Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 16

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/

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 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.

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.

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.

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: THOUGHTS ON THE DEATH OF THE STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER

Writing is a science and its principles cannot be disregarded with impunity. -- F.W. von Mellenthin (paraphrase)

As a writer, nothing is more annoying to me than the present way in which characters are being crafted nowadays -- especially female characters, especially in the way they relate to men. Beyond this, I am continuously infuriated by the false claims, made every few years like a kind ponderous, of slow-booming clockwork, that no strong female characters existed in Hollywood until the present age. That women -- and men -- had nothing to look up to in this regard 'til, say, the characters of Katniss Everdeen or Rey Skywalker came along.

I understand that every generation re-invents the wheel, including my own (X). I also understand that every generation overvalues its own contribution and undervalues that of the ones which came before. Human nature is universal and unchanging, and nobody is exempt from its peculiarities. But a lot of the dumber aspects of human nature can be combated successfully if we are aware they exist, arm ourselves against them, and use those arms intelligently. Like bigotry and prejudice, it is more helpful to acknowledge that we suffer from 'em and then consciously fight against 'em, than it is to pretend we are completely free of their influence: A problem cannot be corrected unless it is recognized. And folks, we have a problem with characters. The characters of today absolutely suck. They are rubbish, garbage, trash. They are boring, self-righteous, one-dimensional, unrealistic, and stuffed almost to bursting with unrealistic and unlikeable traits. There seems to be a war against strong, self-assured, good-hearted male characters in all forms of fiction today, and at the same time, a propagandistic effort to pump up female characters into Mary Sues without any flaws, who possess a maturity beyond their years or life experience, who are physically stronger than men and more resourceful at all times, and who do not experience conflict so much as roll over it the way a car might roll over a frog. Notwithstanding that this does not correspond with reality, it is bad storytelling. Nobody likes -- nobody ought to like -- a perfect character of any gender. They are boring. They are also obnoxious.

To quote Thomas Magnum, "I know what you're thinking." Here's another middle-aged white male frightened by female empowerment. No, and again no. I am all for female empowerment. I grew up on female empowerment. Your humble correspondent was actually born in 1972, and without any effort at all, I can name a whole slew of female characters who kicked ass before my young and dazzled vision, long before the Born Perfect heroines of this age bothered to put down their cell phones and macchiatos and show up:

Diana Prince (Wonder Woman) - 70s
Jamie Sommers (The Bionic Woman) - 70s
Kelly Garrett, Jill Munroe, Sabrina Duncan, Kris Munroe (Charlie's Angels) - 70s/80s
Princess Leia Orgaina - 70s/80s
Ellen Ripley - 70s/80s
Sarah Connor - 80s/90s
Buffy Summers - 90s

I came up with that list in ten seconds. I did not consult the internet to do it and am doubtless leaving out several and perhaps many others from my formative period, the time I refer to as "grew up came up." These are merely the ones which left the greatest impression upon me, and not because of their looks, though I confess to crushes on many of them. Nope. These females were written in two ways which distinguish them from their modern, perfect, Captain Marvel style counterparts:

1. They had flaws.
2. They usually had strong men in their lives.

In regards to 1., the flaws were what made them relatable and likeable. I had a crush on Jamie Sommers because she was decent to the bone but also a little mischevious and could be terribly stubborn, sometimes to the point of self-destructiveness. She seemed real to me, human, at once extremely feminine in the classical sense, and yet tough as nails and courageous as a lion when duty demanded it. Ellen Ripley was likewise flawed: her emotions often got the better of her, and while she was great in a crisis, she was not cool in a crisis. In fact she was almost a berzerker, fighting with rage, desperation and hysteria, and we got to see her develop into her power over a period of time. Ditto Sarah Connor: we meet her as a hapless young waitress, and watch her slowly transform into an embittered, brutally determined survivalist, a soldier's soldier. As for Buffy Summers, she fascinated me the most, because her super powers did not in any way assist her in any of her real-world dilemmas, like failing grades or problems with boys. In fact, her powers were a burden, imposing unfair restrictions on her life. She also struggled regularly with fear, doubt and resentment at being "The Chosen One" who was nonetheless likely to die before the age of twenty-five. I could understand and sympathize with her weaknesses because they were realistic and relatable. What I'm driving at here is that the writers of this era understood that perfection is death to storytelling. They did not feel the need to make their heroines invincible archetypes to prove their feminist credentials (if they were men) or project their own fantasies about themselves onto screen (if they were women). Their characters cried sometimes. They got scared. They had petty jealousies and resentments. They could get beaten up, outwitted, fooled. And rather than diminishing them, this made we the viewers love them. I use that last word explicitly. I loved (I still love) most of these characters...OK, I lusted after Charlie's Angels, but still. I rooted for them because they deserved to be rooted for, and because they were composed in such a way (flawed) that their external conflicts had inherent dramatic tension. Perfection is never tense.

In regards to 2., the writers of this era did not feel the need to emasculate, effeminize, and altogether shit on the male counterparts of their heroines simply to make said heroines look better, or to work off their misandry on men who couldn't dump them in real life. On the contrary, most of these chracters had very strong male wingmen. Excepting Charlie's Angels, I can easily think of at least one strong male counterpart for each of these heroines:

Diana Prince - Col. Steve Trevor jr.
Jamie Sommers - Steve Austin
Princess Leia Orgaina - Han Solo
Ellen Ripley - Dwayne Hicks
Sarah Connor - Kyle Reese
Buffy Summers - Angel

In not one of these cases did having a strong male sidekick diminish the heroine in question. In not one case did it make their stories less interesting. On the contrary, the male counterpart complimented, enriched, and in some cases completed the female hero. And it is on this point that the modern writer tends to choke. They want their females to be Born Perfect, to get the better of every situation without difficulty, and never to rely upon a man for anything. They reduce the male sidekick to sexless foils, pallid, bantnamweight beta-males who snivel from the sidelines. The only males allowed to show any strength in modern writing are nonwhites, gays or villains (who are not shockingly almost always white). But in a movie like "Captain Marvel," the writers one-bettered themselves and made even the villain a pansy, violating a fundamental rule of storytelling in the process, to wit: a hero is only as strong as their villain. And this is now more or less the standard for entertainment: from "The Book of Boba Fett" to "Willow" to "Star Trek: Discovery" to "She Hulk" to "Loki" and "Hawkeye" and "The Rings of Power" and "Velma" to "The Last Jedi" to the entire "M-She-U" and back again, we see the same process, endlessly repeated, and endlessly ending in disastrous failure. The writers of the new "Dungeons & Dragons" movie have openly boasted that they "enjoyed" emasculating their male leads: Notwithstanding the issues of misandry involved, or self-loathing and cowardice if the writer is a man, it is simply bad storytelling. It is always going to be bad storytelling when you disregard basic writing principles. The principles of creative engineering are inflexible and do not make exceptions for one's political and sexual beliefs, and one of them is: "Excellence is inspired by excellence, mediocrity knows no genius but itself." I would not go so far as to say that behind every great female character is a great male character, but I would say that the addition of a great male sidekick never takes anything away, and usually compliments, the female lead.

It is obviously impossible, and probably not even desirable, that we should divorce our own personal beliefs from our creative writing. Passion is usually a good thing, if the motive underlying it is also good. On the other hand, as I said above (probably four or five times), it is not possible to create a new system of creative engineering to suit modern writers and their peculiar fetish for identity politics and misandry. Today's writers are not hacks as it is often claimed: they are merely propagandists. They have lost interest, if indeed they ever had interest, in telling stories and creating characters: instead, they write tracts, screeds, pamphlets, public service announcements for their personal beliefs. This is not to say the writers of yesteryear were always, or even usually, good at their jobs, merely that their hearts were generally in the right place even if their efforts went completely sideways. The people who wrote stuff like "Wonder Woman" were hardly geniuses at their craft: that show was fucking ridiculous from the pilot onward. But at least it was written as entertainment, and not as propaganda.

If we ever want to right the sinking ship of storytelling in this world, we must begin by understanding there is a hole in the damned ship. The ability of writers to create interesting, likeable, or at least sympathetic characters is on the downgrade, and it is on the downgrade because the writers are self-injecting their personal issues into their work in a way that is destructive to the product. They are trying to work out deep-seated issues not with psychiatrists, but with audiences; not at the ballot-box, but in the writer's room. They are debasing storytelling and character generation so badly that an entire generation of young people is now growing up not even knowing what the hell good storytelling is, because they have no context to understand it. They are simply told NOT to like something is racist, or misogynist, or some other damned -ist, and are thus unfree to form an objective opinion about it. If these people, modern writers, can't lead and won't follow, they must at least get the fuck out of the way, and make room for those who know what they are doing: in the mean time, we -- the audiences -- can insist that writers return to the basic principles which once made characters like Ellen Ripley and Buffy Ann Summers possible in the first place.

THE BEST NOVELS I'VE EVER READ - PART 2

It's Wednesday, and for no other reason than I'm already confused about the time twice over (DST, and I thought last Saturday was St. Patrick's), I may as well continue discussing the best novels I've ever read. As before, I will draw a faint line in the dust between the best I've read and my favorites -- faint because they overlap, but are not entirely synonymous. Anyway, last Saturday Evening Post I hit you with ten novels which I regard as inarguable classics. Tonight I come at ya with ten more. So without further ado (adieu?), here they are:

THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS by Ursula K. LeGuinn. Somewhere between science-fiction and fantasy lies this incredibly imaginative, speculative novel about a visitor to the planet of Gethen, where the population is "ambisexual," meaning they alternate sexes when not in a sexless state. Ostensibly about one man's attempt to establish diplomatic relations with a faraway world, DARKNESS is actually about the way our sexuality -- not our gender, but our actual sexual physiology and its effects on our behavior -- shapes civilization and human behavior. The frustrated narrator, Genly Ai, struggles mightily but is never entirely able to overcome the cultural/sexual barriers his permanent male status places between himself and the Gethans. Written in 1969, long before the present era of "gender reveal parties" and pronoun arguments, LeGuinn fearlessly explores the very nature of humanity and how sex, and sexlessness, shapes outlook and society at large. A short, vivid novel with a lush and picturesque "creative surround," it also shows that world-building need not take 1,000 pages.

THE WINDS OF WAR by Herman Wouk. The first installment of his two-book series about WW2, WINDS chronicles two familys, the Henrys and the Jastrows, on the eve and beginning of the second world war. The Henrys are a sprawling Navy family whose patriarch, the crusty go-getter Victor "Pug" Henry, has his sights set on admiral's rank. The Jastrows are affluent Jews divided between America (the fiesty Natalie) and Europe (the pompous Aaron). Intersecting by marriage, Wouk threads his many characters through politics, religious strife, the first rumblings of the Holocaust and the outbreak of the war. A sprawling epic tied closely to historical events, it is at its heart a romance, one which blows all over the planet as world events threaten to destroy characters we become more invested in -- despite or perhaps because of their flaws -- with every page. Wouk's greatest gift was making chapters in which not much happens but dialog and description read with delightful ease. This sort of Tolstoy-like saga, with innumerable well-drawn characters (even the minor ones seem to stand out clearly in my mind) set against grandiose moments of history, is not in fashion nowadays, but Wouk was quite the master of it.

SPARTACUS by Howard Fast. Written in a deliberately anachronistic style in a non-chronological way, SPARTACUS chronicles the doomed rebellion of that slave against the power and might of the late Roman Republic. Though Fast takes liberties with history and characterization to fit the story into a modern political framework (he was a communist when he wrote it), if one scrapes away his ideological motives, one discovers a timeless tale about the human desire for freedom, the dehumanizing perils of wealth and inequality, and universal need for love as we understand it. His depictions of the late Republic -- its glory and its corruption -- slave life, gladiatorial games and war are carried out in an unusual way, more through reminiscences than conventional descriptions, but his madness has method: he is trying to tell us how difficult it is to get to the truth at the core of every legend, and how little that truth really matters when the legend is so inspiring and necessary. Making a story which ends so tragically so uplifting takes a very special artistic talent.

IT by Stephen King. So many people know IT from the 80s TV series and recent film duology that it's easy to forget it was a novel. And what a novel. King's magnum opus of terror is probably his best-ever book, a 1,000+ page epic which, unlike some of his other lengthy works, rarely if ever feels bloated, self-indulgent or overwritten. The story of seven children who do battle with a monster, only to have the monster return in their adulthood even more dangerous than before, IT is really several things at once. It is the ultimate "monster horror novel" because It is a creature which assumes the shape of that which its victim most fears, so be prepared for a lot of different baddies in one book, all of which like to murder children in hideous ways. It is an astonishingly sentimental and beautiful examination of King's own small-town New England childhood in the 1950s. And it is an equally wonderful exploration of childhood friendship and the power (and peril) of imagination. At his worst, King is a sloppy and lazy writer who publishes novels that feel like first drafts, with characters that feel half-dimensional: at his best, he is a pastmaster of the art he himself has elevated to a new level over the course of his long career. IT is an example of him driven by a white-hot idea drawn from his own childhood, and nursing it until it was nearly perfect. Nobody who reads IT will forget characters like Ben Hanscom, Richie "Trashmouth" Tozier, the psychopathic bully Henry Bowers....or the thousand-faced monster itself. If King had been hit by a truck (or eaten by a monster) after writing this book, his legacy would still be intact.

KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING by George Orwell. Some novels are written "for" you. Others are written "about" you. ASPIDISTRA will speak to any creative soul -- any aspiring writer, musician, poet, or artist; indeed, to counterculturist or hater of the capitalistic system who also rejects its political alternatives. In other words, to stubborn, irrational dreamers fighting for artistic or just plain human integrity. It is the story of Gordon Comstock, a former advertising writer from London who chucked away his "good" job to pursue the life of a poet, failed miserably, and now exists in self-enforced poverty, choking on bitterness and frustration. If this sounds depressing, it is: but it's written with such stinging Orwellian wit that Gordon's struggles, while brutal and humiliating, are also frequently comic. He is just sympathetic enough for us to care about his misery, and just enough of a misanthrope for us to get a kick out of it at the same time. After all, his "war against money" is a choice, as is the dismal way he treats Rosemary, the girl who loves him but won't sleep with him, and Ravelston, his wealthy best friend. Although Gordon is presented as a fairly rotten person in many ways, his loathing of the advertising world -- a metaphor for the entire capitalist system as Orwell saw it -- is so genuine, and his self-loathing as an artist so realistically depicted, that though the setting (1930s London) is a century removed from today, nothing about the struggle itself seems dated. What Gordon wants -- to make a living doing what he loves -- is not unreasonable, but everything conspires to force him away from the epic poem he's trying to compose and back into the soul-atomizing job of writing advertising jingles for deodorant and breakfast crisps. Everyone with any artistic talent at all, anyone who lives an eccentric or "different" kind of life, can relate to Mr. Comstock and his rebellion against money.

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY by Irving Stone. This beautifully-written saga about Michaelangelo is not only very well-written (the prose is vivid but curiously light, curiously deft in its touch), but deeply satisfying and enriching to read. Following the progidious talent from childhood to death, it weaves his career as a painter and sculptor through the tumultuous and violent events of Italy in the 16th century, when it (like Europe) was making a painful transformation from the end of the Dark Ages to the beginnings of the Enlightenment, covers the three curiously chaste "loves of his life," as well as his rivalry with other masters, including Leonardo Da Vinci. I never expected a thick historical novel about a man with no capacity for violence, no sex life, and no interest in politics or religion or money could be this page-turning or rewarding to read. I emerged from it feeling as if I had taken a barefoot tour of Italy and the Renaissance, experiencing both its glories and the intricacies of his culture and its grittier, uglier, crueler aspects. Full of intrigue and brimming with the same zest, even lust, which Michaelangelo brought to his work, I found it one of the most aesthetically pleasing novels I can recall.

THE KILLER ANGELS by Michael Sharra. By now you know, even if you haven't read my own book SINNER'S CROSS, that I much prefer my war stories to revolve around people and emotions rather than technology or grand strategy. This classic novel of the Battle of Gettysburg, inspired by the real-life accounts of its participants, has probably lost a certain luster in readers' minds because it was force-fed to generations of highschool students. This is unfair. While Sharra's very singular prose style is not going to be for everyone, and can occasionally become distracting (the last thing prose should ever do), his take on the battle, as a clash of human wills, hopes, dreams, fears, loves, hates and ambitions, rather than a battle of armies per se, is seminal. He brings historical characters so completely to life that the reader steps away from the book feeling as if they know men like Robert E. Lee, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, John Buford, and most especially James Longstreet, whose postwar letters and writings inspired Shaara to write the novel. While explaining the tactical and strategic plotting of both sides, Shaara sternly sticks to the novel as a lens for observing humans under pressure, showing the blunders and brilliance which such pressure produces in the great and the ordinary human alike. THE KILLER ANGELS is one of a handful of books I would say are necessary to read -- not because everyone will like it, but because of the insights it offers on causes, war, and human nature itself.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE by Anne Rice. Speaking of prose stylists, Rice's famous (and infamous) vampire saga features the most accurate reproduction of 19th century "Gothic" style writing I have ever read. It is part of what weighs this novel down, but it is also what transforms it from a mere vampire tale into a genuine classic, a work of prose-poetry on a vast scale. It follows Louis du pont du Lac, an 18th century plantation owner who is transformed into a vampire, through 200 years of wandering and suffering across the world -- emphasis on the "suffering" -- as he tries to come to terms with existential anguish over his condition. While slow and even ponderous at times, it is a remarkable and vivid work which brings 1700s/1800s New Orleans to such life that it seems almost to throb and pulsate with, well, blood. Lestat, Louis' sire and mentor, is a terrifying depiction of sadistic villainy tinctured with operatic self-pity; Claudia, the child-vampire Lestat turns to give Louis a "daughter," is simply pure evil, both of them contrasting brutally with Louis and his never-ending feelings of remorse and doubt. Rice uses vampirism, curiously enough, as an examination of humanity: Louis spends his chunk of eternity in mourning for his mortal self, for the loves he cannot have, for the life he cannot live. The irony is, of course, that he never appreciated human life when he had it. There's a message in there somewhere....

RED ARMY by Ralph Peters. This forgotten gem might be the best "pure war" novel I've ever read. Its author was a former Army intelligence man who possessed a keen understanding of the Soviet army and NATO, and wrote a book which is in every way the opposite of Tom Clancy's engrossing mega-hit, RED STORM RISING. Focusing entirely on the human element rather than weapons systems or technology, and told 100% from the POV of the Soviets during a hypothetical WWIII, it chronicles a whole slew of memorable characters as they fight and die to conquer West Germany sometime in the later 1980s. What I love about RED ARMY is that it is both free of the jingo patriotism which tended to ruin Clancy's best efforts, and a fully human novel. Men like Leonid, the hapless private soldier; Seryosha, the vicious, cowardly bully; and Gordunov, the haunted, ruthless paratrooper given an impossible task, are not easy to forget. Nor are the Malinskys: the four-star general living up to ancient traditions, and his son, who cannot live them down. Peters writes combat as chaos in which very little goes right, and that usually by accident, and war at its higher levels as a clash of egos, hidden agendas and politics as much as strategy or tactics. His criticisms of the Russian military, NATO generally and the German army specifically (both validated, in their way, by current events in Ukraine) are also very rich food for thought. This is a hard-hitting book whose mantra is "war is not won by the most competent army; it is won by the least incompetent army."

I trust there are some books on this list readers might disagree with, but for me, the measure of a great novel is how it lingers within one's mind, and what effect it has on one's development as a human being -- and, if they're of a creative turn, on their own writing style. To be effected, and affected, by words on a page is powerful magic. These books left a mark on me. If you haven't already indulged and are of a mind, they might do the same for you.

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: THE BEST NOVELS I'VE EVER READ

On this cold and somewhat dreary St. Patrick's Day, I find myself already hungover and therefore unwilling to participate in the revelry I can hear clearly through my windows. And since this is a Goodreads blog and I never seem to talk about books in it (unless they are my own), I thought I would discuss some of my all-time favorites.

Now, when I say "the best novels I've ever read," I have to remind myself that the best novels and my favorite novels are not necessarily the same thing. I am going to exclude some I greatly enjoyed because, objectively speaking, they aren't all that well-written or are simply guilty pleasures. I suppose they will end up in a separate blog. For now, I'll stick to those I feel are the elite of my own experience: well-written, well-crafted, deeply resonant novels that achieve whatever it is they set out to do, no matter how ambitious. This list is just a chunk of an iceberg (there are obviously going to be more), the titles are chosen at random, and my only rule is that no author be referenced more than once in the same list.

Now, to quote Dominic Da Vinci, "Let me get into this."

COMING UP FOR AIR by George Orwell. Regarded as "minor classic" but largely unknown outside of those who have actually read Orwells novels that aren't named 1984 or ANIMAL FARM, this is my favorite Orwell story and fundamentally his most human. The protagonist, George "Fatty" Bowling, is an insurance salesman living in the inner-outer suburbs of London in 1938. He's fat (hence the name), wears false teeth, has a nagging, penny-pinching wife he doesn't love and children he regards largely as nuisances. Though vulgar and thick-skinned, Bowling is also quite intelligent, and increasingly depressed by the soullnessness, the shallowness, the sheer deafening noise of modern life, anxious about the coming war, and even more anxious about what he calls "the after war" -- a dystopian era of totalitarianism and poverty he foresees which is very similar to the one Orwell actually created for 1984. Reflecting on his childhood in a small rural market town in the Late Victorian/Edwardian Eras, he realizes that what he had then was a sense of inner peace, of stillness: a freedom not from physical labor, privation or illness, but from fear. He decides to revisit his childhood home and see if he can take a literal and metaphysical breath of fresh air. Being a political firebrand, Orwell is not really thought of as a strong prose-writer, but he did excellent work here, and more than that, recreated the atmosphere of early 1900s rural England to a degree which makes the reader feel, in a few short chapters, that he has been there himself. Likewise, his brutish descriptions of WW1 and Bowling's struggles to find a job in postwar England, and his inevitable descent from a hopeful young man into a disillusioned nobody. Bowling's journey into the past and through the present is witty and tragic, cynical and sentimental: what's more, its themes of a middle-aged man beginning to feel increasingly alienated from modern life are absolutely timeless.

THE ANTAGONISTS by Ernest K. Gann.* This was the first historical "war" novel I ever read which is largely absent any actual combat, and does not suffer from the fact. Taking place during the Siege of Masada in A.D. 72 - 73, it is Gann's fictionalized but beautifully researched take on the war of wills between Flavius Silva, commander of the Roman Empire's Tenth Legion, and Eleazar ben Yair, the Jewish rebel who holed up atop a seemingly impregnable desert fortress with 900 men, women and children following Rome's conquest of Judea. Silva is a man with many problems. First, he's got to take Masada, which requires years of siege warfare in blistering temperatures, and an engineering feat which strains the imagination. Second, he's got to do it before his fed-up legionaries mutiny. Third, he's got to deal with a "dignitary" from Rome who is scheming to take over his command. To top it off, he's a drunk in the bargain, gutted by the premature death of his beloved wife, and who now finds himself falling in love with a beautiful Jewish hostage who naturally hates his guts. Meanwhile, on top of "the Rock," ben Yair has problems of his own. The charismatic rebel leader is surrounded by thousands of enemy troops with no hope of escape, trying to hold morale together among his people while the Romans build a ramp right up to his very gates, and increasingly anxious about the fate of his wife and son, who are just as doomed as he is. Each of the antagonists is basically faced with insurmountable internal problems while trying to kill the other, and yet they develop a healthy respect for each other's skills. More a story about human beings in conflict and under extreme pressure than combat per se, it is also an examination of the qualities that make good leaders have more in common with each other than they do with the men that send them to die.

*This novel is also published under the name MASADA.

THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT by Lawrence Sanders. Sanders is today remembered as "Mr. Bestseller," a prolific and occasionally hackish author who nonetheless had a command of descriptive prose that is perhaps unequaled in the modern English language. At his height, however, he could produce works of pure art, and T6C is such a book. It follows the dissolute Samuel Todd, an investigator for a scientific grant foundation, as he travels to a dying town in upstate New York to meet a famous researcher hoping for said grant. The seemingly picayune assignment of deciding whether Dr. Teleford Thorndecker should get his funding turns increasingly bizarre and dangerous when he begins to realize just what kind of experiments Thorndecker is conducting in the depressing town of Coburn, NY, a place where everyone from the police chief to the local minister is not only hiding their own secrets, but desperate to make sure the foundation money flows through their moribund burg no matter what teh cost. Really good books always have something to say beyond the obvious, and THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT has a lot to say about our fear of ageing -- not death per se, but the act of growing older and the state of being old. Todd is a man who just broke up with the love of his life because he couldn't hack the age difference between them, and Thorndecker is a man obsessed with recapturing the vitality of youth to please his seductive, amoral wife. Beautifully and atmospherically written, with a cliche' of a drunken priavte-eye protagonist who turns said trope upside down by neither carrying a gun nor being able to fight, this is a thoughtful book about the need to come to terms with things inevitable, and the terrible costs we pay when we fail to do so.

THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman. At once a science-fiction masterpiece and a scathing antiwar novel, Haldeman's novel about a reluctant soldier who ends up living for thousands of years thanks to the principle of "time dilation" is one that will stay with you, well, forever. In the near future, Earth is at war with a mysterious race referred to as Taurans. Because the laws of relativity cause time-dilation for space travelers nearing the speed of light, every time Private William Mandella comes back from a mission, he finds decades or even centuries have passed. Every friend, relative, and society he has ever known become extinct: language, the physical look of the human race, and even sexuality are no longer recognizable to him. Yet the war persists, leaving him, at one point, the oldest person in the human race, with no clear idea what he is even fighting for, and desperate to be reunited with a fellow soldier, Marygay, with whom he is hopelessly in love but seemingly doomed never to encounter again. Dark, bitter, brutal, but also curiously witty and always deft, THE FOREVER WAR is one of the most imaginative novels I have ever read, showing us a man who tries to remain fundamentally human even as the human race itself becomes increasingly like the machines it uses to wage endless war.

RED DRAGON by Thomas Harris. Now merely remembered as the book that introduced us to Dr. Hannibal Lecter ("Is that the one before SILENCE OF THE LAMBS?") this novel is an absolute masterpiece in its own right, arguably the best novel I have ever read. Harris introduces us to Will Graham, a wounded, world-weary former FBI consultant dragged out of retirement to help the Bureau track down a serial murderer known as Red Dragon. The Dragon slaughters entire families at the full moon, and as the story begins, we are a few weeks away from yet another lunar massacre. Graham is a top forensics man, but his real gift -- he views it as a curse -- is his ability to get into the heads of serial killers, reconstruct their fantasies, and eventually predict their behavior. He caught Lecter years before by getting into his hideous head; now he's after the equally twisted Dragon. Unfortunately, due to Lecter's covert intervention, the Dragon is also after him. As much an examination of how monsters are made as how they are hunted, DRAGON is a deeply empathetic and human novel, in which Francis Dolarhyde, the Dragon, is shown to be as much a victim of monsters as a monster himself. Violating the "show don't tell" rule with brilliant aplomb, he eventually takes us into Dolarhyde's horrific childhood with such merciless exactitude that we cannot help heartbroken at how he came to be the man he is. Nor can we help but root for his burgeoning romance with a female co-worker, even though we know it is as doomed as anything can be. Graham, too, is a casualty of his own mind: he cannot turn off the faculties which allow him to be such a superb manhunter, making his return to the field a tightrope walk over his own sanity. The basic ideas driving DRAGON are now exhausted cliches after 30 years of shows about crime-scene techs, profilers, forensic experts, etc., etc., but Harris struck first: DRAGON is the father of every novel, television series and movie which mined these subjects absolutely bare. And it is better than all of its imitators.

PIECE OF CAKE by Derek Robinson. Probably no event in modern Western history is as mythologized as The Battle of Britain. The image of a handful of heroic "knights of the air" turning back Hitler's hordes and saving civilization with sheer guts and determination is a picturesque one that has survived even this cynical cage. Yet Derek Robinson did his best to destroy it in PIECE OF CAKE, a brutally iconoclastic take on the Battle and the men who fought it. CAKE is the story of the Royal Air Force's "Hornet Squadron" and its first twelve months at war, from September 1939 to September 1940. During that time we meet the pilots and follow them through the air war's early, boring days to its frantic, cataclysmic climax over London. While most of the pilots are killed off, and then replaced by others who are in turn killed off, a few linger long enough for us to get to know them, and boy, are they jerks. Far from being noble and selfless, Robinson paints a picture of shallow, callow, thrill-seeking post-adolescents who "would probably be out robbing banks if they weren't flying for us." (One of them, Lance "Moggy" Cattermole, is an out and out psychopath, and a sadist in the bargain.) Nor are their commanders any better: Ramsay is a mean-tempered bully, and Lord Rex an inflexible snob. Of course there are some likeable blokes, too, such as "Uncle" Kellaway, "Skull" Skellen, "Fanny" Barton, "Mother" Cox and poor "Fitz" Fitzgerald -- but the point is that nobody, not even the character who becomes the main protagonist, Christopher Hart, fits anybody's image of a hero. They shoot down friendly aircraft by mistake, bully each other, sleep with each other's women, steal, lie, cheat, go crazy, and even commit murder. Robinson has a marvelous and very English gift for sarcasm and sustained low-grade cruelty in his writing, and he depicts Hornet Squadron as a kind of flying collegiate dormitory, full of men behaving badly. Robinson also shows the air war for what it was: a grinding, slow-moving slaughter, generally absent anything resembling glory and definitely absent anything resembling honor. As Hart puts it, "Up there the world is divided into bastards and suckers. Make your choice."

PET SEMATARY by Stephen King. As I said above, the best novels always have something to say beyond the obvious, and in PET SEMATARY, Stephen King (who incidentally hates this book), had a dark and curious theme indeed: "Sometimes dead is better." When Louis Creed and his family move into their new home in rural Maine, they never suspect the old animal cemetery in the woods beyond has the power to resurrect the dead. And when Louis finds out, courtesy of his kindly neighbor Jud (one of King's best-drawn characters ever), he naturally uses its power to bring the family cat back to life after it is tragically struck down on the road. By the time he asks Jud the inevitable question, "Has anyone ever buried a person there?" however, very bad and evil things are already in motion, centering around a Mack truck, Louis's toddling son Gage, and his beautiful wife Rachael. A slow-burn into true horror, King takes his time getting you to know, and love, the Crandalls and the Creeds, before he systematically puts them through the worst hell imaginable. The thesis of the book is that death is a natural process to be made friends with rather than feared, and like Dr. Thorndecker in SIXTH COMMANDENT, those who go against that process risk fates worth than the death they fear. King was very big on the idea of "forbidden knowledge" as a classic trope of horror, and he employs it brutally and beautifully here, letting Lou Creed know in no uncertain terms that everything has a price, and sometimes dead is better. This is, I believe, the first book that ever truly frightened me.

THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE by Robert Louis Stevenson. Continuing in the theme of Forbidden Knowledge is the classic of the genre. Set in Victorian England, this is the story of Dr. Henry Jekyll, benefactor of the community, "fellow of all souls" and general do-gooder, who creates a potion which allows him to assume a different physical form. In that form, that of Edward Hyde, he indulges in all the vices Victorian morals forbid, and then, transforming back to himself, continues his upright ways until his craving for sin gets the better of him. Unfortunately for Jekyll, however, he swiftly loses control of both the Hyde persona itself and his ability to change into and out of it at will: in fact he ends up stranded as Hyde, and having committed a vicious public murder, is now a hunted man. Reaching out to his old friend Utterson, he tries desperately to rework the formula, assume Jekyll's shape, and escape justice, but the walls are closing in, and as I said above, everything has a price. Known as much for its attack on Victorian hypocrisy as for its horror and sci-fi elements, the book is actually a brilliant examination of the nature of human character itself. Is Jekyll a wicked man who merely desires to be appear virtuous while he satisfies his sweet tooth on the side, or a red-blooded man rebelling against the strict and cramping moral codes of the era the only way possible? The answer is not really clear, and that's part of what makes this swift-moving, beautifully written novella so enjoyable.

DUNE by Frank Herbert. I am not traditionally a sci-fi guy. I have read more fantasy than science-fiction...and I don't read a lot of fantasy, either. That having been said, DUNE has to be one of the greatest novels ever written in any genre. It is a towering masterwork of imagination harnessed to a unique prose-style, and while it has sold less than Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," it is comparable in terms of influence within its own genre. DUNE is the story of one young man's transformation from the heir to a minor noble line into a messiah-like figure, somewhere between Mohammed and Caesar. Set in a universe as complex and fully-developed as the real one, where the mind rather than technology is key and king, it is brimming with intrigue and conflict, as Paul Atreides struggles not only to regain his birthright, but to prevent his transformation into a higher being from turning him into a monster more cruel than the one who drove him into exile. With lots to say about politics, ecology, economics and religion, DUNE is one of those books that is so rich that one invariably picks up on new subthemes with each subsequent rereading.

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald. What makes a classic? Timelessness. That's really the only difference between the "great" popular novels that are quickly forgotten, and the ones that resonate through the decades, generations, even centuries. Taken on its face, THE GREAT GATSBY is a light, comic-tragic coming-of-age story set in the Jazz Age: a tale about a man who came from nothing and went back to nothing. But it is much more than that. It is a tale about illusion and disillusion, young love and heartbreak, power and fragility. It is a cautionary tale with an underlying note of bitterness against the unfairness of life and the fleeting nature of relationships. The narrator, Nick Carraway, is the vehicle by which we encounter Jay Gatsby, a fabulously wealthy Long Islander of dubious reputation and uncertain history: Gatsby has everything money can buy except his long-lost, now married love Daisy Buchanan. Throughout the novel he schemes with the precision of a chess master to cleave Daisy from her jerk husband Tom, but his plans go awry, with tragic consequences for many involved, but perhaps most tragic for Nick: Carraway enters the story young, upbeat and naive, and leaves it older, sadder, and wiser, his path mimicking the path of all men in their 20s whose dreams break against the crueler realities of life. And it is really this last point that cements the books greatness: in avoiding even a partially happy ending and thus giving us the outcome the story demanded, Fitzgerald turned what might have been a "book of the year" into a timeless classic which is as relevant today as when it was written.

And with that, I come to the end of The Saturday Evening Post and today's list. I tried to keep it fairly diverse, and in the next installment may cheat a little and include short-story collections, because a) they are novel length works of fiction, and b) it's my blog and I'll do as I please with the damned thing. In the mean time, happy St. Patrick's Day to any sober enough to read this.

AS I PLEASE XI: SWEEPING OUT MY BRAIN EDITION

An old friend of mine recently accused me of using the "As I Please" subseries of this blog as a broom to sweep out my brain. He likened my other subseries to objects that had been crafted fully, if not necessarily to everyone's taste: but this one, he said, was the mere sawdust within my creative noggin. Curlicues of ideas. Pieces and fragments. Leftovers and remnants. The grisly bits I couldn't or wouldn't fully develop into their own blogs.

This accusation is entirely true. I'm fairly sure I've even admitted it in these very pages. So if you're a regular or semi-regular reader of Stone Cold Prose, you could be forgiven if you rolled your eyes and muttered "hard pass" whenever you see an As I Please pop up in your feed. On the other hand, you must realize that allblogs, of whatever kind and written with whatever motive, exist partially for this exact purpose, the purpose of emptying the ole braincase. They are essentially outlets, pressure valves, "playspaces" (as Maynard James Keenan put it) where rules which might govern our lives in other ways do not apply.

In my mind, the whole fun of the otherwise frequently poisonous internet is that all that tedious logic and structure we were taught in school can be chucked out the window in favor of all sorts of niche, recherché, free-form, even stream-of-consciousness approaches to storytelling and idea-sharing. Being old enough to remember when the internet was actually invented, I recall as well the excitement many of its earliest denizens felt at discovering this playspace where no teacher, parent, or disapproving neighbor could intrude on their passion for Star Trek, Japanese pottery, or porn stars. Where dense, inaccessible, deeply immersive subjects of great complexity could be analyzed on one hand, while on the other, the most absurd, juvenile nonsense could be blathered about in another -- free of pesky grammar, syntax, spelling or punctuation. The early Net was a kind of cyberspace Wild West, a digital Hong Kong whose anthem was "Anything Goes." It was, in a word, free. In recent years that excitement has faded almost out of existence, and with it the crude outsize passion those lucky nerds who got in on the web's ground floor felt back in, oh, 1998 or so. That's sad. It's always sad when excitement yields to a mixture of boredom, oversaturation and entitlement. And this sadness is also why I refuse to bring any real order to the chaos that is my blog. The Wild West is only fun to look back upon because it was Wild. Take away the wildness, and all you've got are dusty, desolate frontier towns where the beer is served warm and the streets are full of horse shit.

All of this having been said, it's now time for me to grab my broom and start sweeping the following onservations out of my cranium:

* While visiting my Mom the other day, I took the occasion to peruse the still-vast, highly eclectic collection of books occupying shelves all over her home. This is the home I grew up in, and both she and my father, and later me and my older brother, filled it from floor to ceiling with books of every kind. I took home with me an armload from the basement, and I know book lovers everywhere will understand the quiet pleasure I experienced when, after dusting them off (no easy task, that) I opened them and was greeted by "that book smell." And no, I don't mean the smell of mold or dust itself. I mean the smell of old linen and foxed paper. It's the sort of scent you encounter only in secondhand bookstores or private libraries, and if you love to read, it is to you what the smell of gunsmoke is to a warhorse, or brandy and cigars might be to a Victorian gentleman coming home from a hard day's work. It manages to convey not merely an object, but a range of experience which includes wonderful tactile sensations, such as one experiences when sitting in an armchair by a fire with your favorite volume and a cup of tea (or whiskey). George Orwell once wrote a depressing passage about how much he loved the smell and feel of books until he worked in a bookshop and grew tired of it all. I hope that never happens to me. It would be a great loss.

* In the same spirit, I now recall an incident from more than twenty years ago, when I came home from work in a state of some exhaustion and despair. It was a winter night of the "dark and stormy" variety, cold and inimical, and the first thing I did was chain the door, as if this could keep the evil from following me. What I wanted was to turn off my phone, turn down all the lights but one, put on comfortable clothes and get into bed with something hot to drink and a good book. But not just any good book. It had to be Lawrence Sanders' "The Fourth Deadly Sin." In that moment I needed the pure escapism Sanders' magnificient prose could deliver, and rummaged all through the apartment: I couldn't find it and nearly gave in, then said, "No, I'm not quitting," and continued to strip-search my modest home until at last, the paperback was in my hand. Only people who frequent a site like Goodreads can understand the joy I felt when, with door locked, phone silenced and only my reading lamp on, I reclined into bliss. It was the perfect antidote to a cold, cruel world.

* When I moved back East in 2020, I had to leave in storage nearly all my books. I had only a few on hand, and a few more I later bought online or from the local secondhand bookstore. Not having my favorite entertainment on hand, I began to replace reading with video games, movies, television. Not to say that I didn't do these other things before: I just balanced them against my principal hobby. But now I had fallen into the trap of mostly watching rather than mostly participating. It troubled me but I did nothing to stop it, and now I find myself struggling every year to read a mere 12 - 14 new books. I boasted in last year's wrapup that I was going to finally meet the Goodreads Challenge again, but I failed -- again. I am in the process of getting myself back into the habit, but it's proven disturbingly difficult. Evidently even lifelong habits can atrophy if neglected long enough.

* Speaking of television, and from the "just because they can, doesn't mean they should" files of human existence, I must say that HD-TV is a retroactive disaster for pretty much any television show shot between the 1990s and the 2010s. The cameras being used at present see more detail than the human eye, and therefore easily penetrate the make-believe of the eras in question. Since getting a hi-def TV years ago, I've noticed more tan lines, freckles, age spots, vericose veins, cellulite, stretch marks, pimples, burst capillaries, wig-lines, appliance seams, spirit gum, and pancake makeup applications than I would have believed humanly possible on actors who are supposed to be beautiful or at least passably attractive. A show as recently produced as "CSI" (2000 - 2015), watched in hi-def, seems designed mainly to display that no amount of makeup, mood lighting, filters and color correction can disguise human frailty from modern cameras and modern televisions: the line of Ted Danson's wig is as plainly divisible as a national border on a map. It doesn't do wonders for silicone appliances, either: the effects work which looked so good in SD looks as fake as a three dollar bill in HD.

* I know I talk a lot about Hollywood in this blog, and sometimes it probably strikes the reader as a form of self-aggrandizing monomania: "Oh Christ, he's corking off about the entertainment industry again." But let's face it, everyone's wells are wettest where interest meets life experience, and thirteen years in the business leaves me with a lot to say, even if I do tend to harp on the same themes over and over again. On the other hand, I rarely talk about law enforcement or criminal justice in these epistles, probably because it's presently how I make most of my wages and therefore impossible to write about objectively or even safely. This is a subject I intend to explore more fully, but for obvious reasons I have to careful not to be too specific, local or contemporary. In the mean time, the Hollywood rants will continue.

* I was accidentally reminded today that Trump is running for president again. The fact that I had to be reminded surprised me, and speaks a lot, I think about shock value and the law of diminishing returns. Trump, like Madonna and various others throughout history -- I'm also reminded of Morton Downey Jr., Rock Newman and Paris Hilton -- thrives on controversy. He craves and in fact requires attention, and doesn't much care whether it's good attention or bad attention, so long as they spell his name right. A lot of his so-called weaknesses in that regard were actually what got him elected. The problem with this burn-it-down approach is that, well, sooner or later you torch all the combustibles and use up all the oxygen: witness the careers of every one of the people I just mentioned. The shtick gets old, people get bored, and attention wanders. It's too soon to write Trump's political obituary, but I get a strong sense, at least at this juncture, that not many people have the stomach, or the stamina, to endure another five to six years of The Donald Trump Show. The mere fact someone as dull, boring and "establishment" as Joe Biden was elected by a such a wide margin serves as partial proof that Americans may need a break from loud noises and open flames for a few years yet.

* Speaking of diminishing returns: the war in Ukraine -- the largest, bloodiest conflict fought in Europe since WW2 -- has now entered its second year, and is clearly slipping out of the minds of Americans concerned with skyrocketing gas prices and energy bills, not to mention the increasingly absurd cost of food. As a rule, Americans traditionally care very little about anything outside our own borders, but the speed with which we can acclimatize ourselves to catastrophes on this scale is distressing. The Russo-Ukraine War is a pivotal historical event unfolding in real time. It is a struggle between the forces of ethno-nationalism and global unity, between autocracy and democracy, between institutionalized corruption and fragile honesty. It is as close to a good and righteous war as anything that has happened since 1945, and near as I can figure, almost nobody around me cares. Caring, of course, won't change anything in Ukraine, but an awareness that there is no going back to the American isolationism of yesteryear, that like it or not the nations of this world are inextricably linked to each other and what effects one effects all, and that doing nothing in the face of aggression always -- always -- fuels more aggression, would restore some of my lagging faith in the human species.

* I've finally decided that this blog will now appear every Saturday (my "Saturday Evening Post") and Wednesday both, so twice as much incoherent nonsense as before is now coming your way, delivered every half-week, like junk mail or allergy injections. You're welcome.

And with that observation -- maybe it's just a hope, politics are best when served bland -- I now leave you among my sawdust.

THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: MY MARTIAL ARTS JOURNEY

I have had as many doubts as anyone else. Standing on the starting line, we’re all cowards. -- Alberto Salazar

I am now old enough to have lived through various eras of history. I was, for example, born during the Cold War, and saw its ending, just as I was born in the 20th Century and saw that end, too. I have lived through the finale of some technological eras and the beginnings of others, and in some cases I have seen multiple technologies come and go in the same line -- LPs yielding to CDs yielding to MP3s yielding to clouds, and so forth. I've seen the demise of mighty retail chains which had stood since the 1800s, the near-extinction of chain bookstores, the decline of malls, the rise of Amazon, the creation of the internet and social media. None of this makes me the least bit special, of course, it is simply an accident of birth-timing coupled with the fact I've been blessed to live half a century.

During those fifty years I have observed a significant change in what is broadly termed "the martial arts." It's worth commenting on because, to if I may quote Jim Halpert from a particularly amusing cold open to an episode of The Office: "Once a year, Dwight holds a seminar updating us on the newest developments in the world of karate. Because, as we all know, one thing a thousand year old martial arts do all the time...is change."

Until 1993, this jolt of sarcasm was an accurate picture of traditional martial arts. They changed, if at all, only very slowly and reluctantly, and usually with a tremendous amount of acrimony. The degree to which practicioners of various martial arts styles resisted any kind of modtification or influence on the systems they were passing down found its most hostile expression in the loathing the old kung fu masters had for Bruce Lee. Though rumors that a confederacy of these masters was responsible for Lee's premature death is widely accepted as sensationalism, their acrimony toward him was quite real. Martial arts narrowly, and Asiatic culture broadly, is founded on tradition, at to paraphrase Mr. Halpert, the one thing traditions don't do...is change. Indeed, as I write this in 2023, some forty-nine years after Lee's death, a Chinese muckraker named Xu Xiaodong is getting into enormities of trouble in his homeland for exposing "fake" kung fu masters with his modernized fighting skills. Xu has suffered a great deal of legal harassment from the Chinese government for drubbing these hapless "masters" in real fights: the CCP has a vested interest in protecting the mystique of kung fu, which runs like a thread through Chinese culture and is also a source of many tourist dollars.

When I was growing up, in the late 70s and 80s, kung fu, and other traditional martial arts like karate, taekwondo and even judo, were cloaked in said mystique. Among the various claims I heard or read about were the ability to slow down heart rates and raise or lower body temperature, walk over hot coals, disable people with single strikes to nerve clusters, or kill them with a single touch. You couldn't open a comic book without seeing advertisements for Count Dante's "Black Dragon Society," which promised -- if you'd only send them a money order -- to make you invincible as Superman and deadly as the plague. An entire episode of the hit show Quincy, revolved around the so-called "dim mak" or "death touch," which allowed a practicioner to kill their victim through a delayed-reaction strike which could be timed to the hour. And anyone from Generation X will remember the "ninja craze," which included that ridiculously awful (yet strangely enjoyable) show The Master, itself essentially codifying all the so-called abilities possible in martial arts: silent movement, borderline gravity defiance, imperviousness to pain, superhuman reflexes, and stealthines to the point of invisibility. Of course, not all of this was taken seriously or even semi-seriously even by boys of ten, but at the same time, anyone who was known to be seriously studying any martial art was usually given a wide berth. There was a boy in my junior high school from Indonesia who studied one of their nastier martial forms, and I was warned to avoid him because he had nearly beaten another student to death in a street fight: it turned out he was one of the nicest (and goofiest) kids I ever met at that wretched school, but the lies told about him prove my point: he "knew karate or something," and that made him essentially lethal.

In spite of all of this, in spite my older brother's buddy who owned a full ninja costume which he would wear when egging houses and suchlike, in spite of the numchuck craze, the throwing-star craze, in spite of Kung Fu theater and all the rest of it, I never had any interest whatever in practicing any martial art until around 1986 or so. I saw The Karate Kid on VHS (or maybe it was cable) and was instantly and utterly obsessed, to the point where I began practicing jump kicks on the backyard gate and wearing black headbands and wishing my hair was gold so I'd look like Johnny Lawrence. I mail-ordered a dozen books on various martial arts, bought exotic-looking patches with fists and flags and dragon emblems on them and had my mom sew them to my jacket, watched ridiculous, poorly-produced instructional home videos, and in short, did everything but actually learn how to fight. It wasn't until the following year that I learned that the family gym, the Yates Field House on the Georgetown University Campus, had a judo class, that I actually joined up and my fantasies about winning flashy tournaments and becoming a brick-pulverizing badass with a babe on each arm slammed into gritty reality.

For starters, I had no idea about the differences between one martial art and another, and boy was a disappointed when I discovered that my new art had no punches or kicks: it was more like wrestling, specifically Greco-Roman wrestling, in which I had no interest. This took some of the bloom off the rose. The rest was rubbed away, or should I say scratched, gouged, and scourged away, by my master, James Takemori. Takemori was a veteran of the famous 442nd "Nisei" Regiment in WW2, comprised entirely of Japanese-Americans, which took more casualties and won more medals than any other, and a legend in the judo community. He was also a tough, mean-spirited, sarcastic bastard, who used to ridicule his students and occasionally strike them when annoyed or displeased. At the time I joined his dojo, I was just coming off a long period of intense unpopularity in school, during which I was alternatively bullied by students and teachers, and his half Army drill instructor, half-Socratic approach to instruction left me empty of enthusiasm. Nevertheless, I toiled, sweated and bled in on his blue mats for what seemed like ages. I didn't learn a helluva lot of useful skills, and I never rose beyond the rank of white belt, but that was as much my fault as his. I didn't have my heart in the work, and I was at that time still very lazy and weak -- weak in character, I mean. Eventually I quit, and submerged back into being a "dimestore cowboy" who walked as if he knew the deep, dark secrets of martial arts, but in reality just practiced out of books propped up in his parents basement. The curious thing about stand-up martial arts, of course, is that it is possible to look very flashy in a short period of time without actually knowing how to fight, and being a teenager, I had remarkable flexibility, speed, and accuracy, which awed friends when I would show off with fancy, pinpoint-precise kicks. I took this useless knowledge with me to college, and began to slap on a thick coat of lies to make it more attractive. Since nobody knew me, I was free to declare that I was a black belt in "American freestyle karate" and also knew some judo. "American freestyle karate" is a real thing, but my knowledge of it came from books and my imagination (even then, "books and imagination" were part and parcel of my personality).

Inevitably I was tested, but the test came in a peculiar form. A fellow inmate of my dorm picked up on my interest and, being a martial artist himself, nagged at me to spar with him. I was desperate to avoid exposure and ducked him as long as possible before my pride forced me onto the mats. To my surprise, I performed pretty well. My defense was non-existent, and my punches weak and awkward, but I had blinding speed and that curious, laser-like precision, which allowed me to avoid a lot of his shots, and also see the smallest opening and take it before my larger, more muscular, much better techicnically skilled opponent could react. I was convincing enough to fool him into thinking I was legitimate, and we ended up forming The York College Karate Club in 1991. We even got the school to front us money for a heavy bag (which I kept until last year), sparring pads, and other equipment we didn't need but wanted badly, such as wooden practice swords and pullovers with our names on them. Populating this club were an assortment of novice and intermediate boxers, martial artists, wrestlers and street brawlers who believed we knew what the hell we were talking about. And in a sense, we did, because our open sparring sessions were at least full contact, which made what we did legitimate if clumsy practice rather than the pure theory taught by other sporting martial arts clubs. Indeed, some of our sparring sessions were wild affairs that produced bruises, bloody lips and noses, skinned knuckles, and slightly loosened teeth. It was here that I began to learn that getting punched in the face is not as bad as a middle-class kid from the suburbs thinks it is, that adrenaline highs are a real thing, and that even pain can be pleasurable when it comes in the heat of combat. But it was also here that I learned my limitations, and they were many. Not only my technique but my courage was insufficient, and in any case I was still a fraud, albeit one who periodically put his body where his mouth was. In time my faternity life would interfere with my participation in the Club, and by my junior year (1992-1993) I had discarded it entirely.

In 1995 my interest in the arts was rekindled when I watched the first of the Ultimate Fighting Championships (I, II and III) on videotapes rented from Blockbuster. At the time, the UFC was essentially human cockfighting (as John McCain put it) and
advertised as having no rules, though in fact a few did exist (no eye gouging, fish hooking or biting was allowed). Like many other young men bursting with bloodlust I couldn't watch these gladiatorial games fast enough and found them wonderful and terrible to behold. Part of my personal curiosity lay in the fact that the UFC was here to settle an ancient argument about which style of martial arts was the best in actual, (almost) no-holds barred combat. Kung fu, boxing, karate, pit fighting, shooto, wrestling, jiu-jitsu, judo, ninjitsu -- the list of names was endless, each represented by a guy usually looking like the hero or villain of those terrible 80s action movies you saw on Cinemax. And two facts were quickly established. The first was that stand-up fighters were essentially helpless when paired against grapplers. The second was that the dominant style of grappling was the Brazilian take on Japanese jiu-jitsu, epitomized by Royce Gracie. But just as quickly, Gracie jiu-jitsu -- itself a traditional art -- got exposed as being insufficient for victory if the practicioner in question could not take his opponent to the ground. The previously invicible Gracie was humbled at UFC V by Ken Shamrock, and while the fight was declared a draw, it was clear that something, some fundamental shift, was going on in the previously hidebound, even petrified, world of martial arts. Shamrock, who had been submitted by Gracie at UFC I, had adapted his game to neutralize Gracie's superior techniques. So what had begun as a commercial for Gracie jiu-jitsu became a warning, a cautionary tale. For generations, traditional practicioners had been declaring their styles invcincible and perfect, and now, one after the other, their delusions were being brutally shattered on pay-per-view television. Men who wanted to compete in what was now being dubbed "mixed martial arts" had to do just that: mix. Wrestlers, grapplers and strikers had to learn each other's secrets. They had to grow. They had to do the very thing they prided themselves on never doing: change.

My own journey continued -- as before, in blundering fits and cowardly, apathetic starts. After graduating college in 1997, I joined a boxing gym and spent some months toiling within its battered bosom. It was a truly humbling experience. Boxing is less of a sport than it is a complex vocation. Because you can only use your fists, and only strike a very clearly defined area of your opponent's body -- because, in short, you are so sharply limited in what you can do -- you must do it phenomenally well. And doing things phenomenally well requires an enormous amount of practice...which takes stamina...which takes commitment. Once again I found myself struggling in that final, most crucial area. I still wanted the propers, but I didn't want the lumps, the bumps, the bloody noses that went with them.

For years after this, I thrashed bags at gyms between Pennsylvania and Maryland, once again giving passersby and observers the distinct impression I knew what I was doing. I even trained personal trainers at a gym in Bethesda, MD, in how to use the speed bag, which I could handle like a pro. As Tommy Morrison once observed, some guys can look great on the bag but can't beat the shit out of a diaper, and this probably applied to me. I remained a dimestore cowboy: all sizzle but very little steak. Meanwhile, the martial arts world was changing all around me. The UFC left the sleazy, neon-lighted world of "no holds barred" and became a mainstream sport with ever-increasing popularity. Fighters ceased to be brawlers or single-style masters but synthesized their techniques and became well-rounded athletes. Colorful "characters" became professionals. If I'd been aware of the contrast between this phenomenon and my own status, I would not have enjoyed the knowledge.

Time marches onward, and so did I -- to California. I continued to terrorize inanimate objects at gyms, but I was getting tired of it. I was now in my 30s and tired beyond words of looking like I knew what I was doing: I wanted to actually know. Then one day, when I was in the midst of a search for a gym which taught aikido -- a peculiar martial art I'd always been curious about -- my headlights splashed against a window on Third Street in Los Angeles. It advertised KARATE, HAPKIDO, AIKIDO. The next morning I walked over to it, introduced myself to the master, and arranged to come back for an introductory class. A single hour of training there and I knew I'd found a second home. It is possible to exist in dischord with one's goals for decades, but now everything seemed to fall into place with a satisfying click. All the experiments with all those martial arts on both coasts now became an actual practice. Two days a week of training became three, sometimes four, and occasionally five. At my first belt test I was almost paralyzed with fright, and when the time came for the ceremonial bareknuckle board-breaking, I had so much adrenaline flowing I didn't so much break it as annihilate the poor thing. I knew, of course, that these traditionalist martial arts were of limited practical value. The dark, half-supernature mystique they had once carried was long gone. They were simply sets of techniques, some of which might be useful if one were jumped, mugged, or assaulted, but for the most part they existed for their own sake. The tornado kick, for example, is almost completely useless in real life, but boy is it beautiful to witness if you do it right, and that's really the point -- "tricking" is simply to martial arts what muscle cars are to automotion. They are demonstrations of what the human body is capable of if it is trained correctly, and that in itself carries its own sense of mystique. The point, for me, is that I was actually doing "the things" rather than merely talking about them or pretending to do them. I went to class. I trained. I got thrown. I got hurt. I lost skin on knuckles, elbows, knees. And I won my promotions fairly.

In 2012 I fought my first -- and last -- "professional" fight, down at the Team Quest gym in Encinitas, California. It was "professional" only in that it was sanctioned by the California State Athletic Commission, and open to any style of kickboxing. Present were several well-known MMA and bareknuckle fighters, but the competition was between amateurs like myself. I hadn't trained for the fight, my equipment was all wrong, and the organizers fibbed about the type of gloves we'd be using and what was and was not allowed in the fights. I lost my bout by TKO in the second round. My opponent, a firefighter and triathlete who trained x3 times a week with world champions, was too tall, too well-trained and far too well-conditioned for me to handle. I had the moves, mostly, but not the stamina. However, I acquitted myself well enough to harrangue the crowd afterwards, much to their amusement, and the referee, a pro kickboxer himself, told me my performance had inspired him. Indeed, for the first and last time in my life I was contacted by a professional kickboxing promotion and asked if I wanted to fight on their card up around Fresno (or was it Frisco?) in a few months. It was heady wine to be offered such a fight. I even ended up on the list of perspective title challengers in my weight class. I was now "real" in my own mind, no longer the dimestore cowboy, no longer the phony. On the other hand, I was not "real" in the larger sense. I was too old, too inexperienced and too poor to do this seriously: training requires money, and I didn't have it, any more than I had the time to do the work necessary when freelancing in the entertainment industry, sometimes 100 hours a week. And so my dreams in this direction faded, albeit with little regret. I had proven to myself I could make the commitments necessary -- the blood, the sweat, the figurative tears. And when I finally got my black belt in 2013, well, I knew that I had come out the other side of a long tunnel which I had entered almost twenty years before. Martial arts were changing around me, shedding centuries of petrified traditions, and I was changing too -- growing up, accepting discipline and discomfort and humility as the price of achievement, even taking some pleasure in the process itself.

I tell you all this because I have come to understand that change is fundamental to life, to the actual process of existing as a living, breathing, thinking being. I'm all for traditions, and as an anxious person require more routines than most people to soothe my nerves, but I now believe that a feeling of anxiety, of fear, towards or about a new endeavour is a sure sign that you are on the right track. That which scares you, engages you, and forces you to grow. As David Goggins has often maintained, you can't find growth from a place of comfort. All growth and all greatness lie on the other side of that line, where things are frightening and uncomfortable. It was awful for my ego, as a 38 year-old man, to have to put on a white belt again. And it was awful for traditional martial artists to choke down the fact that a lot of what they were preaching was nonsense. But it was precisely this point that our transformations began. Sometimes pride is precisely what prevents us from being the people, or the institutions, we wish to be. So my challenge to myself is the same one I make to you now: allow yourself to get punched on the nose, literally or figuratively, once in a while. Try new things. Fail at them. Try others. Fail at them, too. Keep trying and keep failing until you find something you love, until you hear the click of connection. Whatever pain you experience will be more than made up for by the introduction to whole new worlds within yourself you never knew existed.