coward (service staffers can't fight back), and, b) a believer in feudal social hierarchies, i.e. that social status and money should determine how human beings should be treated. These are people uninterested in the actual worth of people as people. They may be sweet as pie to you, but you should remember that if you were the waiter, you'd be getting treated very differently indeed.
PEOPLE WHO OWN THINGS THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN TO THEM. From the Holocaust to slavery, it has become very chic for folks to act is they themselves carry post-traumatic stress from historical events which occurred decades, generations, even centuries before they were born. This phenomenon is part of a larger trend toward the fetishization of victimhood everywhere, but it is quite annoying on its own, and usually indicates that the person in question has bought into that trend. This type lacks identity and self-confidence and is covering guilt over their (probably) comfortable middle class existence by channelling long-dead ancestors who actually knew real suffering.
This list is hardly exhaustive, but does include most of the things I regard as more subtle (or less unsubtle) personality warning signs. I do not believe I have ever encountered a person who habitually exhibits one or more of these traits who was tolerable in the long run. Obviously some of my own personality quirks are at play in composing this list, but I never claimed to be quirk-free: merely passable at spotting red flags when they are flapping in my face.
OVERTALKERS. Chronic overtalking is more than rude and annoying, it is a sign that the person in question is a) uninterested in anyone else's opinon, b) feels a need to dominate and control situations. It is a sign that they care very little for other people and don't respect them. Overtalkers are dangerous because they often bully themselves into positions of authority without being able to lead. What leader can make informed decisions without listening?
PEOPLE WHO WON'T TAKE YES FOR AN ANSWER. This is a person who may seem perfectly normal and sociable, but in reality is simply a contrarian. They will oppose any firm opinion you express, even if they actually hold the same opinion themselves. An example from my own experience would be when an acquaintance at my gym saw my boxing T-shirt and said, “Man, that was a great fight.” I replied, “Best I've ever seen.” He immediately said, “It wasn't that great.” I'd had it with the son of a bitch by this point and replied, “Yes, it was – the best fight I've ever seen and maybe the greatest fight ever.” He looked like I'd shot his dog and never spoke to me again. Contrarianism stems from a deep-seated fear of other people's strong opinions. It is found in people with big but fragile egos who feel insecure in the face of security and want to bully anyone who displays it.
PEOPLE WHO CAN'T LAUGH AT THEMSELVES. The ability to rib yourself, and be ribbed, over the blunders, stupidities, and fooleries that we all commit on a daily basis says a great deal about your ability to see your own life in perspective, and to efface your ego. The inability to do this is a gigantic red flag: I've never met a snob, bully, egomaniac or narcissist who found the slightest humor in themselves, or could make the distinction between being kidded in good fun or being insulted and attacked.
PEOPLE WHO CAN'T READ THE ROOM (OR A FACE). I'm aware some people have conditions that make it impossible for them to read social cues, facial expressions, and tones of voice, and I genuinely do feel sorry for them. However, such people are generally intolerable and having to deal with them regularly is infuriating: more than that, they may be showing signs of something else: narcissistic dickbagery. A person who tries to hold an unrelated conversation with you when you are visibly exhausted, in pain, or upset is – at best – someone who doesn't give a damn about you, your health, your sanity, or your feelings.
MONOMANIACS. “A monomaniac is a person who can't change their mind and won't change the subject.” Anyone who has but one topic of conversation is to be avoided at all costs, for the simple reason they are crashing bores. They are also obnoxious: they will always seek to turn any conversation in the direction of their obsession, and then control the conversation. Such people have no interest in any one else's opinions, thoughts, or feelings, nor can they read the social cues, or act upon them if by chance they can read them. This leads me to....
HIJACKERS. Hijackers are people who are unable to get others to listen to them, usually because they are unpleasant or uncharismatic: so they hijack social occasions planned and organized by others for their own selfish purposes. A person who announces their engagement at their sibling's sweet sixteen party is a hijacker; so too is the person who comes on the social media platform of a much more popular friend or relation and posts something guaranteed to shift conversation from the intended topic to themselves and their agenda. Hijackers are devious, manipulative, selfish people who try to compensate for their weakness through sly action.
PEOPLE WITH NO SELF-AWARENESS. A lack of self-awareness is often considered amusing in company: such people are viewed as entertaining. This tendency is however a sign of deep-seated narcissistic traits. Narcissists, as a rule, lack a sense of shame, so when someone behaves very badly, or says foolish things or lies or boasts outrageously without seeming to be remotely aware that they have done so, the red flag is flying like Old Glory on the Fourth of July. This entertainment you don't need.
PROJECTORS. One of the largest red flags you'll encounter is the person who thinks, because they are suspicious, mean-spirited, loveless, vindictive, petty, jealous, etc., that everyone else is, too. They project their own misanthropy onto everyone else. They do not believe in goodness, love, friendship, altruism, self-sacrifice, etc.: they view such things as con artistry used to disguise the base, selfish motives they themselves harbor and possess. These people also have a nasty tendency to assume that since everyone is going to betray them anyway, they had best strike first.
PEOPLE WHO HEAR WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR. I once took a photo of a woman in front of the Hollywood sign, using her camera. Later, she sent me the image, and I remarked, “Good picture.” A little while later we were talking and she said, “Remember when you said how hot I looked in that picture?” Wishful thinking is one thing. Delusion is another. But some people have brains like prisms, which refract what they actually see and hear into things they want to see and hear, so that they exist in a reality all their own, a fantasy world. You say, “You're pretty crazy,” and they will hear “You're pretty!” These folks are straight-up, stone cold psychos and have to be avoided at all costs.
PEOPLE WHO DON'T LEARN LESSONS. In college, I encountered a girl complaining bitterly that "every time I move into a house, my roomates always seem like cool people at first, but it turns out they're assholes and they all end up hating me." She admitted this had happened at least four times in her collegiate career. When I suggsted she might be the problem, she looked as if I had just sprung a second head. An inability to learn lessons or make conclusions from obvious evidence is generally a sign that the person, in addition to possibly being profoundly stupid, has zero self-awareness and cannot take responsibility for their actions. These types leave a lot of wreckage in their wake.
OVERSHARERS. I was once at a party and met a girl who, within moments of me being introduced, began to dive into the most intimate details of her past without any prompting and without any conversational context. Throughout the course of the evening I overheard her do this at least a half-dozen times to other people, totally heedless of the discomfort these details were causing the complete strangers she was evidently trying to impress. This sort of thing is more than mere social awkwardness: it indicates a deeper inability to understand how human interaction actually works, a tendency toward feeding on pity or attention, and, once again, a complete lack of self-awareness.
PEOPLE WHO HAVE TO WIN AT EVERYTHING. Did you ever have a slight disagreement with someone over some unimportant matter, and days later, get an e-mail from the person you were arguing with, featuring five links to websites proving they were right and you were wrong? Have you ever had someone stop everything they are doing, turn the car around, and pull a book off a shelf, just to show you there are 54 and not 53 countries in Africa? Worse yet, have you ever experienced someone who, having been proven wrong on a very minor point, will continue the argument, even after you have dropped it? These walking red flags are simply bullies of a more complicated variety than the sort that wanted your lunch money in fourth grade. They are the types who, if finally crushed in a dispute, will sulk, brood, give you the silent treatment, and plot petty acts of revenge for months or years, all over nothing. Seeing their self-worth in a perfection they don't possess, they will go to outrageous lengths to be right even when they are wrong.
PEOPLE WHO MAKE SUPERFICIAL JUDGMENTS. I once knew a man who prided himself on sizing up and appraising others on the scantiest possible information. Once arrived at, his opinions were inalterable: nothing people actually did after the fact mattered more than his hasty initial estimation of them. This is actually the essence of bigotry, and indeed, people who make decisive snap judgments about everything, usually with almost nothing to base those judgments upon, are bigots even if their metrics are not based on race, ethnicity or sex. What they see as “decisive” is really just moral and intellectual laziness coupled with the mean-spiritedness all bigots have at the core of their souls.
PEOPLE WHO ARE RUDE TO THE WAITER. A person who is as a rule rude to waiters, clerks, tellers, fast food employees, and service staff generally is a person who is a) a coward (service staffers can't fight back), and, b) a believer in feudal social hierarchies, i.e. that social status and money should determine how human beings should be treated. These are people uninterested in the actual worth of people as people. They may be sweet as pie to you, but you should remember that if you were the waiter, you'd be getting treated very differently indeed.
PEOPLE WHO OWN THINGS THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN TO THEM. From the Holocaust to slavery, it has become very chic for folks to act is they themselves carry post-traumatic stress from historical events which occurred decades, generations, even centuries before they were born. This phenomenon is part of a larger trend toward the fetishization of victimhood everywhere, but it is quite annoying on its own, and usually indicates that the person in question has bought into that trend. This type lacks identity and self-confidence and is covering guilt over their (probably) comfortable middle class existence by channelling long-dead ancestors who actually knew real suffering.
This list is hardly exhaustive, but does include most of the things I regard as more subtle (or less unsubtle) personality warning signs. I do not believe I have ever encountered a person who habitually exhibits one or more of these traits who was tolerable in the long run. Obviously some of my own personality quirks are at play in composing this list, but I never claimed to be quirk-free: merely passable at spotting red flags when they are flapping in my face.
April 19, 2023
AS I PLEASE XII: EXHAUSTED EDITION
Tonight I was planning on publishing a blog called "Red Flags." I actually spent some hours pondering how I would compose it as I walked along the Rail Trail yesterday after work, and then again today: I am however too goddamned tired to put it all together. It will have to wait 'til Saturday. However, being as I tired as I am right now, at exactly 9:00 PM, has got me thinking a lot about, well, being tired, and how the experience changes as you grow older.
* As a kid, tiredness is something you fight against. This begins, I believe, in infancy: a tired baby will cry, fuss, flail its tiny limbs, do just about anything but what it wants to do, which is sleep. Later, as a small and finally a large, sub-adult child, I fought against tiredness with a kind of bitter emnity. On weekends this could be well understood, since every conscious hour away from school was nectar to be savored. It made less sense on schoolnights, when there was no real reward and hefty penalty for staying up late: neverthless, I often did just that. This habit continued into high school and through college, and I believe in retrospect that children, and later teenagers, simply resent going to bed. It may be that their energy levels are higher to begin with and thus harder to exhaust, it may be that they are naturally noctural, but by God they do not like going to sleep.
* This is bizarre, because I have seldom encountered a child, teenager, or late college-age student who doesn't excel at sleeping. The sort of sleep one gets say, at the age of 9, or 19 for that matter, is of the very highest quantity and quality, far superior to the sleep people in even early middle age get except on their best nights. This makes the resentment the young feel about going to bed all the more ironic, since when they hit their 30s they will begin to crave deep, restful slumber, but achieve it less often, and less satisfyingly, than they did previously. Hell, by the time I was 25 years old, I was already too exhausted on Fridays to do much more than take my girlfriend to an early dinner, have a drink, and then go home to bed. The last thing I wanted to do was the first thing I'd wanted to on Fridays just a few short years before, which was go out and party.
* Because real adults often have trouble getting to sleep, or staying asleep, or achieving sleep which is truly restful even if the hours clocked are seemingly sufficient, they tend to welcome the very fatigue that they warred against as youths, when the act of being tired was viewed almost as an affliction that had to be overcome. I vividly remember the peer pressure, expressed usually as verbal abuse, which occurred in college when someone (me) used to start fading before the others in his group. Seldom if ever was this individual (me) simply allowed to leave and go to bed. Oh no. They were harrangued, plied with shots or more beer, and generally bullied into several extra hours of consciousness they did not want. And they always gave into this bullying, because deep down, they felt their tired state was a sign of weakness that had to be combatted.
* Starting in the middle-20s, feelings of weariness are, if not actually welcomed, generally accepted by the weary. By my later 20s, instead of raising hell on Fridays, or even just going to the gym, I began to greatly enjoy the ritual of disconnecting my phone, double locking my door, turning down most of the lights and essentially turning my apartment into a diving bell that may as well have been at the bottom of the sea. Pajama-type clothing was donned as soon as I was alone, and the hours between arrival and actual bedtime were essentially spent in a state of pre-sleep, where I spoke to no one, drank comforting hot beverages, and either watched TV or read a book in bed.
* This transition strikes most twentysomethings as somewhat embarrassing. Like baldness or decline in eyesight or sudden weight gain, it was deemed a sign of ageing, and thus something to be ridiculed, denied, fought against. However, since nobody really wants to fight against it -- pajamas are comfortable, hot tea on winter tights is soothing, and a good book or classic TV program provides great comfort after a rough week in the salt mines -- a lot of lies have to be told, a lot of exuses have to be made, to keep up the front that you are still the hellraiser you used to be, until at last you throw away all pretense and tell your friends you just want to fucking go to sleep.
* As we get older and the quality of our rest declines, we finally make note -- years too late -- that, holy shit, there is a connection between how much sleep we have and how well we function the next day at work. An early twentysomething can, as a rule, drink and smoke and screw themselves insensible 'til three in the morning, wake up at seven, slam a cup of coffee, take a cold shower, and still manage to have a prodctive workday: what's more, they can repeat the whole debauchery the next night. A fortysomething who stays up too late, drinks too much and crashes after midnight may as well not come to work the next day. He will barely be able to get out of bed, arrive late to his job, and once there do little but suck down company coffee while staring glassily at his computer, often unable to even remember his password, his extension, or his own middle name. What's more, when he arrives home, he will probably sleep for two hours in front of the television, and then awake even more depressed, confused and exhausted than he was before.
* Pushing through tiredness is also much more difficult as a fellow of fifty than it was when I was, say, thirty. This is because the fabled "second wind," which I first encountered in college and which allowed me to stay up for 24 hours at a crack without the aid of drugs, tends to wave bye-bye at some point and ne'er returns. "Pushing through" is still possible, but goddamn, is it hard: when I was working on Face Off back in 2012 or so, I used to arrive at the studio around three in the afternoon and work until somewhere between three and nine the next morning, almost without a break. At the time I was forty years old, and to do this sort of thing I required all the coffee Krispy Kreme could supply. Nevertheless, the entire next day was a dead loss. I was unable to sleep when I got home, but also unable to function. I did not have the mental powers even to watch television. I just sort of existed, in a mindless stupor.
* As a young-un, I often found exercise would revive my mind and body when I was in a state of physical and mental tiredness. A few miles around the jogging track could work wonders: they were nearly as effective as sleep. As an ancient relic, however, I now find that exercise is harder when tired, and provides no actual benefit in terms of waking me up. I may feel better afterward, I may actually be healthier, but instead of being just tired, I am now tired...and sweaty.
* For all of this, the amount of sleep I require to function is much lower now than it was when I was a kid. Back then, I required up to twelve hours: as a younger grown man, about nine: and as a middle-aged one, just under eight. I actually noticed at the age of thirty that I was horribly exhausted in the mornings after seven hours of sleep, but on weekends, would sleep only an extra hour at the most, and then wake feeling completely rested. Some of this was probably psychological, but most of it was physical: evidently "a good night's rest" is really a question of whether you got that last crucial 45 minutes or not.
* As depressing as all of this sounds, I have to say that Dan Henderson's remark that "I can do everything at forty that I could at twenty, just not as fast" actually does hold true even when you're fifty. Some of it is genetics, some of it is how well or poorly you treat yourself, but most of it is simply attitude. If one accepts that life is about change, unpleasant change first and foremost, then one accepts the necessity of flexibility. I woke up tired today, but I managed a ten hour workday that also involved about 40+ miles of driving, a bench trial, multiple court heatings, innumerable phone calls, a haircut, a four mile walk, a Perry Mason TV movie ("The Case of the Scandalous Scoundrel"), and writing this blog. I even had time for a beer. So yeah, I can still power through. It just takes more power than it used to.
It's now 9:58 PM, and I am about to hit the rack. Whether or not I will actually sleep through the night and greet Thursday with a saucy, Errol Flynn-like grin and a flippant remark, or just groan pitifully and stare in disbelief at my bedside clock, is unknown to me. But I just remember the words of Joyce Rochelle:
We all grow tired eventually; it happens to everyone. Even the sun, at the close of the year, is no longer a morning person.
* As a kid, tiredness is something you fight against. This begins, I believe, in infancy: a tired baby will cry, fuss, flail its tiny limbs, do just about anything but what it wants to do, which is sleep. Later, as a small and finally a large, sub-adult child, I fought against tiredness with a kind of bitter emnity. On weekends this could be well understood, since every conscious hour away from school was nectar to be savored. It made less sense on schoolnights, when there was no real reward and hefty penalty for staying up late: neverthless, I often did just that. This habit continued into high school and through college, and I believe in retrospect that children, and later teenagers, simply resent going to bed. It may be that their energy levels are higher to begin with and thus harder to exhaust, it may be that they are naturally noctural, but by God they do not like going to sleep.
* This is bizarre, because I have seldom encountered a child, teenager, or late college-age student who doesn't excel at sleeping. The sort of sleep one gets say, at the age of 9, or 19 for that matter, is of the very highest quantity and quality, far superior to the sleep people in even early middle age get except on their best nights. This makes the resentment the young feel about going to bed all the more ironic, since when they hit their 30s they will begin to crave deep, restful slumber, but achieve it less often, and less satisfyingly, than they did previously. Hell, by the time I was 25 years old, I was already too exhausted on Fridays to do much more than take my girlfriend to an early dinner, have a drink, and then go home to bed. The last thing I wanted to do was the first thing I'd wanted to on Fridays just a few short years before, which was go out and party.
* Because real adults often have trouble getting to sleep, or staying asleep, or achieving sleep which is truly restful even if the hours clocked are seemingly sufficient, they tend to welcome the very fatigue that they warred against as youths, when the act of being tired was viewed almost as an affliction that had to be overcome. I vividly remember the peer pressure, expressed usually as verbal abuse, which occurred in college when someone (me) used to start fading before the others in his group. Seldom if ever was this individual (me) simply allowed to leave and go to bed. Oh no. They were harrangued, plied with shots or more beer, and generally bullied into several extra hours of consciousness they did not want. And they always gave into this bullying, because deep down, they felt their tired state was a sign of weakness that had to be combatted.
* Starting in the middle-20s, feelings of weariness are, if not actually welcomed, generally accepted by the weary. By my later 20s, instead of raising hell on Fridays, or even just going to the gym, I began to greatly enjoy the ritual of disconnecting my phone, double locking my door, turning down most of the lights and essentially turning my apartment into a diving bell that may as well have been at the bottom of the sea. Pajama-type clothing was donned as soon as I was alone, and the hours between arrival and actual bedtime were essentially spent in a state of pre-sleep, where I spoke to no one, drank comforting hot beverages, and either watched TV or read a book in bed.
* This transition strikes most twentysomethings as somewhat embarrassing. Like baldness or decline in eyesight or sudden weight gain, it was deemed a sign of ageing, and thus something to be ridiculed, denied, fought against. However, since nobody really wants to fight against it -- pajamas are comfortable, hot tea on winter tights is soothing, and a good book or classic TV program provides great comfort after a rough week in the salt mines -- a lot of lies have to be told, a lot of exuses have to be made, to keep up the front that you are still the hellraiser you used to be, until at last you throw away all pretense and tell your friends you just want to fucking go to sleep.
* As we get older and the quality of our rest declines, we finally make note -- years too late -- that, holy shit, there is a connection between how much sleep we have and how well we function the next day at work. An early twentysomething can, as a rule, drink and smoke and screw themselves insensible 'til three in the morning, wake up at seven, slam a cup of coffee, take a cold shower, and still manage to have a prodctive workday: what's more, they can repeat the whole debauchery the next night. A fortysomething who stays up too late, drinks too much and crashes after midnight may as well not come to work the next day. He will barely be able to get out of bed, arrive late to his job, and once there do little but suck down company coffee while staring glassily at his computer, often unable to even remember his password, his extension, or his own middle name. What's more, when he arrives home, he will probably sleep for two hours in front of the television, and then awake even more depressed, confused and exhausted than he was before.
* Pushing through tiredness is also much more difficult as a fellow of fifty than it was when I was, say, thirty. This is because the fabled "second wind," which I first encountered in college and which allowed me to stay up for 24 hours at a crack without the aid of drugs, tends to wave bye-bye at some point and ne'er returns. "Pushing through" is still possible, but goddamn, is it hard: when I was working on Face Off back in 2012 or so, I used to arrive at the studio around three in the afternoon and work until somewhere between three and nine the next morning, almost without a break. At the time I was forty years old, and to do this sort of thing I required all the coffee Krispy Kreme could supply. Nevertheless, the entire next day was a dead loss. I was unable to sleep when I got home, but also unable to function. I did not have the mental powers even to watch television. I just sort of existed, in a mindless stupor.
* As a young-un, I often found exercise would revive my mind and body when I was in a state of physical and mental tiredness. A few miles around the jogging track could work wonders: they were nearly as effective as sleep. As an ancient relic, however, I now find that exercise is harder when tired, and provides no actual benefit in terms of waking me up. I may feel better afterward, I may actually be healthier, but instead of being just tired, I am now tired...and sweaty.
* For all of this, the amount of sleep I require to function is much lower now than it was when I was a kid. Back then, I required up to twelve hours: as a younger grown man, about nine: and as a middle-aged one, just under eight. I actually noticed at the age of thirty that I was horribly exhausted in the mornings after seven hours of sleep, but on weekends, would sleep only an extra hour at the most, and then wake feeling completely rested. Some of this was probably psychological, but most of it was physical: evidently "a good night's rest" is really a question of whether you got that last crucial 45 minutes or not.
* As depressing as all of this sounds, I have to say that Dan Henderson's remark that "I can do everything at forty that I could at twenty, just not as fast" actually does hold true even when you're fifty. Some of it is genetics, some of it is how well or poorly you treat yourself, but most of it is simply attitude. If one accepts that life is about change, unpleasant change first and foremost, then one accepts the necessity of flexibility. I woke up tired today, but I managed a ten hour workday that also involved about 40+ miles of driving, a bench trial, multiple court heatings, innumerable phone calls, a haircut, a four mile walk, a Perry Mason TV movie ("The Case of the Scandalous Scoundrel"), and writing this blog. I even had time for a beer. So yeah, I can still power through. It just takes more power than it used to.
It's now 9:58 PM, and I am about to hit the rack. Whether or not I will actually sleep through the night and greet Thursday with a saucy, Errol Flynn-like grin and a flippant remark, or just groan pitifully and stare in disbelief at my bedside clock, is unknown to me. But I just remember the words of Joyce Rochelle:
We all grow tired eventually; it happens to everyone. Even the sun, at the close of the year, is no longer a morning person.
April 16, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: ADVENTURES IN POETRY
I play the game for the game's own sake. -- Sherlock Holmes
One of the many skills I wish I possessed is the ability to write great, or even just really good, poetry. On the face of it, this does not make sense. Orwell once remarked that poetry was "the least tolerated of the arts" and he was right. In American society anyway, poets are despised, ridiculed, marginalized, under- or simply un-paid, and have no social cachet whatsoever. The very act of writing poetry is often linked to effeminacy or homosexuality regardless of whether the poet falls in these categories, and is associated in many minds with weakness or societial uselessness. When in modern times a poet is rocognized, it is usually due to circumstances which have nothing to do with their skill as a poet. Maya Angelou, for example, was not famous because she was a good poet: she was famous because she was a good black poet. I am absolutely convinced that had she been white or latina, she would not be nearly as well known, even if her verses were exactly the same. This is not a criticism of her poetry: it is a criticism of the "trained bear" aspect of American culture: when a person in a traditionally downtrodden category of humanity excels at something, they are often given a fame disproportionate to others of equal talent who lack their so-called "exotic" quality. And this fame is often slightly tinged with condescention, as in "look at how well that bear dances!" This is not something we like to talk about or admit, but it is true. Yet the fact remains that there have been very great poets in the last 50 - 100 years who are totally unknown to the public because they did not catch the fancy of reporters looking for an "angle." They simply wrote great poems in poverty and near-total obscurity.
This intolerance, mingled with tokenism ("the thing is only interesting if a 'trained bear' does it") is hypocritical in the extreme, because poetry ceases to be contemptible at the exact moment we cease to call it poetry. If we refer to it as songwriting, from which it is often almost indistinguishable, it suddenly acquires huge merit. The same goes for the writing of rap lyrics, which are actually viewed through a funhouse mirror and become ultra-masculine rather than effeminiate, even though they too are simply rhyming poetry. This phenomenon is something I have observed my entire life, though it runs contrary to Shakespeare's assertion that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." In point of fact, if we called roses "garbage flowers," we would probably find excuses notto smell them. Names have enormous power. And the name of poetry is largely mud in the culture we share.
Despite this, I crave the poet's skills, which are as different from the writer's skills as a flare gun is from a howitzer, and have from time to time tried to hone them by producing poems of my own. The vast majority of poems I've written were unreadable trash, but every now and again I produced something which was not altogether hopeless, showed signs of promise, or simply burst with imagery and passion even if the technique was sorely lacking. And in fact I have no technique whatsoever. I never really studied the art, and in a sense the real attraction to the form is rooted in its general lack of rules: poetry is language freed of restraints. It doesn't require grammar or syntax or punctuation or even proper spelling. It doesn't have to make sense or tell a complete story. It can exist entirely for its own sake, like "Jabberwock." And yet when teachers did try to introduce us to poetry, they usually adopted the horrible "Dead Poet's Society" method of trying to reduce poetry to a series of formulas, rules and devices which had to be ruthlessly applied, thus crushing any sense of fun or daring out of the entire exercise before it even began. This left me with a resentment of the writing process itself, which no doubt contributed to my general inability to compose anything worthwhile, but did free me from learning all those tedious "schools of thought" which often hobble the imaginations of overserious students.
The curious thing about sharing poetry is the embarrassment involved. Nothwithstanding the prejudices I mentioned above, the very act of showing a poem with someone, or to an audience, is one of surprisingly intense intimacy. As a novelist, I have written explicit sex scenes, moments of gut-wrenching tragedy, vivid depictions of the most horrific violence and depravity, and there are times when I feel a certain awkwardness knowing friends, family and acquaintances are reading these things. Poetry, however, is on a totally different level of discomfort. Poems by their very nature come from the heart, from the soul, from the deepest recesses of our own personality and spirit. It is impossible to share a poem with another human being without lowering your guard, setting down your armor, and making yourself totally vulnerable: in short, showing your true, naked self. Poems are probably as close to pure honesty as can exist in life, honesty has no artifice to dress it up, and emotional nudity can be extremely discomfiting. This is at once the attraction and the repulsion of the medium. It is both beautiful and personally frightening.
Somewhere in Los Angeles I have a few poems scribbled down in hard copy which do not exist anywhere else: the remainder are here, in electronic form, skulking in a folder I seldom open because I forget for years at a time that it even exists. The spirit moves me to even try my hand at poetry only at very great intervals: sometimes so much time passes between composition and me reading them again that I forget I ever penned them. Having stumbled over my poetry file, however, I found it not altogether humiliating to read. I will never be mistaken for a great or even a good poet, but I am definitely a sincere one, and there is a great deal of strength in sincerity, even if every other measureable quality is lacking.
I am going to share a few examples here with you, written in somewhat different veins. This will at least show that as in my fictional writing, there is some diversity of subject matter. It will also show that I am willing to share more in this blog than my subjective opinions. In a recent post I rather stupidly remarked that I had come to understand that no growth is possible without change. This was a very commonplace observation, rather like stating water is wet: it only seemed profound to me because as an axious person I tend to take comfort in routines. However, I truly believe the only way for writers to get better is to take risks, and opening one's self to ridicule is a fairish risk.
The first poem was written some years ago when I was living in Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, the idea came to me while I was sitting in godawful traffic, brooding about the shallowness of the entertainment industry and the seeming pointlessness of my life in general:
Superficial Cars
We live superficial lives
In a superficial city
Sit in superficial traffic
And get superficial pity.
We drive to superficial jobs,
In superficial cars
We meet superficial women
In superficial bars.
We eat superficial meals
In superficial places
We make superficial talks
In superficial spaces.
At our superficial booths
We drink superficial beers
Smile superficial smiles
Hide superficial tears.
And in the superficial nights
We scream superficial screams
Lay in superficial beds
Have superficial dreams.
And as our superficial hearts
Beat in superficial souls
Our superficial lives
Burn like superficial coals.
Setting aside deeper analysis of my observations here, which may themselves not be worthy of deeper analysis since the poem is direct to the point of obviousness, I am slightly partial to it all the same because it seems, within my own mind anyway, to capture the essential emptiness of modern life, with its pointless scurrying, empty pleasures, and underlying loneliness.
Next comes a much older and completely different poem, written in the early-mid 2000s. There is no attempt at rhyme, nor is there the strict structure I imposed upon the former example. In this exercise I was trying very hard to set a tone, establish a mood, create an atmosphere, while simultaneously telling a story:
Risen
We had not come to dine
The night was young
And we were
Gone with the way of things
The old way
Of doing business.
We had but come to see
For ourselves
This new Face
They had put upon the world
Our old enemies, our old friends
Our lovers.
We had the rest of forever
But no time to waste
The stars
They shine for all
But for some
Only briefly.
The moon
(How beautiful is the moon)
How pale
And we your children
How do we love thee?
Madly.
We had not come to dance
The night was ours
The garden secret
Winding roses, by the pool
And our faces
Unreflected.
We cast no shadow
On this world
And know the darkest secrets
Of your heart
(O how we understand you,
Plaything.)
By the surf, by the storm-swept rock
You built your house
Upon the sand
Into your door
We came on in
Invited.
You poured the wine, we did not drink
You set the meal, we did not eat
But gracious host
The time has come
To show our teeth.
We saw your Face
The world you made
The life you lead
Your daylight dreams
That burn our eyes
Vengeance is ours.
You washed your hands
You hung the cross
And rolled the stone
And broke the seal
Now not your Caesar, and not your Christ, is
Risen.
So darkness falls
Behind your eyes
Our bite is sharp
We taste the blood
The night is ours, we show our Face
Grinning.
The moon has set
The air is chill
Our point is made, it’s time to leave
You where you lie
In the world you made…
Finished.
One of my most annoying characteristics is a tendency to assume my audience needs to have everything explained to them: I was "mansplaining" to both men and women long before this dubious word came into vogue. Fortunately the tendency was recognized and called out by those close to me when I was still very young, and I have worked hard to eliminate it from my writing. I try always to show and not to tell, both in terms of description and moral point, so I will leave interpretations of this poem entirely to you, with the exception that there is a subtheme of narrative dishonestly, or perhaps merely the difficulty of change, in the opening line.
As an example of "flash poetry" I offer this:
I Would Love To
“I would love to,” she said
And all the reasons not to
Were crushed between our lips.
This is perhaps the oldest surviving example of a poem I have. I came up with the idea sometime, but not a long time, after hearing Steve Vai's Passion and Warfare in 1990. I was experimenting with the idea of communicating as much as possible in the fewest possible words: in this case, the idea of lust overcoming good sense.
My fourth example is probably the best, which is perhaps a dubious distinction in this company, but what the hell. I wrote it in 2013, during a period of great emotional anguish, and reached deep into my vault of borrowed imagery to compose it. In these words are contained a very large number of homages, principally to Clive Barker, but at least a half a dozen other writers as well. In fact, the whole poem is really a collection of dialog taken from other people's scripts and novels bridged together here and there by my own fragmentary ideas and driven by own raw emotions. I had no shame in doing this, since Andre "Dr. Dre" Young and Quentin Tarantino became both rich and famous doing much, much worse:
INQUITATUS
You again?
Very well. Let us begin the lesson. Leave your clothes with your hopes and stand before me
Naked as you came into the world.
Naked as you came before your lover, well
I will give you an orgasm at the taste of this whip,
This lash you love. And hate.
(You may scream; there is no shame)
The first stroke lays bare the muscle and the blood
Flows into the cracks between the floorboards where I buried you before.
You can taste the blood, can you not? And do you not like the taste?
After all it is what you came here for.
The second lash lays bare the bone and glistening
Brain in which hide your thoughts,
Your wet machinery of scheming.
And those thoughts
Stalk about this room and caper in glee
These are what nightmares look like,
Unbound.
Do you not like their parade?
Why do you weep so that your
Tears mingle with the blood you came here to shed?
You are the stubbornest of all my pupils
So eager to play and so reluctant to admit it.
But I know what you want, what you came here for
Your words are lies but your screams
Mean what they say
And more blood flicks the wall and spatters the marching
Nightmares as the lash seeks the truth
Within you, and lays bare your beating heart from within its
Cage of ribs
And it is for this that you have come to me, have you not, child?
It is for this and just this you have come to your master to hang naked from
The chains you forged, link by link and yard by yard, so I could show you what your heart looks like.
Let me take it from you, flaming like a coal
And hold it before you, burning like an augury
That tells your future.
This is a hellbound heart, and hell calls hell
Abyssus abyssum invocat
But you do not know this because you do not know
Yourself, do not know
why you even come here. So I will tell you
It is to find the truth in yourself, because there is truth in
Pain and pain alone will show you who you are,
But all this I have told you before.
Shown you before.
And perhaps that is enough for today
You may
Come down off the chains and sew yourself together
Sew yourself around the hellbound heart that drives you
To fresh hells yet unborn
(Abyss abyssum invocat, after all)
And make your way home, steaming, through the snow
Your hopes bundled beneath your arm like schoolbooks
To the empty loveless place in which you live
To lick your wounds by the cold hearth
And curse me for telling you that which you wished to know.
As a final example, similarly personal in nature but drawing less from the work of others, is "Thousand Cigarette Kiss (For Kathy)". Way back in 1996, when I was still lingering in college long after its charms had exhausted themselves, I had a rather tragic, somewhat squalid affair with an unhappy girl named Kathy. (I actually have no idea if she spelled her name with a K or not, but somehow it seems to fit.) In any event, "Kathy," despite her looks, was even more of a mess than I was at the time: drinking too heavily, smoking too much, and seeking to blot out emotional pain and academic disappointment by taking me to bed at regular intervals. Even at the time I could see this provided her with only a temporary feeling of relief at very high cost, but I was too selfish to stop it, as it provided me emotional morphine of my own.
You sit in the bar
Drinking away the pain I can’t
Cure and making it worse
For the both of us
And I fascinated
Watch
You make love to the menthol
The way you never made love to me
And I never made love to you
Because we are both loveless
It was cold when we first met
So dark
The snow was deep
To drunk to drive
So we ended up in bed instead
I can remember the way
Your body looked
Naked in the streetlight
Remember the taste of smoke and wine
upon your lips
He didn’t love you and you wanted
So bad to blot out the pain and I
Excellent in that regard
So generously agreed to help
And now
Nights have passed and here
We are in that same bar
Floundering again
In the wake of your Marlboro
And I’m waiting
Patient as a spider
For the shot that will numb you
Enough to be with me instead
If shame was a thing I could feel
I would be ashamed
But it’s so dark outside
So cold
And the snow’s so deep
And even spiders have the right
To keep warm
Hell
You can even think of him
While we do it
(I told you I was generous)
Another greasy quarter down the juke box
Another sad sad song
And I'll see you home and
In your doorway collect
Your thousand cigarette kiss.
I find this poem interesting because it makes me look somewhat worse than I actually am, or rather was, in terms of behavior. Kathy was always the aggressive intiator of our encounters, sometimes going as far as to bang on my door (or my window) at three in the morning when all I really wanted to do was get some goddamned sleep. The predatory, arachnid-like imagery I use is actually unfair to me, and I believe it stems entirely from my persistent sense of guilt: I could have handled our affair (I don't know what the hell else to call it) in a much more human and friendly way, but was afraid that any kindness that went deeper than mere politeness would be misinterpreted by a deeply unhappy, foundering young woman, at a time when I was barely keeping afloat myself.
You see what I'm getting at here. However good, bad, or downright awful you find these five examples, they are objectively very personal works, products either of deep-seated emotions or of very strong desires to produce a specific effect. There is honesty in them even if they lack in every other department. When I write fiction, I never publish it unless I think it fit to pass muster, and I am a strict drill sergeant: but with poetry, since I have no intention of publication, I can afford to concentrate on emotional veracity rather than technical perfection. As with a woman giving birth, the goal is not to do the thing with panache, but simply to get it done. The rest will take care of itself.
One of the many skills I wish I possessed is the ability to write great, or even just really good, poetry. On the face of it, this does not make sense. Orwell once remarked that poetry was "the least tolerated of the arts" and he was right. In American society anyway, poets are despised, ridiculed, marginalized, under- or simply un-paid, and have no social cachet whatsoever. The very act of writing poetry is often linked to effeminacy or homosexuality regardless of whether the poet falls in these categories, and is associated in many minds with weakness or societial uselessness. When in modern times a poet is rocognized, it is usually due to circumstances which have nothing to do with their skill as a poet. Maya Angelou, for example, was not famous because she was a good poet: she was famous because she was a good black poet. I am absolutely convinced that had she been white or latina, she would not be nearly as well known, even if her verses were exactly the same. This is not a criticism of her poetry: it is a criticism of the "trained bear" aspect of American culture: when a person in a traditionally downtrodden category of humanity excels at something, they are often given a fame disproportionate to others of equal talent who lack their so-called "exotic" quality. And this fame is often slightly tinged with condescention, as in "look at how well that bear dances!" This is not something we like to talk about or admit, but it is true. Yet the fact remains that there have been very great poets in the last 50 - 100 years who are totally unknown to the public because they did not catch the fancy of reporters looking for an "angle." They simply wrote great poems in poverty and near-total obscurity.
This intolerance, mingled with tokenism ("the thing is only interesting if a 'trained bear' does it") is hypocritical in the extreme, because poetry ceases to be contemptible at the exact moment we cease to call it poetry. If we refer to it as songwriting, from which it is often almost indistinguishable, it suddenly acquires huge merit. The same goes for the writing of rap lyrics, which are actually viewed through a funhouse mirror and become ultra-masculine rather than effeminiate, even though they too are simply rhyming poetry. This phenomenon is something I have observed my entire life, though it runs contrary to Shakespeare's assertion that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." In point of fact, if we called roses "garbage flowers," we would probably find excuses notto smell them. Names have enormous power. And the name of poetry is largely mud in the culture we share.
Despite this, I crave the poet's skills, which are as different from the writer's skills as a flare gun is from a howitzer, and have from time to time tried to hone them by producing poems of my own. The vast majority of poems I've written were unreadable trash, but every now and again I produced something which was not altogether hopeless, showed signs of promise, or simply burst with imagery and passion even if the technique was sorely lacking. And in fact I have no technique whatsoever. I never really studied the art, and in a sense the real attraction to the form is rooted in its general lack of rules: poetry is language freed of restraints. It doesn't require grammar or syntax or punctuation or even proper spelling. It doesn't have to make sense or tell a complete story. It can exist entirely for its own sake, like "Jabberwock." And yet when teachers did try to introduce us to poetry, they usually adopted the horrible "Dead Poet's Society" method of trying to reduce poetry to a series of formulas, rules and devices which had to be ruthlessly applied, thus crushing any sense of fun or daring out of the entire exercise before it even began. This left me with a resentment of the writing process itself, which no doubt contributed to my general inability to compose anything worthwhile, but did free me from learning all those tedious "schools of thought" which often hobble the imaginations of overserious students.
The curious thing about sharing poetry is the embarrassment involved. Nothwithstanding the prejudices I mentioned above, the very act of showing a poem with someone, or to an audience, is one of surprisingly intense intimacy. As a novelist, I have written explicit sex scenes, moments of gut-wrenching tragedy, vivid depictions of the most horrific violence and depravity, and there are times when I feel a certain awkwardness knowing friends, family and acquaintances are reading these things. Poetry, however, is on a totally different level of discomfort. Poems by their very nature come from the heart, from the soul, from the deepest recesses of our own personality and spirit. It is impossible to share a poem with another human being without lowering your guard, setting down your armor, and making yourself totally vulnerable: in short, showing your true, naked self. Poems are probably as close to pure honesty as can exist in life, honesty has no artifice to dress it up, and emotional nudity can be extremely discomfiting. This is at once the attraction and the repulsion of the medium. It is both beautiful and personally frightening.
Somewhere in Los Angeles I have a few poems scribbled down in hard copy which do not exist anywhere else: the remainder are here, in electronic form, skulking in a folder I seldom open because I forget for years at a time that it even exists. The spirit moves me to even try my hand at poetry only at very great intervals: sometimes so much time passes between composition and me reading them again that I forget I ever penned them. Having stumbled over my poetry file, however, I found it not altogether humiliating to read. I will never be mistaken for a great or even a good poet, but I am definitely a sincere one, and there is a great deal of strength in sincerity, even if every other measureable quality is lacking.
I am going to share a few examples here with you, written in somewhat different veins. This will at least show that as in my fictional writing, there is some diversity of subject matter. It will also show that I am willing to share more in this blog than my subjective opinions. In a recent post I rather stupidly remarked that I had come to understand that no growth is possible without change. This was a very commonplace observation, rather like stating water is wet: it only seemed profound to me because as an axious person I tend to take comfort in routines. However, I truly believe the only way for writers to get better is to take risks, and opening one's self to ridicule is a fairish risk.
The first poem was written some years ago when I was living in Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, the idea came to me while I was sitting in godawful traffic, brooding about the shallowness of the entertainment industry and the seeming pointlessness of my life in general:
Superficial Cars
We live superficial lives
In a superficial city
Sit in superficial traffic
And get superficial pity.
We drive to superficial jobs,
In superficial cars
We meet superficial women
In superficial bars.
We eat superficial meals
In superficial places
We make superficial talks
In superficial spaces.
At our superficial booths
We drink superficial beers
Smile superficial smiles
Hide superficial tears.
And in the superficial nights
We scream superficial screams
Lay in superficial beds
Have superficial dreams.
And as our superficial hearts
Beat in superficial souls
Our superficial lives
Burn like superficial coals.
Setting aside deeper analysis of my observations here, which may themselves not be worthy of deeper analysis since the poem is direct to the point of obviousness, I am slightly partial to it all the same because it seems, within my own mind anyway, to capture the essential emptiness of modern life, with its pointless scurrying, empty pleasures, and underlying loneliness.
Next comes a much older and completely different poem, written in the early-mid 2000s. There is no attempt at rhyme, nor is there the strict structure I imposed upon the former example. In this exercise I was trying very hard to set a tone, establish a mood, create an atmosphere, while simultaneously telling a story:
Risen
We had not come to dine
The night was young
And we were
Gone with the way of things
The old way
Of doing business.
We had but come to see
For ourselves
This new Face
They had put upon the world
Our old enemies, our old friends
Our lovers.
We had the rest of forever
But no time to waste
The stars
They shine for all
But for some
Only briefly.
The moon
(How beautiful is the moon)
How pale
And we your children
How do we love thee?
Madly.
We had not come to dance
The night was ours
The garden secret
Winding roses, by the pool
And our faces
Unreflected.
We cast no shadow
On this world
And know the darkest secrets
Of your heart
(O how we understand you,
Plaything.)
By the surf, by the storm-swept rock
You built your house
Upon the sand
Into your door
We came on in
Invited.
You poured the wine, we did not drink
You set the meal, we did not eat
But gracious host
The time has come
To show our teeth.
We saw your Face
The world you made
The life you lead
Your daylight dreams
That burn our eyes
Vengeance is ours.
You washed your hands
You hung the cross
And rolled the stone
And broke the seal
Now not your Caesar, and not your Christ, is
Risen.
So darkness falls
Behind your eyes
Our bite is sharp
We taste the blood
The night is ours, we show our Face
Grinning.
The moon has set
The air is chill
Our point is made, it’s time to leave
You where you lie
In the world you made…
Finished.
One of my most annoying characteristics is a tendency to assume my audience needs to have everything explained to them: I was "mansplaining" to both men and women long before this dubious word came into vogue. Fortunately the tendency was recognized and called out by those close to me when I was still very young, and I have worked hard to eliminate it from my writing. I try always to show and not to tell, both in terms of description and moral point, so I will leave interpretations of this poem entirely to you, with the exception that there is a subtheme of narrative dishonestly, or perhaps merely the difficulty of change, in the opening line.
As an example of "flash poetry" I offer this:
I Would Love To
“I would love to,” she said
And all the reasons not to
Were crushed between our lips.
This is perhaps the oldest surviving example of a poem I have. I came up with the idea sometime, but not a long time, after hearing Steve Vai's Passion and Warfare in 1990. I was experimenting with the idea of communicating as much as possible in the fewest possible words: in this case, the idea of lust overcoming good sense.
My fourth example is probably the best, which is perhaps a dubious distinction in this company, but what the hell. I wrote it in 2013, during a period of great emotional anguish, and reached deep into my vault of borrowed imagery to compose it. In these words are contained a very large number of homages, principally to Clive Barker, but at least a half a dozen other writers as well. In fact, the whole poem is really a collection of dialog taken from other people's scripts and novels bridged together here and there by my own fragmentary ideas and driven by own raw emotions. I had no shame in doing this, since Andre "Dr. Dre" Young and Quentin Tarantino became both rich and famous doing much, much worse:
INQUITATUS
You again?
Very well. Let us begin the lesson. Leave your clothes with your hopes and stand before me
Naked as you came into the world.
Naked as you came before your lover, well
I will give you an orgasm at the taste of this whip,
This lash you love. And hate.
(You may scream; there is no shame)
The first stroke lays bare the muscle and the blood
Flows into the cracks between the floorboards where I buried you before.
You can taste the blood, can you not? And do you not like the taste?
After all it is what you came here for.
The second lash lays bare the bone and glistening
Brain in which hide your thoughts,
Your wet machinery of scheming.
And those thoughts
Stalk about this room and caper in glee
These are what nightmares look like,
Unbound.
Do you not like their parade?
Why do you weep so that your
Tears mingle with the blood you came here to shed?
You are the stubbornest of all my pupils
So eager to play and so reluctant to admit it.
But I know what you want, what you came here for
Your words are lies but your screams
Mean what they say
And more blood flicks the wall and spatters the marching
Nightmares as the lash seeks the truth
Within you, and lays bare your beating heart from within its
Cage of ribs
And it is for this that you have come to me, have you not, child?
It is for this and just this you have come to your master to hang naked from
The chains you forged, link by link and yard by yard, so I could show you what your heart looks like.
Let me take it from you, flaming like a coal
And hold it before you, burning like an augury
That tells your future.
This is a hellbound heart, and hell calls hell
Abyssus abyssum invocat
But you do not know this because you do not know
Yourself, do not know
why you even come here. So I will tell you
It is to find the truth in yourself, because there is truth in
Pain and pain alone will show you who you are,
But all this I have told you before.
Shown you before.
And perhaps that is enough for today
You may
Come down off the chains and sew yourself together
Sew yourself around the hellbound heart that drives you
To fresh hells yet unborn
(Abyss abyssum invocat, after all)
And make your way home, steaming, through the snow
Your hopes bundled beneath your arm like schoolbooks
To the empty loveless place in which you live
To lick your wounds by the cold hearth
And curse me for telling you that which you wished to know.
As a final example, similarly personal in nature but drawing less from the work of others, is "Thousand Cigarette Kiss (For Kathy)". Way back in 1996, when I was still lingering in college long after its charms had exhausted themselves, I had a rather tragic, somewhat squalid affair with an unhappy girl named Kathy. (I actually have no idea if she spelled her name with a K or not, but somehow it seems to fit.) In any event, "Kathy," despite her looks, was even more of a mess than I was at the time: drinking too heavily, smoking too much, and seeking to blot out emotional pain and academic disappointment by taking me to bed at regular intervals. Even at the time I could see this provided her with only a temporary feeling of relief at very high cost, but I was too selfish to stop it, as it provided me emotional morphine of my own.
You sit in the bar
Drinking away the pain I can’t
Cure and making it worse
For the both of us
And I fascinated
Watch
You make love to the menthol
The way you never made love to me
And I never made love to you
Because we are both loveless
It was cold when we first met
So dark
The snow was deep
To drunk to drive
So we ended up in bed instead
I can remember the way
Your body looked
Naked in the streetlight
Remember the taste of smoke and wine
upon your lips
He didn’t love you and you wanted
So bad to blot out the pain and I
Excellent in that regard
So generously agreed to help
And now
Nights have passed and here
We are in that same bar
Floundering again
In the wake of your Marlboro
And I’m waiting
Patient as a spider
For the shot that will numb you
Enough to be with me instead
If shame was a thing I could feel
I would be ashamed
But it’s so dark outside
So cold
And the snow’s so deep
And even spiders have the right
To keep warm
Hell
You can even think of him
While we do it
(I told you I was generous)
Another greasy quarter down the juke box
Another sad sad song
And I'll see you home and
In your doorway collect
Your thousand cigarette kiss.
I find this poem interesting because it makes me look somewhat worse than I actually am, or rather was, in terms of behavior. Kathy was always the aggressive intiator of our encounters, sometimes going as far as to bang on my door (or my window) at three in the morning when all I really wanted to do was get some goddamned sleep. The predatory, arachnid-like imagery I use is actually unfair to me, and I believe it stems entirely from my persistent sense of guilt: I could have handled our affair (I don't know what the hell else to call it) in a much more human and friendly way, but was afraid that any kindness that went deeper than mere politeness would be misinterpreted by a deeply unhappy, foundering young woman, at a time when I was barely keeping afloat myself.
You see what I'm getting at here. However good, bad, or downright awful you find these five examples, they are objectively very personal works, products either of deep-seated emotions or of very strong desires to produce a specific effect. There is honesty in them even if they lack in every other department. When I write fiction, I never publish it unless I think it fit to pass muster, and I am a strict drill sergeant: but with poetry, since I have no intention of publication, I can afford to concentrate on emotional veracity rather than technical perfection. As with a woman giving birth, the goal is not to do the thing with panache, but simply to get it done. The rest will take care of itself.
April 12, 2023
WOLF WEATHER
in the pale, pale
light.
pale, pale light of
the moonglow.
I've got a hunger that's in
motion. a hunger that i
cant control.
I'm alone now, in my room
again. on the prowl now
through your dreams
again.
howling
On Saturday I regaled you -- tried to, anyway -- with tell of my upcoming novel Exiles: A Tale From the Chronicle of Magnus. Tonight I attempt to enliven your Wednesday by announcing the not-terribly-far-off release of a new novella, Wolf Weather.
As you may know if you habituate this blog (there are a few that do, poor, wretched, long-suffering creatures), I have been trying my damndest to resurrect the half-forgotten, often disrespected corpses of the novella and novelette for some years now. Now, according to the interwebs, a novelette is a fictional story ranging from 7,500 to 19,000 words (the "long short story"), while a novella ranges from 10,000 to 40,000 words (the "short novel"). There is obviously a degree of overlap there, for no hard definitions of story types exist: the term "novelette" isn't even used in the Americas, though it may still have some purchase in Britain, or so I'm told. But you get my point. Of all the storytelling forms, tales in this word count range are probably the most difficult to get published traditionally. There are surprisingly large numbers of venues both print and electronic, for flash fiction and short stories; and of course novels are as popular as they have ever been; but those lower-mid range tales fell out of fashion ages ago. I hate this very much, for it so happens that this is the range in which I am often most comfortable writing. I have also found that many readers enjoy this length, because it provides more "meat" than a short story and allows them to become more emotionally invested in the characters. At the same time, it does not have the same intimidating quality that a novel possesses (how many people have avoided classic works of literature because the sheer fucking size turns them off?)
Since 2018, I have released five novelettes and novellas. They are:
Deus Ex
The Numbers Game * Pinnacle Book Achievement Award
Seelenmord
Nosferatu * Pinnacle Book Achievement Award
Shadows and Glory
Well, in the next few months, possibly sooner, I am adding a sixth novella to the list. Wolf Weather is a horror-fantasy story of 15,000-odd words, and unlike anything I have ever-before published. I debated with myself as to how much I was going to reveal about it here, and decided that less is more, so I will keep it simple: imagine if you had lived a life of harsh military discipline from the time you were a child, were whipped for the slightest disobedience, and constantly called upon to do battle for an emperor you had never seen. Now imagine that emperor orders you to the far north, far off the map, into a frozen land where the sun never shines and the only light comes from the grinning moon. Imagine that once there, hundreds of miles from the warmth of civilization and the sun, you encounter supernatural beasts somewhere between wolf and man. Cunning creatures who slaughter your comrades and lay siege to the fort you have built with your own raw and bleeding hands. Imagine that one by one, your fellow legionnaires are torn to bits and consumed or worse yet, turned into beasts themselves, until at last, only you remain. The sole survivor and inhabitant of Fort Luna. Now imagine that is where the story begins.
Wolf Weather is a tale about discipline and duty in the face of hopeless odds. It is also a story about wildness...and desire. And what happens when the two things meet head on in the deeps of the forest beneath the light of the moon.
And that's it. That's all I'm gonna say, except that I really like the story, which is far from always the case, and greatly enjoyed my excursion into dark fantasy. Wolf Weather is undergoing its final editorial polish and the cover is still being formatted, but I expect to release it by midsummer latest. It will be available on pre-order from Amazon, and also through my website (autographed) at mileswatsonauthor.com.
Til then, keep howlin'.
light.
pale, pale light of
the moonglow.
I've got a hunger that's in
motion. a hunger that i
cant control.
I'm alone now, in my room
again. on the prowl now
through your dreams
again.
howling
On Saturday I regaled you -- tried to, anyway -- with tell of my upcoming novel Exiles: A Tale From the Chronicle of Magnus. Tonight I attempt to enliven your Wednesday by announcing the not-terribly-far-off release of a new novella, Wolf Weather.
As you may know if you habituate this blog (there are a few that do, poor, wretched, long-suffering creatures), I have been trying my damndest to resurrect the half-forgotten, often disrespected corpses of the novella and novelette for some years now. Now, according to the interwebs, a novelette is a fictional story ranging from 7,500 to 19,000 words (the "long short story"), while a novella ranges from 10,000 to 40,000 words (the "short novel"). There is obviously a degree of overlap there, for no hard definitions of story types exist: the term "novelette" isn't even used in the Americas, though it may still have some purchase in Britain, or so I'm told. But you get my point. Of all the storytelling forms, tales in this word count range are probably the most difficult to get published traditionally. There are surprisingly large numbers of venues both print and electronic, for flash fiction and short stories; and of course novels are as popular as they have ever been; but those lower-mid range tales fell out of fashion ages ago. I hate this very much, for it so happens that this is the range in which I am often most comfortable writing. I have also found that many readers enjoy this length, because it provides more "meat" than a short story and allows them to become more emotionally invested in the characters. At the same time, it does not have the same intimidating quality that a novel possesses (how many people have avoided classic works of literature because the sheer fucking size turns them off?)
Since 2018, I have released five novelettes and novellas. They are:
Deus Ex
The Numbers Game * Pinnacle Book Achievement Award
Seelenmord
Nosferatu * Pinnacle Book Achievement Award
Shadows and Glory
Well, in the next few months, possibly sooner, I am adding a sixth novella to the list. Wolf Weather is a horror-fantasy story of 15,000-odd words, and unlike anything I have ever-before published. I debated with myself as to how much I was going to reveal about it here, and decided that less is more, so I will keep it simple: imagine if you had lived a life of harsh military discipline from the time you were a child, were whipped for the slightest disobedience, and constantly called upon to do battle for an emperor you had never seen. Now imagine that emperor orders you to the far north, far off the map, into a frozen land where the sun never shines and the only light comes from the grinning moon. Imagine that once there, hundreds of miles from the warmth of civilization and the sun, you encounter supernatural beasts somewhere between wolf and man. Cunning creatures who slaughter your comrades and lay siege to the fort you have built with your own raw and bleeding hands. Imagine that one by one, your fellow legionnaires are torn to bits and consumed or worse yet, turned into beasts themselves, until at last, only you remain. The sole survivor and inhabitant of Fort Luna. Now imagine that is where the story begins.
Wolf Weather is a tale about discipline and duty in the face of hopeless odds. It is also a story about wildness...and desire. And what happens when the two things meet head on in the deeps of the forest beneath the light of the moon.
And that's it. That's all I'm gonna say, except that I really like the story, which is far from always the case, and greatly enjoyed my excursion into dark fantasy. Wolf Weather is undergoing its final editorial polish and the cover is still being formatted, but I expect to release it by midsummer latest. It will be available on pre-order from Amazon, and also through my website (autographed) at mileswatsonauthor.com.
Til then, keep howlin'.
April 8, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: OLE MAGNUS IS BACK
In 2022 I released DEUS EX, an alternative-history novella about a defeated dictator who, as his enemies close in, contemplates both escape and how his great empire came to ruin. The central figure is Magnus Antonius Magnus, a man who is equal parts Caesar, Hitler, Napoleon and Ghengis Khan: brilliant, charismatic, ambitious, and ruthless. He conquered a quarter of the earth's surface and ruled it with an iron fist, in time coming to see himself as a god. The questions I posed with the book were whether Magnus could indeed escape justice for his terrible crimes, and if so, if he were able to flee and start anew in a distant land, had he learned anything from his downfall...or would he simply repeat his mistakes?
Like all my novellas, I wrote it as a stand-alone story. I wanted to explore the psychology of tyrants, autocrats, and dictators generally, while also penning a thriller of the "will he get away, or won't he?" variety. To do this, I had to set the scene, and give readers an understanding of what the world Magnus ruled was like. However, as I began to write, I came to realize that in order to tell the tale of his downfall, I also had to chronicle his rise to power. I had to supply not only a certain amount of backstory for the character, but also create a second world, the world he overthrew to become a dictator. Very little of this world appears in DEUS EX, and in fact I constructed only what was necessary for the internal logic of the story to hold true, but the fact is that a writer's creative faculties, once turned on, are not so easily turned off. Months after the novella had hit literal and electronic shelves, I kept adding bricks to the edifice. I kept sketching more and more detail into the world Magnus was born into, which he came to detest and ultimately decided to destroy. It began to take a very clear and detailed shape in my mind, and like most landscapes, seemed to beg its artist for the insertion of some people. Quite without intending to, I had set up all the preconditions to continue the story of Magnus, albeit in a prequel rather than a sequel form.
All of this is a roundabout way of telling you that 2023 will see the release of EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLE OF MAGNUS. This story is not a novella: it is a full-length novel, albeit a somewhat shorter novel than is my usual wont. It is set about twenty years before the events of DEUS EX, and is the story of Enitan Champoleon, a solitary exile on the Isle of a Thousand Names, and Marguerite Bain, a smuggler who encounters this fantastical man and learns his life story...and how it intersects with Magnus, the mysterious rebel leader. There is not a lot I can reveal about this novel without ruining its many surprises, but I can say this much:
* It is the first novel I have written with a female protagonist. Marguerite Bain, captain of the Sea Dragon and member of the Brotherhood of the Coast, a band of smugglers and pirates licensed by the Order to operate in the Mediterranean Sea, is a woman grown weary of intrigue and violence, who secretly longs for peace, but must never show weakness.
* It is the first novel I have written where the male protagonist has neither size, nor stature, nor fighting ability: Enitan Champoleon lives solely by his wits...and his lies. Champoleon is among other things the means by which I explore the awesome power of lies, and how they can not only move the world, but grow out of the control of the liars who utter them.
* It explores the peculiar world of the Order, the politico-economic system which rules Europe not with an iron hand, but red tape: it is a faceless bureacracy backed up by highly skilled assassins, which restricts all technology to further its control ove the population.
* It shows us Magnus as a much younger man, just beginning his quest for power, and yet already demonstrating the ruthless cunning which will ultimately leave him as master of Europe...as well as the cruelty and lust for domination which prove his eventual downfall.
* Since Deus Ex actually takes place at the very end of the story of Magnus, it is not necessary to read it before you read Exiles: however, having a go at the novella first will give you a better understanding of what sort of man Magnus is and what he is capable of. It is my intention to piece him together story by story, paying little attention to chronology, until we have a complete picture of this very complex, profoundly evil, and yet strangely sympathetic man.
No novel writes itself, but Exiles was at once the easiest, and at the same time the most pleasurable experience I have ever had writing a novel. The first draft took less than four months to complete: one-third of the time it normally takes me under the most idealized circumstances. Indeed,
most literary works are like love affairs: dizzying moments of joy and pleasure alternate with long periods of boredom and stagnation, followed by agonizing battles with confusion, heartbreak and failure. This one was more like a summer vacation packed with interesting experiences and colorful adventures. I enjoyed every moment of writing it and was sad when I typed the final period. Only the knowledge that the Chronicles of Magnus will continue, probably in 2024, with yet another full-length novel, made saying goodbye to the world I'd accidentally created bearable.
I am presently in the process of producing the second draft, commissioning a cover and booking a review tour, but I am confident that the release date will correspond roughly with my planned trip to Iceland in September or October of this year. It is not going to be my only release of 2024, and may be preceded by a horror-fantasy novella called Wolf Weather, but it is something I'm deeply excited about. If you have interest, Deus Ex is available on Amazon on Kindle e-book and in paperback
Deus Ex
and autographed, personalized copies can be obtained from my own website
https://www.mileswatsonauthor.com/
Like all my novellas, I wrote it as a stand-alone story. I wanted to explore the psychology of tyrants, autocrats, and dictators generally, while also penning a thriller of the "will he get away, or won't he?" variety. To do this, I had to set the scene, and give readers an understanding of what the world Magnus ruled was like. However, as I began to write, I came to realize that in order to tell the tale of his downfall, I also had to chronicle his rise to power. I had to supply not only a certain amount of backstory for the character, but also create a second world, the world he overthrew to become a dictator. Very little of this world appears in DEUS EX, and in fact I constructed only what was necessary for the internal logic of the story to hold true, but the fact is that a writer's creative faculties, once turned on, are not so easily turned off. Months after the novella had hit literal and electronic shelves, I kept adding bricks to the edifice. I kept sketching more and more detail into the world Magnus was born into, which he came to detest and ultimately decided to destroy. It began to take a very clear and detailed shape in my mind, and like most landscapes, seemed to beg its artist for the insertion of some people. Quite without intending to, I had set up all the preconditions to continue the story of Magnus, albeit in a prequel rather than a sequel form.
All of this is a roundabout way of telling you that 2023 will see the release of EXILES: A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLE OF MAGNUS. This story is not a novella: it is a full-length novel, albeit a somewhat shorter novel than is my usual wont. It is set about twenty years before the events of DEUS EX, and is the story of Enitan Champoleon, a solitary exile on the Isle of a Thousand Names, and Marguerite Bain, a smuggler who encounters this fantastical man and learns his life story...and how it intersects with Magnus, the mysterious rebel leader. There is not a lot I can reveal about this novel without ruining its many surprises, but I can say this much:
* It is the first novel I have written with a female protagonist. Marguerite Bain, captain of the Sea Dragon and member of the Brotherhood of the Coast, a band of smugglers and pirates licensed by the Order to operate in the Mediterranean Sea, is a woman grown weary of intrigue and violence, who secretly longs for peace, but must never show weakness.
* It is the first novel I have written where the male protagonist has neither size, nor stature, nor fighting ability: Enitan Champoleon lives solely by his wits...and his lies. Champoleon is among other things the means by which I explore the awesome power of lies, and how they can not only move the world, but grow out of the control of the liars who utter them.
* It explores the peculiar world of the Order, the politico-economic system which rules Europe not with an iron hand, but red tape: it is a faceless bureacracy backed up by highly skilled assassins, which restricts all technology to further its control ove the population.
* It shows us Magnus as a much younger man, just beginning his quest for power, and yet already demonstrating the ruthless cunning which will ultimately leave him as master of Europe...as well as the cruelty and lust for domination which prove his eventual downfall.
* Since Deus Ex actually takes place at the very end of the story of Magnus, it is not necessary to read it before you read Exiles: however, having a go at the novella first will give you a better understanding of what sort of man Magnus is and what he is capable of. It is my intention to piece him together story by story, paying little attention to chronology, until we have a complete picture of this very complex, profoundly evil, and yet strangely sympathetic man.
No novel writes itself, but Exiles was at once the easiest, and at the same time the most pleasurable experience I have ever had writing a novel. The first draft took less than four months to complete: one-third of the time it normally takes me under the most idealized circumstances. Indeed,
most literary works are like love affairs: dizzying moments of joy and pleasure alternate with long periods of boredom and stagnation, followed by agonizing battles with confusion, heartbreak and failure. This one was more like a summer vacation packed with interesting experiences and colorful adventures. I enjoyed every moment of writing it and was sad when I typed the final period. Only the knowledge that the Chronicles of Magnus will continue, probably in 2024, with yet another full-length novel, made saying goodbye to the world I'd accidentally created bearable.
I am presently in the process of producing the second draft, commissioning a cover and booking a review tour, but I am confident that the release date will correspond roughly with my planned trip to Iceland in September or October of this year. It is not going to be my only release of 2024, and may be preceded by a horror-fantasy novella called Wolf Weather, but it is something I'm deeply excited about. If you have interest, Deus Ex is available on Amazon on Kindle e-book and in paperback
Deus Ex
and autographed, personalized copies can be obtained from my own website
https://www.mileswatsonauthor.com/
April 5, 2023
AND NOW, MY FAVORITE NOVELS
A few weeks ago, I published a couple of blogs listing some of the best novels I've ever read. By "best" I meant the best written, best constructed, most effective pieces of storytelling I'd ever personally laid eyes upon...but not necessarily my personal favorites. For me, "favorite" means a novel I can read once a year without ever growing tired of it; not necessarily a "great" novel like The Agony and The Ecstasy, which I enjoyed enormously, and which I think is a minor masterpiece, but am not sure I will ever read again. "Favorite" means novels I greatly enjoy and love even though they may (or may not) have flaws which preclude them, technically, from greatness.
The following are a diverse group of novels, genre-wise, which I have read at least twice, and in some cases probably a dozen times or more. Some of them would qualify for my "best" list, others are merely enormously fun and never seem to get old.
The Keep by F. Paul Wilson (horror). This story about German soldiers in WW2, stationed in a Transylvanian castle who accidentally wake up...something...from a deep, dark sleep is atmospheric, dreadful, character-driven, imaginative and subverts all your expectations, starting as sheer horror and then shifting to horror-fantasy as easily as its lying antagonist crafts backstories. The character of Captain Klaus Woermann is a triumph: a complex, conflicted, deeply likeable German soldier whose main concern is simply to save the lives of his men from the mysterious force determined to kill them. And what a force it is....
Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy (techno-thriller). Say what you want about Clancy (and I have), "RSR," his epic saga imagining a full-on war between NATO and the Soviet Union is dense, immersive, extremely well-written, and combines techno-wizardy, military strategy, political and economic intrigue, and the human element with almost seamless brilliance. Clancy tends toward jingo patriotism, deification of the military and intelligence complex, and oversimplicity in everything, most especially character generation: what's more, he seems to have no color sense at all....I'm not sure he uses a single color adjective in the entire novel. This book is nevertheless a damn fine read.
A Clergyman's Daughter by George Orwell (literary). Orwell's least-known and least-remembered novel is a highly enjoyable, beautifully-written failure. The story of Dorothy Hare, a much-tried, ultra-religious spinster in a small English village who has a nervous breakdown and wakes up in London with no memory of who she is, the novel is a scattershot criticism of late interwar English society, and an experience-based exploration of real poverty: Orwell mined his own experiences as a tramp, migrant agicultural worker, and schoolteacher to furnish Dorothy with trials, and while this book never comes together and has a certain artificiality of outcomes, it's an unforgettable depiction of the bare misery of British poverty in the somnolent years before WW2. It's also the only novel Orwell ever wrote from a female perspective.
War Story by Derek Robinson (war). This author, unknown to American audiences, was never so brilliant as when he approached an unapproachable subject or a treasured national myth, and then beat the shit out of it. "War Story" depicts life in a British fighter squadron in WW1, where the life expectancy of new pilots was about three weeks. The protagonist is a vain, shallow, unteachable snob, who seems determined to learn absolutely nothing while he quests for glory and girls. Written at a very high level, it introduces the usual gang of glib-tongued, sophomoric-minded amateur killers Robinson seems to feel populate the British military, and follows them as they get into every manner of trouble imaginable. Imagine a cricket match populated by borderline psychopaths using revolvers instead of cricket bats, and you have "War Story."
The Centurions I - IV by Damion Hunter a.k.a. Amanda Cockrell (historical romance). Cockrell, writing under a masculine pen name, has an overflowing passion for ancient Rome, and that passion flows off the pages of this largely forgotten four-book series, which chronicles the Julianus family during the Flavian Dynasty (A.D. 69 - 96). It is written as a historical romance, and is full of battles, intrigue, sex, and familial discord, but it lacks the emphasis on torture and debauchery you see in many Rome-set series. Cockrell admired the Romans, and while hardly blind to their cruelties and perversions, her emphasis is on her characters and how the tumultuous events shape their development as men and women. The main character, Correus, is a bit of a Mary Sue, but he's likeable, and the other characters -- especially his half-brother Flavius, their slave Forst, and Correus' second wife Ygerna -- have rich character arcs. I found these books both educational and engrossing -- in short, fun. A pleasure to read and re-read.
Privateers by Ben Bova (science-fiction). Bova, like Clancy, was a deeply flawed writer: on the other hand, he could turn one helluva phrase, and the conception of "Privateers" was pretty breathtaking. In a spacefaring 21st century where the Soviet Union dominates the planet and the solar system, an oversexed, fearless and rugged American millionaire becomes the first space pirate, looting Soviet ore ships while dueling with the Russian bad guy for the heart, and body, of a barely legal Latina bombshell. Pulsating with lust, adrenaline and adventure, and served with doses of readily believeable future technology, "Privateers" is a fun, well-written romp that mingles adventure and intrigue with sex and speculation. The hero is born-perfect "Chad" with the morals of a Hollywood casting couch executive, but even he can't entirely ruin this page-turning escapism set in the stars.
Body Count by William Turner Huggett (war). This novel about a Marine lieutenant's tour of duty in Vietnam is a remarkable achievement: an intimate epic about war, coming of age, the effects of battle on the human soul, and -- most interestingly -- the racial politics of the U.S. military in 1969. Our hero is a naive, earnest middle-class kid who struggles to learn the arts of war the hard way beneath an unforgiving commander and above a hard-charging sergeant, and his platoon is a highly colorful collection of old salt Marines, hippies in uniform, black militants, misfits, troublemakers, goof-offs and natural-born warriors. The author is a Nam vet, and he writes his many characters with a remarkable sensitivity and empathy without romanticizing them. He takes the same tack on war itself, depicting its cruelties and dehumanizing horrors but also frankly addressing its addictive appeal, something very few writers have the balls to address. You can't beat this novel for its take on the racial tension between blacks and whites and how that played out on the battlefield.
The Fourth Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sanders (mystery). From a standpoint of pure prose writing alone, this book is incredible. Sanders' depiction of retired NYPD chief of detectives Edward X. Delaney, a crusty, food-obsessed homicide dick dragged back into harness to solve a rich man's murder, is sheer enjoyment -- especially the opening acts. Sanders had a love of food, drink, architecture, clothing, women, and New York itself which bursts off every page, and brings to life an otherwise routine Big Apple murder mystery. This was the last of the "Deadly Sin" books and by far the least original, but it is written so beautifully it doesn't matter. And Delaney is a fun protagonist, tough, no-nonsense, and sandwich-obsessed.
Rising Sun by Michael Crichton (mystery). Another mystery I never tire of reading is Chrichton's controversial novel about a high-profile murder in Los Angeles that pulls its generic protagonist into the high-stakes world of Japanese business interests. Chrichton was accused of "Japan-bashing" and racism, but he's guilty only of lack of subtlety: like Oliver Stone, he cannot make a point without driving it through your skull, and his point was that Americans, in the 1980s, were willingly committing economic suicide for Japan's benefit, and corrupting themselves in the process. A better-than-average murder mystery with so-so dialog but a relentless pace, it excels because of its clash-of-cultures conflicts and the character of John Connor, a semiretired cop, fluent in Japanese, who guides the dull protagonist Smith through the subtleties and nuances of Japanese culture. Chrichton had no gift for character generation, but Connor is hard to forget.
Holocaust For Hire by Joseph Silva (young adult). OK, OK, this is a novel about...Captain America. But damn it, it's remarkably well-written and a helluva lot of fun. If I were trying to turn a kid onto reading for its own sake, this is probably the choice I'd make: Silva (probably a pen name) has a real gift for colorful, atmospheric prose and page-turning suspense, as he follows Cap, Nick Fury and a pair of star-crossed, would-be lover reporters on their quest to foil the Red Skull's nefarious plot to establish a (you guessed it) Fourth Reich using an earthquake-generating machine. I read this again a few years ago after finding it in a used bookstore, and was shocked how well it holds up: a lot of so-called authors could benefit from how cleverly worded and just damned readable and fun this little novel truly is.
Black Sunday by Thomas Harris (thriller). Harris will always be remembered as the guy who created Hannibal Lecter. But before Lecter, and indeed before the whole quadrilogy of Lecter-involved or Lecter-centric novels, he wrote this minor masterpiece of a thriller about an vengeance-obsessed Vietnam vet who plans on blowing up the Super Bowl with the aid of some Middle Eastern terrorists. A tale of hunters and hunted, cold professionalism and white-hot madness, with as much sympathy for its tormented antagonist as for its heroes, this book showcases Harris' Hemingway-esque prose style and his ability to make the deepest possible character studies in the briefest possible of words. Michael Lander is the sort of villain you cannot help but pity and root for, even though he is trying to kill 80,000 people, and in depicting his tragic life, Harris shows us how most monsters -- Lecter aside -- are made, and not born.
I could go on, but I think this is a pretty fair scattering of novels across many a genre. They aren't necessarily great in the classical sense of the word, but they are the sort that it is possible to read many times without tiring of them, and in my book, that beats greatness any day.
The following are a diverse group of novels, genre-wise, which I have read at least twice, and in some cases probably a dozen times or more. Some of them would qualify for my "best" list, others are merely enormously fun and never seem to get old.
The Keep by F. Paul Wilson (horror). This story about German soldiers in WW2, stationed in a Transylvanian castle who accidentally wake up...something...from a deep, dark sleep is atmospheric, dreadful, character-driven, imaginative and subverts all your expectations, starting as sheer horror and then shifting to horror-fantasy as easily as its lying antagonist crafts backstories. The character of Captain Klaus Woermann is a triumph: a complex, conflicted, deeply likeable German soldier whose main concern is simply to save the lives of his men from the mysterious force determined to kill them. And what a force it is....
Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy (techno-thriller). Say what you want about Clancy (and I have), "RSR," his epic saga imagining a full-on war between NATO and the Soviet Union is dense, immersive, extremely well-written, and combines techno-wizardy, military strategy, political and economic intrigue, and the human element with almost seamless brilliance. Clancy tends toward jingo patriotism, deification of the military and intelligence complex, and oversimplicity in everything, most especially character generation: what's more, he seems to have no color sense at all....I'm not sure he uses a single color adjective in the entire novel. This book is nevertheless a damn fine read.
A Clergyman's Daughter by George Orwell (literary). Orwell's least-known and least-remembered novel is a highly enjoyable, beautifully-written failure. The story of Dorothy Hare, a much-tried, ultra-religious spinster in a small English village who has a nervous breakdown and wakes up in London with no memory of who she is, the novel is a scattershot criticism of late interwar English society, and an experience-based exploration of real poverty: Orwell mined his own experiences as a tramp, migrant agicultural worker, and schoolteacher to furnish Dorothy with trials, and while this book never comes together and has a certain artificiality of outcomes, it's an unforgettable depiction of the bare misery of British poverty in the somnolent years before WW2. It's also the only novel Orwell ever wrote from a female perspective.
War Story by Derek Robinson (war). This author, unknown to American audiences, was never so brilliant as when he approached an unapproachable subject or a treasured national myth, and then beat the shit out of it. "War Story" depicts life in a British fighter squadron in WW1, where the life expectancy of new pilots was about three weeks. The protagonist is a vain, shallow, unteachable snob, who seems determined to learn absolutely nothing while he quests for glory and girls. Written at a very high level, it introduces the usual gang of glib-tongued, sophomoric-minded amateur killers Robinson seems to feel populate the British military, and follows them as they get into every manner of trouble imaginable. Imagine a cricket match populated by borderline psychopaths using revolvers instead of cricket bats, and you have "War Story."
The Centurions I - IV by Damion Hunter a.k.a. Amanda Cockrell (historical romance). Cockrell, writing under a masculine pen name, has an overflowing passion for ancient Rome, and that passion flows off the pages of this largely forgotten four-book series, which chronicles the Julianus family during the Flavian Dynasty (A.D. 69 - 96). It is written as a historical romance, and is full of battles, intrigue, sex, and familial discord, but it lacks the emphasis on torture and debauchery you see in many Rome-set series. Cockrell admired the Romans, and while hardly blind to their cruelties and perversions, her emphasis is on her characters and how the tumultuous events shape their development as men and women. The main character, Correus, is a bit of a Mary Sue, but he's likeable, and the other characters -- especially his half-brother Flavius, their slave Forst, and Correus' second wife Ygerna -- have rich character arcs. I found these books both educational and engrossing -- in short, fun. A pleasure to read and re-read.
Privateers by Ben Bova (science-fiction). Bova, like Clancy, was a deeply flawed writer: on the other hand, he could turn one helluva phrase, and the conception of "Privateers" was pretty breathtaking. In a spacefaring 21st century where the Soviet Union dominates the planet and the solar system, an oversexed, fearless and rugged American millionaire becomes the first space pirate, looting Soviet ore ships while dueling with the Russian bad guy for the heart, and body, of a barely legal Latina bombshell. Pulsating with lust, adrenaline and adventure, and served with doses of readily believeable future technology, "Privateers" is a fun, well-written romp that mingles adventure and intrigue with sex and speculation. The hero is born-perfect "Chad" with the morals of a Hollywood casting couch executive, but even he can't entirely ruin this page-turning escapism set in the stars.
Body Count by William Turner Huggett (war). This novel about a Marine lieutenant's tour of duty in Vietnam is a remarkable achievement: an intimate epic about war, coming of age, the effects of battle on the human soul, and -- most interestingly -- the racial politics of the U.S. military in 1969. Our hero is a naive, earnest middle-class kid who struggles to learn the arts of war the hard way beneath an unforgiving commander and above a hard-charging sergeant, and his platoon is a highly colorful collection of old salt Marines, hippies in uniform, black militants, misfits, troublemakers, goof-offs and natural-born warriors. The author is a Nam vet, and he writes his many characters with a remarkable sensitivity and empathy without romanticizing them. He takes the same tack on war itself, depicting its cruelties and dehumanizing horrors but also frankly addressing its addictive appeal, something very few writers have the balls to address. You can't beat this novel for its take on the racial tension between blacks and whites and how that played out on the battlefield.
The Fourth Deadly Sin by Lawrence Sanders (mystery). From a standpoint of pure prose writing alone, this book is incredible. Sanders' depiction of retired NYPD chief of detectives Edward X. Delaney, a crusty, food-obsessed homicide dick dragged back into harness to solve a rich man's murder, is sheer enjoyment -- especially the opening acts. Sanders had a love of food, drink, architecture, clothing, women, and New York itself which bursts off every page, and brings to life an otherwise routine Big Apple murder mystery. This was the last of the "Deadly Sin" books and by far the least original, but it is written so beautifully it doesn't matter. And Delaney is a fun protagonist, tough, no-nonsense, and sandwich-obsessed.
Rising Sun by Michael Crichton (mystery). Another mystery I never tire of reading is Chrichton's controversial novel about a high-profile murder in Los Angeles that pulls its generic protagonist into the high-stakes world of Japanese business interests. Chrichton was accused of "Japan-bashing" and racism, but he's guilty only of lack of subtlety: like Oliver Stone, he cannot make a point without driving it through your skull, and his point was that Americans, in the 1980s, were willingly committing economic suicide for Japan's benefit, and corrupting themselves in the process. A better-than-average murder mystery with so-so dialog but a relentless pace, it excels because of its clash-of-cultures conflicts and the character of John Connor, a semiretired cop, fluent in Japanese, who guides the dull protagonist Smith through the subtleties and nuances of Japanese culture. Chrichton had no gift for character generation, but Connor is hard to forget.
Holocaust For Hire by Joseph Silva (young adult). OK, OK, this is a novel about...Captain America. But damn it, it's remarkably well-written and a helluva lot of fun. If I were trying to turn a kid onto reading for its own sake, this is probably the choice I'd make: Silva (probably a pen name) has a real gift for colorful, atmospheric prose and page-turning suspense, as he follows Cap, Nick Fury and a pair of star-crossed, would-be lover reporters on their quest to foil the Red Skull's nefarious plot to establish a (you guessed it) Fourth Reich using an earthquake-generating machine. I read this again a few years ago after finding it in a used bookstore, and was shocked how well it holds up: a lot of so-called authors could benefit from how cleverly worded and just damned readable and fun this little novel truly is.
Black Sunday by Thomas Harris (thriller). Harris will always be remembered as the guy who created Hannibal Lecter. But before Lecter, and indeed before the whole quadrilogy of Lecter-involved or Lecter-centric novels, he wrote this minor masterpiece of a thriller about an vengeance-obsessed Vietnam vet who plans on blowing up the Super Bowl with the aid of some Middle Eastern terrorists. A tale of hunters and hunted, cold professionalism and white-hot madness, with as much sympathy for its tormented antagonist as for its heroes, this book showcases Harris' Hemingway-esque prose style and his ability to make the deepest possible character studies in the briefest possible of words. Michael Lander is the sort of villain you cannot help but pity and root for, even though he is trying to kill 80,000 people, and in depicting his tragic life, Harris shows us how most monsters -- Lecter aside -- are made, and not born.
I could go on, but I think this is a pretty fair scattering of novels across many a genre. They aren't necessarily great in the classical sense of the word, but they are the sort that it is possible to read many times without tiring of them, and in my book, that beats greatness any day.
April 1, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: WHAT 80'S TV TAUGHT ME
Anyone who knows me knows that I spend a goodly amount of time in the past. I mean this in the pop-cultural sense. Much of my television-viewing is spent somewhere between the mid-late 50s and the early 00s. In fact, with three or four notable exceptions, I can't think of a TV series which began after 2010 that I have watched to its completion. You aren't interested in my psychology, so I won't get into the reasons why, assuming I even understand them myself, but the fact remains: I watch a lot of "old" television.
Of course, one of the interesting things about studying television (or cinema) is what it tells us about the era in which it was produced. I don't just mean its fashion and technology, or its political atmosphere: I mean what you can show and can't show, say and can't say. And beyond that, what sort of worldview it tends to espouse, even if only subconsciously. Popular culture is as good a barometer of a society as any other metric out there, and centuries hence, if anyone is still around to examine it, I've little doubt the conclusions our descendants draw about us will come largely from their knowledge about how we amused ourselves.
For good or ill.
In the last few years I have done a great deal of TV watching from my own formative period, the 1980s. I was struck immediately by its unwritten rules, the ones never codified but readily apparent to any watcher. The things that showed up again and again regardless of the genre of the show in question, as if they were immutable laws of the universe, or the peculiarities of the Fates:
1. A car will explode given any opportunity whatsoever. It will explode if is struck by another car, if the gas tank is shot, if it smashes against a wall, and most interestingly, not only if it goes over a cliff...but in midair, before it hits anything. What's more, it will explode in a fiery holocaust, as if it is absolutely soaked in gasoline.
2. Getting shot in the shoulder hurts about as much as barking your shin against a coffee table -- maybe less. It is never fatal and bleeds about as much as a shaving cut. It is not even debilatative, but usually involves the hero wearing a small bandage or at most, a sling in the next scene: however, he can throw the sling off and operate normally if he has to.
3. Getting knocked unconscious is not a big deal. Sometimes a hero will get knocked out two or even three times in the same episode without any lasting effects whatsoever. He won't be concussed. He won't feel dizzy or nauseous or act confused or angry for more than ten seconds. What's more, a man knocked unconscious will remember everything right up to the second they were KO'd.
4. Being thrown from a moving car is not dangerous and does not lead to injury, not even if the hero lands on solid concrete. The hero will usually climb to his feet, dust himself off, and walk it off as if he did no more than slip in the mud.
5. If the hero is being shot at, the bullets will always hit the dirt in a row behind his heels as he runs, even if the villains are shooting at his head.
6. If you shoot someone above you, even if he is standing behind a railing, he will ALWAYS fall forward.
7. If you shoot someone with a gun in their hand, especially an automatic weapon, they will generally fire a round or spray a volley as they fall.
8. Drug dealers are always referred to as "pushers," because nobody buys drugs voluntarily in the 80s -- they are pushed into it.
9. If a just-introduced character says he has a baby on the way, or that he's due to retire next week, he will be killed before the first commercial.
10. A character using a six-shooter will fire 8 - 10 times before he needs to reload.
11. Private detectives are allowed to kill as many bad guys as they wish without serious inconvenience to themselves. If the hero kills a bad guy he is generally allowed to leave the scene and go about his business by the local police: at most, a detective will say, "I want you in my office tomorrow morning, sharp!"
12. If a hero cop meets an old partner or mentor we've never seen before, and this character doesn't die immediately, there is 100% chance he will turn out to be corrupt and will need to be busted by the hero at the end of the episode.
13. If a private detective is in a shootout with bad guys, and the cops come, the cops will automatically know who the good guy is when they arrive: they will never gun down the good guy by mistake. Sometimes they will even arrest the bad guys and drive off even as our heroes calmly reload their guns and say affirming things before the credits roll.
14. If a hero character is seriously wounded, even at the point of death and not expected to live, they will be up and about in the next episode as if nothing happened, and the incident will never be mentioned or referenced again. This also applies to the deaths of loved ones and bad breakups. Complete reset.
15. The scene in "Dirty Harry" where Scorpio forces Harry to run all around Frisco with the ransom money will sooner or later be repeated in any cop or private detective show.
16. A blonde woman is generally a sexpot or an idiot. A blond man is almost always a bully, moron or a snotty rich kid with a sweater around his neck. A redheaded woman is either a comical sidekick, a sexual glutton or a dangerous lunatic.
17. At some point one of the heroes or hero sidekicks, usually the one who doesn't get in fights a lot, will slug a bad guy in a bar fight, wince in pain, and then shake out his hand as if it's broken.
18. Most male children below the age of twelve will have a horrible, bowl-like helmet of hair at least an inch thick, which will make you want to see them die an appropriately horrible death. Don't hold your breath. Everyone on the show will find them adorable no matter how fucking obnoxious they might be.
19. Any "ethnic" character will usually have entrance music deemed appropriate to his race/ethnicity. An Asian character will get that lute, zither, plinking string sound. A native American will get a wooden flute. Et cetera and so on. What's more, a Frenchman will say things like "mon ami!" and "sacre bleu!", an Englishman "by Jove!" and every Irishman will sound like a fucking leprauchan.
20. Anyone shot will generally go flying, as if they have been struck by a car, rather than drop like a rock, which is what they would do in real life.
21. During a foot chase, the villain will generally find a way to run into several people who are carrying objects or pushing carts, leading to spectacular falls. The hero will follow closely behind, apologizing to those he himself knocks over.
22. During a car chase, the villain will generally find a way to run into empty carboard boxes, empty ice cream containers, and garbage cans full of paper trash. He will generally find a construction site to drive through and a worker will try to wave him off until the last moment and then leap aside. If the chase occurs in the early/mid part of the show, the hero will often find a large body of water to drive into in slow motion.
23. At the climax of the show, the unarmed hero may confront the armed villain, who will flee instead of simply killing the hero. As the hero pursues the bad guy, the bad guy will stop periodically to shoot at the hero. He will always miss, and he will keep missing until he runs out of ammuniton. The hero will then tackle him and defeat him in a fistfight.
24. A powerful villain, head of a major, perhaps international, crime syndicate, will show up to a drug deal or other criminal transaction...in person, thus allowing himself to be captured in a sting operation which might possibly fool a real-life meth-head with a dirty pipe in his boot.
25. At the end of an episode, villains freely confess their crimes in great detail (a la Dr. Evil) right before they point the gun at the hero and say, "And now I'll kill you, too!" whereupon the cops will bust in and take the crook into custody. Afterwhich they will go all Scooby Doo and say, "And I would have gotten away with it if not for you!" Nobody ever exercises their right to remain silent.
At this point you might think I am reveling in my ridicule of these tropes. Not a bit of it. I actually admire the consistency. It's comforting. And I think that is what 80s television offers me -- comfort. A "beginner-to-moderate" level of difficulty in terms of storytelling and execution. When I come home from the courthouse, exhausted in body and spirit, I do not want the unremitting brutality and moral ambiguity of shows like "The Walking Dead" or "Breaking Bad." I do not want my brain taxed by ultraxomplex mysteries, nor do I necessarily wish to unravel knotty moral problems. I want relief from these things, and the Eighties gives me that relief. The general idea was not to upset audiences nor provoke head-scratching, but to supply them with entertainment according to themes which could be variated but not necessarily departed from. Usually the good guy won. Usually the murderer got caught. Usually the looming crisis or pending disaster was averted. Usually the basic precepts of society and morality and so forth were upheld, the foundations tested but unshaken. The brute fact is that with a fair number of exceptions, the TV of this period was unchallenging. Not necessarily stupid or silly or poorly written or badly acted: simply unchallenging. "Cozy" might be the proper word. Like a good episode of "Murder, She Wrote," it gave us what we were expecting, which is another way of saying it was giving us what we wanted, if not necessarily what we needed. I have always maintained that the same play, watched over and over again with different actors, is almost the same as watching different plays: if this were not so, Shakespeare would have gone out of fashion 300 years ago. And looking back, over the gulf of 33 years, I can see that what we wanted was not to be too upset, too agitated, too threatened by what we were seeing on our idiot boxes. We lived in a world that made no sense, and it was natural to desire that T.J. Hooker or Matt Houston or even good old Jessica Fletcher would be able to throttle or talk some logic back into it -- between commercials, of course.
We now live in an age when audiences want nothing but insoluble problems and endless shades of gray. Whether it's "The Last of Us" or "House of the Dragon," our protagonists usually contain nearly as much villainy as the villains. Everyone is tortured. Everyone is troubled. Everyone is pulled in multiple directions and is constantly having their beliefs, morals, codes and values challenged and occasionally destroyed by circumstances. There is a place for this in storytelling, of course, but it shouldn't be the only place. Sometimes I just want to turn off my brain, watch "The Fall Guy" get his man, and be done with it.
Of course, one of the interesting things about studying television (or cinema) is what it tells us about the era in which it was produced. I don't just mean its fashion and technology, or its political atmosphere: I mean what you can show and can't show, say and can't say. And beyond that, what sort of worldview it tends to espouse, even if only subconsciously. Popular culture is as good a barometer of a society as any other metric out there, and centuries hence, if anyone is still around to examine it, I've little doubt the conclusions our descendants draw about us will come largely from their knowledge about how we amused ourselves.
For good or ill.
In the last few years I have done a great deal of TV watching from my own formative period, the 1980s. I was struck immediately by its unwritten rules, the ones never codified but readily apparent to any watcher. The things that showed up again and again regardless of the genre of the show in question, as if they were immutable laws of the universe, or the peculiarities of the Fates:
1. A car will explode given any opportunity whatsoever. It will explode if is struck by another car, if the gas tank is shot, if it smashes against a wall, and most interestingly, not only if it goes over a cliff...but in midair, before it hits anything. What's more, it will explode in a fiery holocaust, as if it is absolutely soaked in gasoline.
2. Getting shot in the shoulder hurts about as much as barking your shin against a coffee table -- maybe less. It is never fatal and bleeds about as much as a shaving cut. It is not even debilatative, but usually involves the hero wearing a small bandage or at most, a sling in the next scene: however, he can throw the sling off and operate normally if he has to.
3. Getting knocked unconscious is not a big deal. Sometimes a hero will get knocked out two or even three times in the same episode without any lasting effects whatsoever. He won't be concussed. He won't feel dizzy or nauseous or act confused or angry for more than ten seconds. What's more, a man knocked unconscious will remember everything right up to the second they were KO'd.
4. Being thrown from a moving car is not dangerous and does not lead to injury, not even if the hero lands on solid concrete. The hero will usually climb to his feet, dust himself off, and walk it off as if he did no more than slip in the mud.
5. If the hero is being shot at, the bullets will always hit the dirt in a row behind his heels as he runs, even if the villains are shooting at his head.
6. If you shoot someone above you, even if he is standing behind a railing, he will ALWAYS fall forward.
7. If you shoot someone with a gun in their hand, especially an automatic weapon, they will generally fire a round or spray a volley as they fall.
8. Drug dealers are always referred to as "pushers," because nobody buys drugs voluntarily in the 80s -- they are pushed into it.
9. If a just-introduced character says he has a baby on the way, or that he's due to retire next week, he will be killed before the first commercial.
10. A character using a six-shooter will fire 8 - 10 times before he needs to reload.
11. Private detectives are allowed to kill as many bad guys as they wish without serious inconvenience to themselves. If the hero kills a bad guy he is generally allowed to leave the scene and go about his business by the local police: at most, a detective will say, "I want you in my office tomorrow morning, sharp!"
12. If a hero cop meets an old partner or mentor we've never seen before, and this character doesn't die immediately, there is 100% chance he will turn out to be corrupt and will need to be busted by the hero at the end of the episode.
13. If a private detective is in a shootout with bad guys, and the cops come, the cops will automatically know who the good guy is when they arrive: they will never gun down the good guy by mistake. Sometimes they will even arrest the bad guys and drive off even as our heroes calmly reload their guns and say affirming things before the credits roll.
14. If a hero character is seriously wounded, even at the point of death and not expected to live, they will be up and about in the next episode as if nothing happened, and the incident will never be mentioned or referenced again. This also applies to the deaths of loved ones and bad breakups. Complete reset.
15. The scene in "Dirty Harry" where Scorpio forces Harry to run all around Frisco with the ransom money will sooner or later be repeated in any cop or private detective show.
16. A blonde woman is generally a sexpot or an idiot. A blond man is almost always a bully, moron or a snotty rich kid with a sweater around his neck. A redheaded woman is either a comical sidekick, a sexual glutton or a dangerous lunatic.
17. At some point one of the heroes or hero sidekicks, usually the one who doesn't get in fights a lot, will slug a bad guy in a bar fight, wince in pain, and then shake out his hand as if it's broken.
18. Most male children below the age of twelve will have a horrible, bowl-like helmet of hair at least an inch thick, which will make you want to see them die an appropriately horrible death. Don't hold your breath. Everyone on the show will find them adorable no matter how fucking obnoxious they might be.
19. Any "ethnic" character will usually have entrance music deemed appropriate to his race/ethnicity. An Asian character will get that lute, zither, plinking string sound. A native American will get a wooden flute. Et cetera and so on. What's more, a Frenchman will say things like "mon ami!" and "sacre bleu!", an Englishman "by Jove!" and every Irishman will sound like a fucking leprauchan.
20. Anyone shot will generally go flying, as if they have been struck by a car, rather than drop like a rock, which is what they would do in real life.
21. During a foot chase, the villain will generally find a way to run into several people who are carrying objects or pushing carts, leading to spectacular falls. The hero will follow closely behind, apologizing to those he himself knocks over.
22. During a car chase, the villain will generally find a way to run into empty carboard boxes, empty ice cream containers, and garbage cans full of paper trash. He will generally find a construction site to drive through and a worker will try to wave him off until the last moment and then leap aside. If the chase occurs in the early/mid part of the show, the hero will often find a large body of water to drive into in slow motion.
23. At the climax of the show, the unarmed hero may confront the armed villain, who will flee instead of simply killing the hero. As the hero pursues the bad guy, the bad guy will stop periodically to shoot at the hero. He will always miss, and he will keep missing until he runs out of ammuniton. The hero will then tackle him and defeat him in a fistfight.
24. A powerful villain, head of a major, perhaps international, crime syndicate, will show up to a drug deal or other criminal transaction...in person, thus allowing himself to be captured in a sting operation which might possibly fool a real-life meth-head with a dirty pipe in his boot.
25. At the end of an episode, villains freely confess their crimes in great detail (a la Dr. Evil) right before they point the gun at the hero and say, "And now I'll kill you, too!" whereupon the cops will bust in and take the crook into custody. Afterwhich they will go all Scooby Doo and say, "And I would have gotten away with it if not for you!" Nobody ever exercises their right to remain silent.
At this point you might think I am reveling in my ridicule of these tropes. Not a bit of it. I actually admire the consistency. It's comforting. And I think that is what 80s television offers me -- comfort. A "beginner-to-moderate" level of difficulty in terms of storytelling and execution. When I come home from the courthouse, exhausted in body and spirit, I do not want the unremitting brutality and moral ambiguity of shows like "The Walking Dead" or "Breaking Bad." I do not want my brain taxed by ultraxomplex mysteries, nor do I necessarily wish to unravel knotty moral problems. I want relief from these things, and the Eighties gives me that relief. The general idea was not to upset audiences nor provoke head-scratching, but to supply them with entertainment according to themes which could be variated but not necessarily departed from. Usually the good guy won. Usually the murderer got caught. Usually the looming crisis or pending disaster was averted. Usually the basic precepts of society and morality and so forth were upheld, the foundations tested but unshaken. The brute fact is that with a fair number of exceptions, the TV of this period was unchallenging. Not necessarily stupid or silly or poorly written or badly acted: simply unchallenging. "Cozy" might be the proper word. Like a good episode of "Murder, She Wrote," it gave us what we were expecting, which is another way of saying it was giving us what we wanted, if not necessarily what we needed. I have always maintained that the same play, watched over and over again with different actors, is almost the same as watching different plays: if this were not so, Shakespeare would have gone out of fashion 300 years ago. And looking back, over the gulf of 33 years, I can see that what we wanted was not to be too upset, too agitated, too threatened by what we were seeing on our idiot boxes. We lived in a world that made no sense, and it was natural to desire that T.J. Hooker or Matt Houston or even good old Jessica Fletcher would be able to throttle or talk some logic back into it -- between commercials, of course.
We now live in an age when audiences want nothing but insoluble problems and endless shades of gray. Whether it's "The Last of Us" or "House of the Dragon," our protagonists usually contain nearly as much villainy as the villains. Everyone is tortured. Everyone is troubled. Everyone is pulled in multiple directions and is constantly having their beliefs, morals, codes and values challenged and occasionally destroyed by circumstances. There is a place for this in storytelling, of course, but it shouldn't be the only place. Sometimes I just want to turn off my brain, watch "The Fall Guy" get his man, and be done with it.
March 29, 2023
WHY THE RUSSIAN ARMY SUCKS: A VERY BRIEF EXPLANATION
Anyone who follows world events is by now aware that Vladimir Putin's "special military operation" is going very poorly indeed. What was supposed to be a three-day walkover is now entering its second year, and some (perhaps biased) sources put Russian casualties as high as 690,000 men killed, wounded and missing, with over 10,000 combat vehicles and 2,600 artillery systems lost in the bargain. These are staggering figures and would remain staggering even if cut in half: Europe has not seen their like since 1945. The now-tired joke, that Putin started the war thinking he had the second best military in the world, only to find he had the second best military in Ukraine, is actually quite true. The question remains: why?
Putin has been in power for over twenty years in one guise or another. He spent much of that time modernizing and reshaping the military he inherited from the Soviet Union, bringing it slowly to par with Western nations not only in terms of technology but also, supposedly, composition and doctrine. He tested his military in numerous small-scale wars, and, often finding it wanting, pressed his ministers and generals to identify problems and come up with and impliment practical solutions. He also boasted of technological breakthroughs (such as hypersonic weapons, nuclear torpedoes, etc.) which effectively put Russia ahead, in some areas, of its Western and Asian rivals. On top of this, he had a vast and highly sophisticated intelligence network with very deep roots. When he gave the go-ahead to invade Ukraine, he did so with what seemed like an insurmountable advantage in every possible area...and yet he has failed, and failed miserably. Twenty years of supposed reforms have yielded an army which has shown itself to be shamefully incompetent on the battlefield. It is my belief, based on a lot of study, that this failure has three basic causes, each of which Putin inherited from the defunct Soviet Union and its forebearer, the old Russian Empire. I would like to explore this subject more fully on Saturday's post, but for now I will keep things short:
1. Corruption. The Russian Federation is a country with very little legitimacy. Putin is a dictator surrounded by oligarchs, just as Soviet premiers were dictators surrounded by Party nomenklatura, just as the Tsars were dictators surrounded by imperial councilors. In each instance you had a single nearly all-powerful man surrounded by men of lesser but still consdierable power. They had everything, everyone else had scraps, and there were no real checks on the supremacy of the ruling body. In such an atmosphere, where there is no political or judicial freedom, or freedom of the press, where the police are merely enforcers for the ruling class, and where criticism of the leader or his system is viewed as treason, corruption flourishes. There is nothing to stop it. And because nobody in a dictatorship profits by telling superiors what they do not wish to hear, even dictators who actively wish to rid themselves corruption find themselves helpless against it. Their reforms and initiatives succeed on paper, but in practice are subverted by a shadow system which everyone knows exists, but nobody talks about. Money earmarked for weapons systems is pocketed by defense ministers. Equipment meant for troops is sold on the black market by generals. Troops supposedly training for combat are hired out to work in factories or on farms by their officers and never learn their trade. The list is almost endless, and it covers everything from the soldier forced to "buy back" his stolen rifle from his corrupt sergeant (who has stolen it) to the naval vessel which can't sail out of the harbor because its repairs were never made -- the contractors faked the work. This termite-like activity eats away at the military from the inside, leaving a hollowed-out shell which looks formiddable but has no substance or strength when put to the test. And since there is no one to tell the emperor he has no clothes, the emperor is inevitably shocked when he discovers himself naked in the midde of a war despite all his insistence that his raiments are beautiful and intimidating. Putin, at his heart, is a gangster, and like all gangsters has no moral center, no understanding of the value of ethics, no grasp of the necessity of being told unpleasant truths. It is much easier to shoot a messenger than listen to bad news, and after a few messengers get shot, the rest of them get a message of their own: tell the boss what he wants to hear.
2. Deception. The Soviets were masters of what they called "disinformation," i.e. lying. Obsessed with secrecy, and with deceiving enemies as to both their strengths, weaknesses and intentions, they raised the science of strategic deception to an art. They were so good at it they managed to convince the world that major events were happening that were not, and also that major events which were in fact taking place never happened at all. It was the same with everything from industrial achievements to military technology.
Just trying to figure out what the Soviets had up their sleeve, if anything, or even if they even had a sleeve, was a nuisance and a nightmare for Western intelligence agencies. There is, however, a decided downside to being such damned good liars and illusionists. Sooner or later, one begins to believe one's own lies, and even worse, to lose the capacity to recognize truth when they see it. Putin, a former KGB officer, had the world believing his military was aces, second only to the United States in power. That was a brilliant coup. However, he himself believed it, or something close to it: and this belief probably shaped his advisors' reports to him about his strategic ambitions in Ukraine. After all (and here we see how this point builds off my last), nobody wants to upset The Boss when The Boss can ruin you, imprison you, have you sent to a penal colony in the Arctic Circle, or simply shot, just because he feels like it. So of all the thousands and tens of thousands of ministers, officers, agents, analysts, plants, moles, spies, and traitors in Putin's employ, there was not one to tell him that Ukranians didn't want to be "liberated," that they actually liked their independence and freedom, that they did not consider themselves Russians as he did, and might actually fight back harder in 2022 than they did in 2014, when he stole the whole of the Crimea from them. The combination of lies served up from below and lies cooked up from above led Putin into a kind of blind man's bluff, except that Putin believed he could see. As Legasov says in CHERNOBYL, "Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies?"
3. Brutality. The army of Russia, whether in Tsarist, Soviet or Federative guise, has always been known for its brutality and cruelty. Most people think of this savage behavior as being directed at its enemies, whoever they might be: it is less well known that the Russian army has an equally terrible reputation for behavior towards its own troops. In "Inside the Soviet Army," Vladimir Rezun wrote of how the conscripted private soldier in Russia could expect to be beaten and humiliated regularly starting on his first night; how he could expect to have his personal property stolen and his pay extorted; how he would be expected to do the work of 2 - 3 men at all times; and how he would have to wait hand an foot upon older, more experienced soldiers or face yet more beatings and humiliations. His food was terrible and insufficient, his barracks criminally overcrowded, he had no recreation of any kind, and discipline was extremely harsh, and could include special prisons in which conditions could drive a man insane or to suicide with astonishing rapidity. And this he had to endure for the whole two years of service. When the Soviet Union collapsed, I wrongly assumed all of this brutality would disappear with the coming of democracy, but Putin killed Russian democracy and he also failed, or perhaps ignored or even encouraged, his army's terrible legacy of both brutalizing and neglecting its soldiers. But it gets worse, because ever since the ages of the Tsars, Russian generals, who permitted this brutalized outlook, have also viewed the common soldier as little more than cannon fodder, and have made their tactical dispositions accordingly. Instead of clever plans, Russian generals were notorious for using human wave assaults on their enemies, wearing them down by sheer force of numbers without regards as to casualties. Coupled with rampant corruption that robs the soldier of his weaponry and equipment, the Russian Army finds itself a completely dysfunctional system in which the soldier is basically worthless in the eyes of his own leaders. There is no loyalty, no humanity, in either in the general or the private: the deeper motivations that make soldiers fight well are absent from these debased, exploited, warped creatures. Since the opening phase of the "special military operation," we have seen the awful tactics of 1914 and 1941 repeated again: masses of men thrown mindlessly at enemy guns to be mowed down, only to be replaced by fresh masses, similarly slaughtered. We have seen anguished, angry communications by Russian soldiers complaining about clumsy tactics, lack of food, lack of ammunition, lack of equipment, lack of care. And we have seen horrible atrocities perpetrated against Ukrainian men, women and children by those soldiers, who lack any sense of restraint or decency. This climate of savagery could be forgiven if it produced results, for results are all that matter in war, but it has not only failed Russia, it has served Ukraine. The Ukrainians hate the Russians for what they have done, and have every incentive to keep fighting them and not to quit. The Russians, on the other hand, have every possible incentive to desert or to surrender. Captivity is probably preferable to service in many Russian units nowadays, and certainly carries with it higher chances of survival.
This is obviously a very complex subject and this missive only skims the surface of the deep-seated cultural issues which persist and bedevil the Russian army. There is much more to analyze and discuss. But these three points, if nothing else, serve as a salutary warning to all the would-be dictators and oligarchs in this country, and all those who enable them at the ballot box. Power for its own sake is not merely corrupting, it is weakening: there is a reason why democracies and not dictatorships tend to win wars. Certain people have worked hard in recent years to normalize brutality, corruption and lying in our society, probably because in their misguided minds all of it equates to strength: but I believe I have shown here, if only in brief, that it equates to precisely the opposite.
Putin has been in power for over twenty years in one guise or another. He spent much of that time modernizing and reshaping the military he inherited from the Soviet Union, bringing it slowly to par with Western nations not only in terms of technology but also, supposedly, composition and doctrine. He tested his military in numerous small-scale wars, and, often finding it wanting, pressed his ministers and generals to identify problems and come up with and impliment practical solutions. He also boasted of technological breakthroughs (such as hypersonic weapons, nuclear torpedoes, etc.) which effectively put Russia ahead, in some areas, of its Western and Asian rivals. On top of this, he had a vast and highly sophisticated intelligence network with very deep roots. When he gave the go-ahead to invade Ukraine, he did so with what seemed like an insurmountable advantage in every possible area...and yet he has failed, and failed miserably. Twenty years of supposed reforms have yielded an army which has shown itself to be shamefully incompetent on the battlefield. It is my belief, based on a lot of study, that this failure has three basic causes, each of which Putin inherited from the defunct Soviet Union and its forebearer, the old Russian Empire. I would like to explore this subject more fully on Saturday's post, but for now I will keep things short:
1. Corruption. The Russian Federation is a country with very little legitimacy. Putin is a dictator surrounded by oligarchs, just as Soviet premiers were dictators surrounded by Party nomenklatura, just as the Tsars were dictators surrounded by imperial councilors. In each instance you had a single nearly all-powerful man surrounded by men of lesser but still consdierable power. They had everything, everyone else had scraps, and there were no real checks on the supremacy of the ruling body. In such an atmosphere, where there is no political or judicial freedom, or freedom of the press, where the police are merely enforcers for the ruling class, and where criticism of the leader or his system is viewed as treason, corruption flourishes. There is nothing to stop it. And because nobody in a dictatorship profits by telling superiors what they do not wish to hear, even dictators who actively wish to rid themselves corruption find themselves helpless against it. Their reforms and initiatives succeed on paper, but in practice are subverted by a shadow system which everyone knows exists, but nobody talks about. Money earmarked for weapons systems is pocketed by defense ministers. Equipment meant for troops is sold on the black market by generals. Troops supposedly training for combat are hired out to work in factories or on farms by their officers and never learn their trade. The list is almost endless, and it covers everything from the soldier forced to "buy back" his stolen rifle from his corrupt sergeant (who has stolen it) to the naval vessel which can't sail out of the harbor because its repairs were never made -- the contractors faked the work. This termite-like activity eats away at the military from the inside, leaving a hollowed-out shell which looks formiddable but has no substance or strength when put to the test. And since there is no one to tell the emperor he has no clothes, the emperor is inevitably shocked when he discovers himself naked in the midde of a war despite all his insistence that his raiments are beautiful and intimidating. Putin, at his heart, is a gangster, and like all gangsters has no moral center, no understanding of the value of ethics, no grasp of the necessity of being told unpleasant truths. It is much easier to shoot a messenger than listen to bad news, and after a few messengers get shot, the rest of them get a message of their own: tell the boss what he wants to hear.
2. Deception. The Soviets were masters of what they called "disinformation," i.e. lying. Obsessed with secrecy, and with deceiving enemies as to both their strengths, weaknesses and intentions, they raised the science of strategic deception to an art. They were so good at it they managed to convince the world that major events were happening that were not, and also that major events which were in fact taking place never happened at all. It was the same with everything from industrial achievements to military technology.
Just trying to figure out what the Soviets had up their sleeve, if anything, or even if they even had a sleeve, was a nuisance and a nightmare for Western intelligence agencies. There is, however, a decided downside to being such damned good liars and illusionists. Sooner or later, one begins to believe one's own lies, and even worse, to lose the capacity to recognize truth when they see it. Putin, a former KGB officer, had the world believing his military was aces, second only to the United States in power. That was a brilliant coup. However, he himself believed it, or something close to it: and this belief probably shaped his advisors' reports to him about his strategic ambitions in Ukraine. After all (and here we see how this point builds off my last), nobody wants to upset The Boss when The Boss can ruin you, imprison you, have you sent to a penal colony in the Arctic Circle, or simply shot, just because he feels like it. So of all the thousands and tens of thousands of ministers, officers, agents, analysts, plants, moles, spies, and traitors in Putin's employ, there was not one to tell him that Ukranians didn't want to be "liberated," that they actually liked their independence and freedom, that they did not consider themselves Russians as he did, and might actually fight back harder in 2022 than they did in 2014, when he stole the whole of the Crimea from them. The combination of lies served up from below and lies cooked up from above led Putin into a kind of blind man's bluff, except that Putin believed he could see. As Legasov says in CHERNOBYL, "Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies?"
3. Brutality. The army of Russia, whether in Tsarist, Soviet or Federative guise, has always been known for its brutality and cruelty. Most people think of this savage behavior as being directed at its enemies, whoever they might be: it is less well known that the Russian army has an equally terrible reputation for behavior towards its own troops. In "Inside the Soviet Army," Vladimir Rezun wrote of how the conscripted private soldier in Russia could expect to be beaten and humiliated regularly starting on his first night; how he could expect to have his personal property stolen and his pay extorted; how he would be expected to do the work of 2 - 3 men at all times; and how he would have to wait hand an foot upon older, more experienced soldiers or face yet more beatings and humiliations. His food was terrible and insufficient, his barracks criminally overcrowded, he had no recreation of any kind, and discipline was extremely harsh, and could include special prisons in which conditions could drive a man insane or to suicide with astonishing rapidity. And this he had to endure for the whole two years of service. When the Soviet Union collapsed, I wrongly assumed all of this brutality would disappear with the coming of democracy, but Putin killed Russian democracy and he also failed, or perhaps ignored or even encouraged, his army's terrible legacy of both brutalizing and neglecting its soldiers. But it gets worse, because ever since the ages of the Tsars, Russian generals, who permitted this brutalized outlook, have also viewed the common soldier as little more than cannon fodder, and have made their tactical dispositions accordingly. Instead of clever plans, Russian generals were notorious for using human wave assaults on their enemies, wearing them down by sheer force of numbers without regards as to casualties. Coupled with rampant corruption that robs the soldier of his weaponry and equipment, the Russian Army finds itself a completely dysfunctional system in which the soldier is basically worthless in the eyes of his own leaders. There is no loyalty, no humanity, in either in the general or the private: the deeper motivations that make soldiers fight well are absent from these debased, exploited, warped creatures. Since the opening phase of the "special military operation," we have seen the awful tactics of 1914 and 1941 repeated again: masses of men thrown mindlessly at enemy guns to be mowed down, only to be replaced by fresh masses, similarly slaughtered. We have seen anguished, angry communications by Russian soldiers complaining about clumsy tactics, lack of food, lack of ammunition, lack of equipment, lack of care. And we have seen horrible atrocities perpetrated against Ukrainian men, women and children by those soldiers, who lack any sense of restraint or decency. This climate of savagery could be forgiven if it produced results, for results are all that matter in war, but it has not only failed Russia, it has served Ukraine. The Ukrainians hate the Russians for what they have done, and have every incentive to keep fighting them and not to quit. The Russians, on the other hand, have every possible incentive to desert or to surrender. Captivity is probably preferable to service in many Russian units nowadays, and certainly carries with it higher chances of survival.
This is obviously a very complex subject and this missive only skims the surface of the deep-seated cultural issues which persist and bedevil the Russian army. There is much more to analyze and discuss. But these three points, if nothing else, serve as a salutary warning to all the would-be dictators and oligarchs in this country, and all those who enable them at the ballot box. Power for its own sake is not merely corrupting, it is weakening: there is a reason why democracies and not dictatorships tend to win wars. Certain people have worked hard in recent years to normalize brutality, corruption and lying in our society, probably because in their misguided minds all of it equates to strength: but I believe I have shown here, if only in brief, that it equates to precisely the opposite.
March 25, 2023
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: WRITING LIFE
Every now and again someone asks me what it's like to be an author. I'm never sure how I'm supposed to respond. After all, what's it like to be a surgeon? Or a plumber? Or a soldier? What's it like to be a fisherman or law clerk or stuntman? What's it like to be a financier or work at a soup kitchen? The question is probably impossible to answer regardless of who you pose it to, because before I am an author, and indeed after, I am also a human being. It is on that point that you and I are most likely to have a point of contact, something in common, a frame of reference from which we can operate. But sometimes I enjoy a challenge, so I am going to try to explain what a writer's life is like, at least at my particular level. (What it's like for Stephen King I couldn't possibly tell you.)
First and foremost: the writer, if he is a true writer and not a hobbyist or a poseur, dilletente, or worker bee (someone who has skill and integrity but is not passionate, not driven to do the thing), is always a writer. He is always on. Nearly everything he sees, observes, thinks about, or experiences is filtered through the lens of his creative faculty. What I mean by this is that reality, everyday reality -- walking around town, driving to the grocery store, jogging, watching a sunset -- has to pass through a kind of screen which lets the forgettable stuff pass but allows the interesting fragments to accumulate in what I call The Writer's Place, a portion of the brain which stores things that might later turn up in a story. Nothing, now matter how trivial or tragic, not even his dreams, are immune from this process. The writer is constantly gathering material, and this is process never stops. There is no "off" switch. In this sense he is both blessed and cursed. The blessing comes from the fact that he can take trivial incidents that others would certainly forget and turn them into pieces of mosaic; he can create art from the most random thoughts, ideas, glimpses, and happenings. The curse is that this faculty, never resting, intrudes on all of his experiences and emotions in the most vulgar and tasteless way. In the grip of terrible grief, the writer is still a writer. Part of him, a part without any sense of decorum or human feeling, is recording and filtering his own pain, evaluating it for its utility as source material for a future book. There are times that the writer cannot help but despise himself for this. As Thomas Harris wrote in Red Dragon, "Graham regarded his own intelligence as grotesque but useful, like a chair made from antlers. There was nothing he could do about it."
Because writing is a solitary process, the ordinary writer probably deals with more loneliness than most people, but it follows that this is more faceted of a statement than it sounds. Writers being artists, they live in a constant relationship with their art which most others cannot understand. The process I described above separates them from other people, but this is not the only obstacle to forming and maintaining human relationships. Writers are often some form of introverts, comfortable only on their own ground and within their own sphere of interest. Writers of the Hemingway or Thompson type, who are life-devouring raconteurs and bon vivants, are a relative rarity and even they may be faking it to a degree. Writers make-believe for a living, so it is only natural that they are more comfortable in make-believe worlds than anywhere else. No writer worth anything has not fantasized regularly since childhood about living in some other universe, be it fantasy, science-fiction or something else entirely. This is not mere projection: it is a reflection of the discomfort they feel as human beings in a world that does not understand them, and which they themselves do not understand. It is a curious phenomenon indeed, for the true writer is a student of the human condition and of life itself, yet he is generally at odds with both humans and what we would call everyday reality. Perhaps it is this very alienation which allows him to make the observations, the deductions, the conclusions which escape those who are happier and better-suited to this world. Perhaps only one who is "in but not of" can truly understand the world. But this ability, like the other, comes with a price. Writers probably fantasize about being "normal" almost as much as they fantasize about being Captain Kirk, Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Because most people do not understand the writing process, writers are often unintentionally insulted by those around them. J.K. Rowling humorously observed that the movie studio suits she dealt with regularly seemed to act as if the Harry Potter books were crystals, or mushrooms, or slalagmites, forming by themselves almost independently of Rowling herself. They did not grasp that writing is work, very hard work indeed, and that a novel, particularly a lengthy one, may take years to complete even if the writer scarcely takes a day off. In my own life, I have often noted that most people not only do not understand this, they take the opposite view to a logical absurdity. I have been told by more than one overweight computer programmer that what I do does not compare with what they do; when I point out that we both sit in chairs in front of computers all day, but they don't need any imagination to do their job and I require an enormity of it, they stare at me as if I had just insulted their mothers. But it is a fact that writing is exhausting work. To constantly tap the creative faculty requires from me more energy than I expend when swimming or hiking or going to the gym. I was never so famished after an hour in a martial arts studio as I was after three hours sitting in graduate school classes. Brain work is hard word, and when you throw the creative side into action alongside the logical one, the energy drain is enormous.
As a result of this, the completion of a story can be a curious experience. Instead of a feeling of accomplishment, triumph and joy, a writer hitting the final period on a manuscript which has been his sole focus for many months or even years often experiences only a low-grade form of depression: a hollow, weary, anticlimactic sort of feeling. Like the evil Morgoth in Tolkien's legendarium, writers pour so much of themselves into their work that they often emerge from the process weakened and tired, yet at the same time restless: already they are planning their next project. After all, what the hell else are they going to do? Unlike Hemingway, who was famous (and infamous) for resting from his literary labors by going on lengthy, debaucherous escapades across Europe with a colorful entourage of friends and hangerso-on from all walks of life, the ordinary writer is not extroverted enough nor even interested enough to take much time off. This is because writing, though it is hard work, is not really "work" to a writer, anymore than swimming is work to a fish. It's part and parcel of existence.
This brings me to another curious torment of the writer: creative restlessness. Because writers so greatly enjoy the opening phase of a project, when their pencils are sharpened, their coffee hot and their enthusiasm at full steam, they tend to go seeking the next project before they have even recovered mentally from the last one. To begin something new while still standing in the ashes of something old is a very writer-y thing to do, and is probably akin to a junkie chasing the dragon, or more accurately, like a junkie cooking up a second shot before the effects of the first one have completely worn off. (As a personal example: I finished the first draft of "Knuckle Down: A Cage Life Novel" on New Year's Eve, 2014. I began "The Night Hunter" on New Year's Day, 2015.)
Creative restlessness can be a blessing in that it keeps a writer's fingers moving, keeps the ink flowing, keeps projects landing on editorial desks. Stephen King owes his entire existence to the phenomenon: he can't sit back on his laurels but is forever banging out new manuscripts. On the other hand, this sort of literary wanderlust can also be a terrible curse. The vast majority of unsuccessful writers are unsuccessful not because of lack of talent (lacking talent is hardly a bar to literary success) because they cannot maintain enthusiasm for what they are writing long enough to finish it. Their desk drawers are crammed with quarter-finished and half-finished novels, screenplays, novellas, short stories. Each of these projects was begun in a white-hot passion and each discarded when that passion cooled. This sort of writer is forever chasing that first day, first week, first month enthusiasm without realizing that such enthusiasm almost never lasts all the way through a project. With one exception, I can't think of anything I've written over the length of a short story which didn't involve some level of slogging and grinding to complete. What gets me over that finish line is not so much discipline per se as simply willpower, stubbornness, monomania. Having spent the first thirty-plus years of my life almost pathologically unable to finish anything, I can no longer abide the existence of an unfinished tale. It took me better than six years to finish "Something Evil," and there were times when I was utterly in despair of ever completing even a sandpaper-rough first draft: the only way I finally triumphed was to ban myself from starting any new novel-length projects until I had written "the end" on that one. I had to corral my creative restlessness and channel the frustration back into the masterwork: else it should never have been finished. Writers who learn how to do this will, if nothing else, actually complete first drafts: but it is something many aspiring writers never learn to do. They simply cannot focus their creativity long enough to fully create anything.
There are other factors which effect writers which many do not fully appreciate even within the writing community itself. George Orwell once remarked that we live in a political age, and that it was folly to believe writing in any form could not be affected (or tainted) by politics. This sad fact is more true today than it was in his lifetime, and this weight is felt by every writer intelligent enough to feel the contours of those forces which press against him and try to squeeze his thoughts and creativity into pre-arranged shapes, or worse yet, censor them entirely. Many novels, during the editing process, are filtered through "sensitivity reads" to screen for potential "bias, racism or unintentional stereotypes." This sounds reasonable on the surface, until one realizes that such things are often very difficult to quantify and come down to subjective judgments made by people with their own biases. One senstivity reader may find bias or stereotype in a novel; another may regard its depictions as spot-on accurate. Whose judgment is correct? The question and the answer are equally subjective in nature and so the writer finds himself hoping he lands the "right" reader, i.e. one who sees no evil in his work. This may seem only an inconvenience, part of the game so to speak, but the effect of this in the larger sense is to make many writers avoid certain topics entirely, or to bastardize their writing to please certain specific people within the industry rather than their readership. I have yet to release a WW2 novel of mine, The Night Hunter, in part because of the resistance I encountered when seeking a traditional publisher for it. This resistance came in the form of editorial interference which had nothing to do with the book's quality, style or length. It was rooted in the fact that the main character of the novel, Paul Ramlow, is half-Jewish. I myself am none-Jewish. The editor in question felt that this was a potentially fatal objection. I do not. The novelist's entire job is to assume other points of view: the male assumes the female, the straight assumes the gay, the black assumes the white, the old assumes the young, the human assumes the animal, the animate the in-animate, et cetera and so on, almost ad infinitum. Whether one has actually, physically "walked a mile in the other's shoes" is not relevant and in many cases, not possible. Obviously one has an obligation to do their research, to avoid cliche and stereotype whenever possible, and so forth, but the idea that "white must write white" or "gay must write gay" or "combat must write combat" is in itself a bigoted position of the worst sort. It is also stupid. If we had conformed to this idea, Stephen Crane would never have written The Red Badge of Courage, nor Tolkien Lord of the Rings nor Stone The Agony and The Ecstasy. James Patterson (white) would not have been allowed to create the (black) character of Alex Cross or the (female) protagonists of the Women's Murder Club, nor Thomas Harris the character of Clarice Starling. And so on and so forth. The infiltration of politics -- racial politics, sexual politics, identity politics, or just regular old "political" politics -- into the creative field has always been a cause for serious concern, but never moreso than now. A conversation I had online a few years ago sums up the impossibility of the writer's position in this regard nowadays:
HIM: You don't have many black folks in your stories.
ME: I actually have this idea about an escaped slave during the Civil War--
HIM: What makes you think you're qualified to write for black characters?
This sort of thing, which sounds so much like an SNL comedy routine, is a sad reality for many writers in our impossible-to-satirize age. We are damned if we do and damned if we don't. We are sharply told to be more inclusive in our fiction and then attacked when we try to do exactly that. We are then told to stick to what we know and get the same abuse, slightly reworded. The straight, white, middle-aged, middle-class writer is told in the same breath that he should be more inclusive and "open-minded" in his storytelling...but also that he is a cultural thief if he tries to do so. It makes an already trying profession all the harder, and adds to the sense of bitterness and frustration many authors feel when they encounter fresh brakes and obstacles in a field already littered with them. One has only to look at the trash coming out of Hollywood in the last decade or so, scripts penned by twentysomething "activists" who were educated by Instagram and know nothing about storytelling, to see the long-term effects of placing ideology above storytelling. A writer ought to be able to come into a project with a completely open mind, and not have to worry about checking cultural and political boxes before he even begins an outline.
Many writers, it must be admitted, are not temperamentally suited for publishing -- that is to say, they are not capable of enduring the criticism, insult, thievery, and even slander they will face when their books hit the literal and virtual shelves. Someone who has slaved for three years on a novel and regards it almost as a child will not thank you for a scourging one-star review: indeed, the very act of publishing has been likened to dropping your pants and inviting the world to judge what they see. I have been fortunate enough in my reviews to date, but I'm hardly unscarred by the process. About a year and a half ago, I discovered quite by accident that there were entire threads on the dark web devoted to how to pirate and torrent my works. I was actually kind of flattered, but also dismayed by the fact I could have "fans" who would go to such lengths merely to avoid paying a 99 cent download fee. And what "fan" steals royalties from a struggling independent author anyway? I've been slammed by bloggers who clearly didn't read the books they were reviewing or became enraged over technical mistakes I didn't actually make. One of my war stories was pilloried for being "full of depressing content," as if surprised that such a tale might not be chock full o' laughs. On two occasions at least, agents rejected manuscripts of mine after heaping praise upon them, but adding that "I don't know how to sell this kind of story." One publisher even asked me for what I believed was a flat-out bribe to put my work in his magazine. Publishing is not a game for the thin-skinned, and writers are, as a rule, extremely thin-skinned. It's a Catch-22 without a solution.
But despite all of these drawbacks and frustrations, we always circle back to the fact I mentioned at the beginning of this epistle: writing is not something writers do, it's something they are. An acorn may or may not grow into an oak, but it will never become an orange tree or a spruce or a thornbush. A writer may or may not achieve literary success, they may or may not even have a single human being ever read one word of what they've written, but they will always be a writer nonetheless. They will always think like a writer and interpret reality as a writer. And this is not a bad thing. There are very few people in this world who know what they were meant to be from a young age, who have that special sense of purpose and identity (even if it is a secret identity) that this knowledge brings them. And there are precious few who will know the absolute joy of bringing into creation people, conversations, incidents, events, even whole worlds, that did not exist before the writer set then down upon the page. The writer may live in poverty and die in obscurity, but so long as the chance remains that one day, years or even centuries from now, another human will find one of his books gathering dust at a frowsy secondhand store somewhere, pay a few pennies for it, and read it casually over a cup of coffee, the writer is never defeated and never truly dead. He has a potential for immortality which few can even comprehend. And while living, he has the pure pleasure of creation for its own sake, for the sheer joy of bringing something into existence, which is as close to an absolute good as you're likely to find in life anyway. Any success beyond that, any awards he wins or money he makes or fame he enjoys, is mere gilding of the lily. As Micharl Moriarty wrote in THE GIFT OF STERN ANGELS, the pleasure of constructing a perfectly constructed sentence, independent of any reader, is its own reward.
First and foremost: the writer, if he is a true writer and not a hobbyist or a poseur, dilletente, or worker bee (someone who has skill and integrity but is not passionate, not driven to do the thing), is always a writer. He is always on. Nearly everything he sees, observes, thinks about, or experiences is filtered through the lens of his creative faculty. What I mean by this is that reality, everyday reality -- walking around town, driving to the grocery store, jogging, watching a sunset -- has to pass through a kind of screen which lets the forgettable stuff pass but allows the interesting fragments to accumulate in what I call The Writer's Place, a portion of the brain which stores things that might later turn up in a story. Nothing, now matter how trivial or tragic, not even his dreams, are immune from this process. The writer is constantly gathering material, and this is process never stops. There is no "off" switch. In this sense he is both blessed and cursed. The blessing comes from the fact that he can take trivial incidents that others would certainly forget and turn them into pieces of mosaic; he can create art from the most random thoughts, ideas, glimpses, and happenings. The curse is that this faculty, never resting, intrudes on all of his experiences and emotions in the most vulgar and tasteless way. In the grip of terrible grief, the writer is still a writer. Part of him, a part without any sense of decorum or human feeling, is recording and filtering his own pain, evaluating it for its utility as source material for a future book. There are times that the writer cannot help but despise himself for this. As Thomas Harris wrote in Red Dragon, "Graham regarded his own intelligence as grotesque but useful, like a chair made from antlers. There was nothing he could do about it."
Because writing is a solitary process, the ordinary writer probably deals with more loneliness than most people, but it follows that this is more faceted of a statement than it sounds. Writers being artists, they live in a constant relationship with their art which most others cannot understand. The process I described above separates them from other people, but this is not the only obstacle to forming and maintaining human relationships. Writers are often some form of introverts, comfortable only on their own ground and within their own sphere of interest. Writers of the Hemingway or Thompson type, who are life-devouring raconteurs and bon vivants, are a relative rarity and even they may be faking it to a degree. Writers make-believe for a living, so it is only natural that they are more comfortable in make-believe worlds than anywhere else. No writer worth anything has not fantasized regularly since childhood about living in some other universe, be it fantasy, science-fiction or something else entirely. This is not mere projection: it is a reflection of the discomfort they feel as human beings in a world that does not understand them, and which they themselves do not understand. It is a curious phenomenon indeed, for the true writer is a student of the human condition and of life itself, yet he is generally at odds with both humans and what we would call everyday reality. Perhaps it is this very alienation which allows him to make the observations, the deductions, the conclusions which escape those who are happier and better-suited to this world. Perhaps only one who is "in but not of" can truly understand the world. But this ability, like the other, comes with a price. Writers probably fantasize about being "normal" almost as much as they fantasize about being Captain Kirk, Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Because most people do not understand the writing process, writers are often unintentionally insulted by those around them. J.K. Rowling humorously observed that the movie studio suits she dealt with regularly seemed to act as if the Harry Potter books were crystals, or mushrooms, or slalagmites, forming by themselves almost independently of Rowling herself. They did not grasp that writing is work, very hard work indeed, and that a novel, particularly a lengthy one, may take years to complete even if the writer scarcely takes a day off. In my own life, I have often noted that most people not only do not understand this, they take the opposite view to a logical absurdity. I have been told by more than one overweight computer programmer that what I do does not compare with what they do; when I point out that we both sit in chairs in front of computers all day, but they don't need any imagination to do their job and I require an enormity of it, they stare at me as if I had just insulted their mothers. But it is a fact that writing is exhausting work. To constantly tap the creative faculty requires from me more energy than I expend when swimming or hiking or going to the gym. I was never so famished after an hour in a martial arts studio as I was after three hours sitting in graduate school classes. Brain work is hard word, and when you throw the creative side into action alongside the logical one, the energy drain is enormous.
As a result of this, the completion of a story can be a curious experience. Instead of a feeling of accomplishment, triumph and joy, a writer hitting the final period on a manuscript which has been his sole focus for many months or even years often experiences only a low-grade form of depression: a hollow, weary, anticlimactic sort of feeling. Like the evil Morgoth in Tolkien's legendarium, writers pour so much of themselves into their work that they often emerge from the process weakened and tired, yet at the same time restless: already they are planning their next project. After all, what the hell else are they going to do? Unlike Hemingway, who was famous (and infamous) for resting from his literary labors by going on lengthy, debaucherous escapades across Europe with a colorful entourage of friends and hangerso-on from all walks of life, the ordinary writer is not extroverted enough nor even interested enough to take much time off. This is because writing, though it is hard work, is not really "work" to a writer, anymore than swimming is work to a fish. It's part and parcel of existence.
This brings me to another curious torment of the writer: creative restlessness. Because writers so greatly enjoy the opening phase of a project, when their pencils are sharpened, their coffee hot and their enthusiasm at full steam, they tend to go seeking the next project before they have even recovered mentally from the last one. To begin something new while still standing in the ashes of something old is a very writer-y thing to do, and is probably akin to a junkie chasing the dragon, or more accurately, like a junkie cooking up a second shot before the effects of the first one have completely worn off. (As a personal example: I finished the first draft of "Knuckle Down: A Cage Life Novel" on New Year's Eve, 2014. I began "The Night Hunter" on New Year's Day, 2015.)
Creative restlessness can be a blessing in that it keeps a writer's fingers moving, keeps the ink flowing, keeps projects landing on editorial desks. Stephen King owes his entire existence to the phenomenon: he can't sit back on his laurels but is forever banging out new manuscripts. On the other hand, this sort of literary wanderlust can also be a terrible curse. The vast majority of unsuccessful writers are unsuccessful not because of lack of talent (lacking talent is hardly a bar to literary success) because they cannot maintain enthusiasm for what they are writing long enough to finish it. Their desk drawers are crammed with quarter-finished and half-finished novels, screenplays, novellas, short stories. Each of these projects was begun in a white-hot passion and each discarded when that passion cooled. This sort of writer is forever chasing that first day, first week, first month enthusiasm without realizing that such enthusiasm almost never lasts all the way through a project. With one exception, I can't think of anything I've written over the length of a short story which didn't involve some level of slogging and grinding to complete. What gets me over that finish line is not so much discipline per se as simply willpower, stubbornness, monomania. Having spent the first thirty-plus years of my life almost pathologically unable to finish anything, I can no longer abide the existence of an unfinished tale. It took me better than six years to finish "Something Evil," and there were times when I was utterly in despair of ever completing even a sandpaper-rough first draft: the only way I finally triumphed was to ban myself from starting any new novel-length projects until I had written "the end" on that one. I had to corral my creative restlessness and channel the frustration back into the masterwork: else it should never have been finished. Writers who learn how to do this will, if nothing else, actually complete first drafts: but it is something many aspiring writers never learn to do. They simply cannot focus their creativity long enough to fully create anything.
There are other factors which effect writers which many do not fully appreciate even within the writing community itself. George Orwell once remarked that we live in a political age, and that it was folly to believe writing in any form could not be affected (or tainted) by politics. This sad fact is more true today than it was in his lifetime, and this weight is felt by every writer intelligent enough to feel the contours of those forces which press against him and try to squeeze his thoughts and creativity into pre-arranged shapes, or worse yet, censor them entirely. Many novels, during the editing process, are filtered through "sensitivity reads" to screen for potential "bias, racism or unintentional stereotypes." This sounds reasonable on the surface, until one realizes that such things are often very difficult to quantify and come down to subjective judgments made by people with their own biases. One senstivity reader may find bias or stereotype in a novel; another may regard its depictions as spot-on accurate. Whose judgment is correct? The question and the answer are equally subjective in nature and so the writer finds himself hoping he lands the "right" reader, i.e. one who sees no evil in his work. This may seem only an inconvenience, part of the game so to speak, but the effect of this in the larger sense is to make many writers avoid certain topics entirely, or to bastardize their writing to please certain specific people within the industry rather than their readership. I have yet to release a WW2 novel of mine, The Night Hunter, in part because of the resistance I encountered when seeking a traditional publisher for it. This resistance came in the form of editorial interference which had nothing to do with the book's quality, style or length. It was rooted in the fact that the main character of the novel, Paul Ramlow, is half-Jewish. I myself am none-Jewish. The editor in question felt that this was a potentially fatal objection. I do not. The novelist's entire job is to assume other points of view: the male assumes the female, the straight assumes the gay, the black assumes the white, the old assumes the young, the human assumes the animal, the animate the in-animate, et cetera and so on, almost ad infinitum. Whether one has actually, physically "walked a mile in the other's shoes" is not relevant and in many cases, not possible. Obviously one has an obligation to do their research, to avoid cliche and stereotype whenever possible, and so forth, but the idea that "white must write white" or "gay must write gay" or "combat must write combat" is in itself a bigoted position of the worst sort. It is also stupid. If we had conformed to this idea, Stephen Crane would never have written The Red Badge of Courage, nor Tolkien Lord of the Rings nor Stone The Agony and The Ecstasy. James Patterson (white) would not have been allowed to create the (black) character of Alex Cross or the (female) protagonists of the Women's Murder Club, nor Thomas Harris the character of Clarice Starling. And so on and so forth. The infiltration of politics -- racial politics, sexual politics, identity politics, or just regular old "political" politics -- into the creative field has always been a cause for serious concern, but never moreso than now. A conversation I had online a few years ago sums up the impossibility of the writer's position in this regard nowadays:
HIM: You don't have many black folks in your stories.
ME: I actually have this idea about an escaped slave during the Civil War--
HIM: What makes you think you're qualified to write for black characters?
This sort of thing, which sounds so much like an SNL comedy routine, is a sad reality for many writers in our impossible-to-satirize age. We are damned if we do and damned if we don't. We are sharply told to be more inclusive in our fiction and then attacked when we try to do exactly that. We are then told to stick to what we know and get the same abuse, slightly reworded. The straight, white, middle-aged, middle-class writer is told in the same breath that he should be more inclusive and "open-minded" in his storytelling...but also that he is a cultural thief if he tries to do so. It makes an already trying profession all the harder, and adds to the sense of bitterness and frustration many authors feel when they encounter fresh brakes and obstacles in a field already littered with them. One has only to look at the trash coming out of Hollywood in the last decade or so, scripts penned by twentysomething "activists" who were educated by Instagram and know nothing about storytelling, to see the long-term effects of placing ideology above storytelling. A writer ought to be able to come into a project with a completely open mind, and not have to worry about checking cultural and political boxes before he even begins an outline.
Many writers, it must be admitted, are not temperamentally suited for publishing -- that is to say, they are not capable of enduring the criticism, insult, thievery, and even slander they will face when their books hit the literal and virtual shelves. Someone who has slaved for three years on a novel and regards it almost as a child will not thank you for a scourging one-star review: indeed, the very act of publishing has been likened to dropping your pants and inviting the world to judge what they see. I have been fortunate enough in my reviews to date, but I'm hardly unscarred by the process. About a year and a half ago, I discovered quite by accident that there were entire threads on the dark web devoted to how to pirate and torrent my works. I was actually kind of flattered, but also dismayed by the fact I could have "fans" who would go to such lengths merely to avoid paying a 99 cent download fee. And what "fan" steals royalties from a struggling independent author anyway? I've been slammed by bloggers who clearly didn't read the books they were reviewing or became enraged over technical mistakes I didn't actually make. One of my war stories was pilloried for being "full of depressing content," as if surprised that such a tale might not be chock full o' laughs. On two occasions at least, agents rejected manuscripts of mine after heaping praise upon them, but adding that "I don't know how to sell this kind of story." One publisher even asked me for what I believed was a flat-out bribe to put my work in his magazine. Publishing is not a game for the thin-skinned, and writers are, as a rule, extremely thin-skinned. It's a Catch-22 without a solution.
But despite all of these drawbacks and frustrations, we always circle back to the fact I mentioned at the beginning of this epistle: writing is not something writers do, it's something they are. An acorn may or may not grow into an oak, but it will never become an orange tree or a spruce or a thornbush. A writer may or may not achieve literary success, they may or may not even have a single human being ever read one word of what they've written, but they will always be a writer nonetheless. They will always think like a writer and interpret reality as a writer. And this is not a bad thing. There are very few people in this world who know what they were meant to be from a young age, who have that special sense of purpose and identity (even if it is a secret identity) that this knowledge brings them. And there are precious few who will know the absolute joy of bringing into creation people, conversations, incidents, events, even whole worlds, that did not exist before the writer set then down upon the page. The writer may live in poverty and die in obscurity, but so long as the chance remains that one day, years or even centuries from now, another human will find one of his books gathering dust at a frowsy secondhand store somewhere, pay a few pennies for it, and read it casually over a cup of coffee, the writer is never defeated and never truly dead. He has a potential for immortality which few can even comprehend. And while living, he has the pure pleasure of creation for its own sake, for the sheer joy of bringing something into existence, which is as close to an absolute good as you're likely to find in life anyway. Any success beyond that, any awards he wins or money he makes or fame he enjoys, is mere gilding of the lily. As Micharl Moriarty wrote in THE GIFT OF STERN ANGELS, the pleasure of constructing a perfectly constructed sentence, independent of any reader, is its own reward.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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