Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 6
July 3, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: JAKE LA MOTTA'S "RAGING BULL"
Just give me a stage where this bull can rage.
When most people hear the words "raging bull," their minds immediately move to the Martin Scorsese movie of the same name. That infamous movie had a point of origin, however, and this is it: the life story of the Raging Bull himself, middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta.
Years after his death and three quartes of a century after his last war in the ring, La Motta's name is still synonymous with a toughness that crosses the border into masochism, as well as misogyny, paranoia and selfishness. It is recorded that when the real-life La Motta left the premiere of Scorsese's film, he asked his ex-wife Vicki in a whining tone, "I really wasn't that bad, was I?" Her reply? "No, you were worse."
It was partially in an attempt to find out what La Motta thought of himself that I located and bought this surprisingly difficult-to-find book. Which was also surprisingly expensive. So be it, and here we go.
The autobiography reads like a well-written pulp fiction crime novel, and no wonder: La Motta, was as much a crook as a boxer. Indeed, this terse little memoir has more robbery, larceny, rape, bribery, depravity and assault in it than any three hardboiled detective flicks set in the era in which the La Motta fought (1941 - 1954). Not since Errol Flynn's tell-all MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS have I read such an warts-and-all, honest-in-spirit confessional from a public figure. He lays his dark and tortured soul absolutely bare. Most people, writing autobiographies, make at least some attempt to rationalize or justify the evil they have done in life, and to apportion some share of the blame to others, or to "the system" or something even more generalized, like poverty or racism: the Bronx Bull does not. This profoundly irresponsible man takes the lion's share of responsibility for his mistakes, caprices and cruelties, attacking himself with the same vigor he once swarmed his middleweight opponents.
La Motta depicts himself as a brutalized boy growing up in a filthy Bronx slum in the 1920s and 30s (he vividly describes the stench of his tenement housing, abetted by the foul practice of boiling dirty diapers on the stove, as well as the dog-sized rats) in which the brutality of the local Mob was balanced by the near-equal savagery of the NYPD. His early years were spent fighting bullies (he used an ice pick), committing a series of petty crimes, and auditioning for the Mafia via a series of robberies. Learning how to box in reform school, he found he had a real talent for structured violence as well, and blazed a bloody trail on the boxing circuit, where he rapidly became known as the Bronx Bull or the Raging Bull for his furious aggression and near-indestructability. He even handed the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson his first-ever defeat, but was denied a title shot until he agreed to throw a fight so Mafia fatcats could get rich on crooked bets. This led to a lengthy suspension and serious damage to his reputation, but La Motta was not to be denied, defeating Marcel Cerdan to claim the middleweight title.
Of course, when he finally won the belt and its attendant glory, he quickly cratered his marriage, career, finances and everything else so thoroughly that he ended up on a chain gang in Florida on a morals charge just a few years after his retirement. This fall, not from grace, which is a state he never visited, but from financial success and public adoration, seems earned and then some, but it also carries the tragedy implicit in the rags-to-riches story, which so often ends "and back to rags again." We, as a society, are literally born into the idea of of the "happily ever after." We very seldom wonder what happens after ever-after. Much of this book is devoted to it.
In fact, La Motta was so tormented by a youthful robbery gone horribly wrong, in which he savagely beat a bookie with a lead pipe, that he sought contrition and repentance in the suffering implicit in the ring, and basically shit on everyone in his life -- his wives, his brother, his best friend -- every chance he got, because he didn't believe he deserved to be the focus of anyone's love. As Vicki said, the loathsome creature portrayed by De Niro in RAGING BULL is perhaps even uglier in his own words than he seems through Scorsese's lens: a jealous, self-hating, pathologically violent beast who didn't quite understand the difference between rape and sex and whose main virtue was a mule-like refusal to bend his knee to the Mafia, even though at times he was quite the armed robber and thief himself. La Motta, as a psychological study, is at least as fascinating as he is disgusting, though sometimes it's a bit of a horserace. There is no doubt that he was a victim of poverty, but he was also a creature of free will like all men, and much of that freedom he used poorly to say the very, very least.
RAGING BULL is extremely well-written; as I said above, it actually turns pages just like a novel, and has the benefit of real emotional honesty: but it is not always easy to read. La Motta is at times so vile that you almost wish someone had shot him dead just to put him out of society's misery. In two chapter he details needlessly violent robberies he committed, and in another the rape of a friend's girlfriend, who later disintegrates mentally as a result of her trauma. What redeems RAGING BULL, at least to a degree, is that some men -- Salvador Dali for example, Sugar Ray Leonard, Sammy Hagar, Arnold Schwarzenegger, even Athony Keidis -- write confessionals that often sound more like boasting than contrition. RAGING BULL is not in that category. In fact, the salvation of this book lies in the fact that you cannot possibly despise La Motta more than he does; you cannot hold him up to greater scrutiny, ridicule and attack than he has done in these pages. Errol Flynn came to believe that he had wasted his life and talents in a mindless pursuit of pleasure, but exhibited very little if any remorse for the damage he'd done to others; La Motta makes it clear that he at least had the decency to truly hate himself for the wreckage he left behind in his wake. If you want a beautifully ugly depiction of poverty, the mob, and the tormented life of a pro fighter who could lick any opponent save himself, you cannot beat this book, whose only real weakness is an unrealistically happy ending. And as a final note I want to touch upon that.
RAGING BULL concludes on a note of positivity which rings false. Not that redemption or change is by any means impossible, but because this particular note strikes me as a contrived, editorially-mandated sort of ending, a sort of simple, feel-good, bright-light Hollywood moment grafted onto an otherwise complex and shadowy tale of human failings in action. This ending speaks to commercial appeal, of course, but also to the need we seem to have to walk into sunsets just for the aesthetics of it even when everything behind us is broken or on fire. As it happened, LaMotta lived until the age of 95, finally passing away in 2017, and by all accounts managed his affairs reasonably well; but the sort of demons that drove him don't simply evaporate with age or moderate living, and I think it's important to keep in mind that reform takes work. Like training for a prize fight, it requires serious daily commitment, but unlike prize fighting, the commitment must be lifelong. It has been said the nature of a man doesn't change, and while this is superficially true, it is false in the sense that one's actual nature hardly matters except to oneself: it is how we treat others that matters to them. La Motta spent a lot of his life paying for his sins, but his greatest sin was making others pay for them as well.
When most people hear the words "raging bull," their minds immediately move to the Martin Scorsese movie of the same name. That infamous movie had a point of origin, however, and this is it: the life story of the Raging Bull himself, middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta.
Years after his death and three quartes of a century after his last war in the ring, La Motta's name is still synonymous with a toughness that crosses the border into masochism, as well as misogyny, paranoia and selfishness. It is recorded that when the real-life La Motta left the premiere of Scorsese's film, he asked his ex-wife Vicki in a whining tone, "I really wasn't that bad, was I?" Her reply? "No, you were worse."
It was partially in an attempt to find out what La Motta thought of himself that I located and bought this surprisingly difficult-to-find book. Which was also surprisingly expensive. So be it, and here we go.
The autobiography reads like a well-written pulp fiction crime novel, and no wonder: La Motta, was as much a crook as a boxer. Indeed, this terse little memoir has more robbery, larceny, rape, bribery, depravity and assault in it than any three hardboiled detective flicks set in the era in which the La Motta fought (1941 - 1954). Not since Errol Flynn's tell-all MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS have I read such an warts-and-all, honest-in-spirit confessional from a public figure. He lays his dark and tortured soul absolutely bare. Most people, writing autobiographies, make at least some attempt to rationalize or justify the evil they have done in life, and to apportion some share of the blame to others, or to "the system" or something even more generalized, like poverty or racism: the Bronx Bull does not. This profoundly irresponsible man takes the lion's share of responsibility for his mistakes, caprices and cruelties, attacking himself with the same vigor he once swarmed his middleweight opponents.
La Motta depicts himself as a brutalized boy growing up in a filthy Bronx slum in the 1920s and 30s (he vividly describes the stench of his tenement housing, abetted by the foul practice of boiling dirty diapers on the stove, as well as the dog-sized rats) in which the brutality of the local Mob was balanced by the near-equal savagery of the NYPD. His early years were spent fighting bullies (he used an ice pick), committing a series of petty crimes, and auditioning for the Mafia via a series of robberies. Learning how to box in reform school, he found he had a real talent for structured violence as well, and blazed a bloody trail on the boxing circuit, where he rapidly became known as the Bronx Bull or the Raging Bull for his furious aggression and near-indestructability. He even handed the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson his first-ever defeat, but was denied a title shot until he agreed to throw a fight so Mafia fatcats could get rich on crooked bets. This led to a lengthy suspension and serious damage to his reputation, but La Motta was not to be denied, defeating Marcel Cerdan to claim the middleweight title.
Of course, when he finally won the belt and its attendant glory, he quickly cratered his marriage, career, finances and everything else so thoroughly that he ended up on a chain gang in Florida on a morals charge just a few years after his retirement. This fall, not from grace, which is a state he never visited, but from financial success and public adoration, seems earned and then some, but it also carries the tragedy implicit in the rags-to-riches story, which so often ends "and back to rags again." We, as a society, are literally born into the idea of of the "happily ever after." We very seldom wonder what happens after ever-after. Much of this book is devoted to it.
In fact, La Motta was so tormented by a youthful robbery gone horribly wrong, in which he savagely beat a bookie with a lead pipe, that he sought contrition and repentance in the suffering implicit in the ring, and basically shit on everyone in his life -- his wives, his brother, his best friend -- every chance he got, because he didn't believe he deserved to be the focus of anyone's love. As Vicki said, the loathsome creature portrayed by De Niro in RAGING BULL is perhaps even uglier in his own words than he seems through Scorsese's lens: a jealous, self-hating, pathologically violent beast who didn't quite understand the difference between rape and sex and whose main virtue was a mule-like refusal to bend his knee to the Mafia, even though at times he was quite the armed robber and thief himself. La Motta, as a psychological study, is at least as fascinating as he is disgusting, though sometimes it's a bit of a horserace. There is no doubt that he was a victim of poverty, but he was also a creature of free will like all men, and much of that freedom he used poorly to say the very, very least.
RAGING BULL is extremely well-written; as I said above, it actually turns pages just like a novel, and has the benefit of real emotional honesty: but it is not always easy to read. La Motta is at times so vile that you almost wish someone had shot him dead just to put him out of society's misery. In two chapter he details needlessly violent robberies he committed, and in another the rape of a friend's girlfriend, who later disintegrates mentally as a result of her trauma. What redeems RAGING BULL, at least to a degree, is that some men -- Salvador Dali for example, Sugar Ray Leonard, Sammy Hagar, Arnold Schwarzenegger, even Athony Keidis -- write confessionals that often sound more like boasting than contrition. RAGING BULL is not in that category. In fact, the salvation of this book lies in the fact that you cannot possibly despise La Motta more than he does; you cannot hold him up to greater scrutiny, ridicule and attack than he has done in these pages. Errol Flynn came to believe that he had wasted his life and talents in a mindless pursuit of pleasure, but exhibited very little if any remorse for the damage he'd done to others; La Motta makes it clear that he at least had the decency to truly hate himself for the wreckage he left behind in his wake. If you want a beautifully ugly depiction of poverty, the mob, and the tormented life of a pro fighter who could lick any opponent save himself, you cannot beat this book, whose only real weakness is an unrealistically happy ending. And as a final note I want to touch upon that.
RAGING BULL concludes on a note of positivity which rings false. Not that redemption or change is by any means impossible, but because this particular note strikes me as a contrived, editorially-mandated sort of ending, a sort of simple, feel-good, bright-light Hollywood moment grafted onto an otherwise complex and shadowy tale of human failings in action. This ending speaks to commercial appeal, of course, but also to the need we seem to have to walk into sunsets just for the aesthetics of it even when everything behind us is broken or on fire. As it happened, LaMotta lived until the age of 95, finally passing away in 2017, and by all accounts managed his affairs reasonably well; but the sort of demons that drove him don't simply evaporate with age or moderate living, and I think it's important to keep in mind that reform takes work. Like training for a prize fight, it requires serious daily commitment, but unlike prize fighting, the commitment must be lifelong. It has been said the nature of a man doesn't change, and while this is superficially true, it is false in the sense that one's actual nature hardly matters except to oneself: it is how we treat others that matters to them. La Motta spent a lot of his life paying for his sins, but his greatest sin was making others pay for them as well.
July 1, 2024
HORIZONS LOST AND FOUND
Cheers to the wish you were here, but you're not.
I spent the weekend past at my alma mater, Seton Hill University, teaching and attending fiction-writing classes, appearing at a surprisingly successful book signing, reuniting with old friends and making new ones, and drinking entirely too much Yuengling Lager. It should have been a grand occasion. In a sense it was. But a pall hung over the lovely old campus (think: Hogwarts on a large green hill), and I could not escape its shadow -- the shadow of death.
There is never a good time to lose a good friend. Still, some losses can come at moments which seem not only to stick the knife between your ribs but slowly turn the blade, as if the Reaper is trying to exact as much pain as possible from the loss.
To be honest, I had not seen Chris in years, and it had been a long time since we had spoken even over the internet. We hardly fit the status of "good friends" as any reasonable person would define the term. But I am not a reasonable person, never have been, and don't really give a fuck if some would think I am appropriating the grief which rightfully belongs to others. There are times in life that you meet someone with whom you form a certain bond, feel a little simpatico, share a certain connection. You may not become friends in the classical sense, due to distance or other factors, but whenever you're together or even engage in a discussion by some cold electronic means, there's a strong unspoken sense of tribe. In my half-century of life I have had many friendships which seemed solid, complete and rang true when tested, yet also evaporated almost immediately upon the imposition of distance, leaving almost no trace behind. I have also enjoyed others -- not as many, but a number -- which shut down as if by a switch when one of us moved away, only to be reignited years or even decades later, the almost literal example of "picking up where we left off." And between these two and indeed, beyond them, there are a range of other types, the most precious I suppose being the sort that goes at full steam regardless of whether the two of you live next door or on other sides of the planet. My point is simply that friendship is harder to define than we would assume. It fits Michael Ruppert's quirky definition of a paradigm as "what we think about something before we think about it." I feel the same way about friends, and I feel the same way about Chris.
We met in graduate school, in the Masters of Fine Arts program, more years ago now than I care to tell you and certainly more than I believe possible. Actually we met without meeting, and this peculiar first impression lingers to this day. As an aspirant to the Writing Popular Fiction program, I was required to submit a sample of my fiction for the approval or disapproval of those responsible for my admittance to the school. It must have impressed somebody, because I was accepted, and thereafter as one of the tasks to be completed in preparation for my first residency at the school, I had to resubmit this piece to my peers for critique, as they had to submit their own pieces to me. I had a total of ten of these submissions to peruse, and it so happened that Chris P's was the first I plucked off the pile.
Now, I must confess here to a failing which I no longer believe applies to me generally as a person: arrogance. I retain a high belief in self, but only in certain specific areas, and I have come to understand that the more humble one tries to be even in those areas where one considers oneself greatly or supremely talented, the better one can become. And this process by necessity opens the door to further humility by virtue of understanding that if there is room for improvement, well, one is not as good as one thought. There is more to it than that, but for the moment we'll leave it there, and I'll just say that at the time, I always entered any situation assuming that I was the best in the room. So when I took Chris' work off the heap, I was prepared to look down my nose at it.
Five minutes later I distinctly recall feeling sweat on my upper lip. Not figurative sweat. Real sweat. I remember either saying aloud or thinking very loudly, "If this is representative of what they've got, how the hell am I even going to stand out?"
When I arrived at school -- this was the summer of 2006 -- I was eager to meet the guy that had clubbed my well-hidden insecurities with his typewriter. I don't actually remember if I wanted to hate him or not, but I do remember telling him what an amazing writer I thought he was, and meaning it, as Salieri meant his initial compliments to Mozart in Amadeus. Thankfully, Chris was not the sort to compete, or to gloat, or to let compliments go to his head. Indeed, as I was to discover, he was actually far too humble for his own good. Beneath that dryly witty-looking face (the more serious a look he tried to put on it, the more he looked as if he were about to burst out laughing) there lay a great creative genius, it is true, but that genius was untouched by egotism, by pride, or even self-belief as I understand the word. And it was here that I found him utterly infuriating, but I'm getting a touch ahead of myself.
Chris and I hit it off, and last weekend, as I was walking and driving around the campus and the town in which it resides, I kept encountering the places where he and I and others had gone while jammed into my wine-red Buick LaSaber sedan. I remember how he told me that Primani Bros boasted "The Salad As Big As Your Head" -- and it turned out to be bigger, since the last time I checked my dome was 61 cm around (must be all that brain). I remember when we needed beer on a Sunday, and the only place we could get it, thanks to Pennsylvania's blue laws, was a dirty hole-in-the-wall dive bar nestled in the basement of a run-down brick building in the shadow of an overpass. We walked in, the room -- full of barflies and meth-heads -- stopped, and then a smoky-faced old junkie drunk, with shards of yellow teeth, allegedly female, screamed, "Lookeee here at them handsome boys! Hows a bout youse buy an old girl a drink!" And Chris, who was kind to seemingly everyone, replied suavely, "Another time, ma'a'm, for sure," as she wolf-whistled us out the door. And I remembered the nerdy arguments we'd have in the dining hall or somebody's hotel room, where a dozen of us would sit around, drinking and eating take-out and fighting about this or that novelist, whether he sucked or was over-rated or truly the genius everyone said he was, and Chris was generally the sole voice of diplomacy, if not necessarily reason. He seemed to be a natural diplomat, incapable of giving or taking offense, genuinely concerned with keeping the peace, willing to take a stand but not willing to hurt someone as a result. And this was why he drove me nuts.
As a writer, as in every other creative pursuit and many which are not creative, it is necessary to have a certain core of arrogance. Not just self-belief; arrogance. I use the word specifically because to be great means to believe one is great even if the evidence periodically indicates otherwise. One must believe that one has a claim which one may in fact not have, or not have yet; and one must cling to this belief in the face of discouragement, false counsel, and counsel which is well-intentioned and possibly correct in the moment but not in the main. In short, one must possess a certainty of greatness independent of logic or likelihood. And this Chris did not possess. Not creatively, I mean. He was far too malleable and pliable, far too open to accepting criticism at face value, far too willing to accept suggestions and submit to attacks from people grossly unqualified to give them. He seemed to lack any ability to discriminate between remarks made by fools and those made by people of genuine talent. His natural goodness meant he had to take everyone seriously, even those operating out of stupidity or jealousy, and his natural diplomacy meant he had to accept every critique with perfect democracy. This seriously effected his writing and it was the subject of a number of arguments between us, conducted primarily over e-mail, but occasionally in person.
"Chris," I'd say in exasperation. "Not everyone with a voice box is worth listening to."
And of course Chris, ever the conciliator, would agree and fail to mention my own reputation, justly deserved at the time, as an arrogant asshole with little regard for othe people's feelings and little respect for their abilities. He would just agree with whatever I said, make one of his heavily ironic jokes, and then change the subject and go right on listening to clowns unfit to carry his pencil. His writing suffered accordingly, yet when we graduated, and I was chosen to give the valedictory (admittedly after an utterly shameless campaign of self-promotion), he was the only person in my graduation class of twenty-eight that I called out by name. There were of course other large talents in the bunch, but Chris was something special, someone with the potential to go all the way -- agent, traditional publishing contract, Hollywood options, all of it. And I was sufficiently respectful of his talent and his human qualities, few of which I shared at the time but all of which I admired, that I wanted him to succeed to the fullest even if it meant he would be running rings around my sorry ass for the rest of our respective writing careers.
After graduation, I had only sporadic contact with Chris. Every couple of years I'd get intensely curious as to what he was doing -- the guy was legitimately a stud, if you can use that word in relation to writers -- so I'd hit him up by e-mail, or on Facebook or by some other means, and we'd get to jawin'. Then, following the birth of his daughter, he disappeared from social media for a long time - years, if memory serves. Can't say as I blame him: by all accounts being a father was the focus of his being. But eventually our ships passed in the night once more, and I distinctly remember him telling me, the last time we communicated directly, that he'd fallen away from writing for a long time, but was now working on a project and would let me know when it was complete. I was excited enough to offer him the services of my editor without actually asking that long-suffering individual if he wanted another client. But I never did hear back from him and once again we fell out of touch completely, with the exception of the occasional "like" on a social media status or a secondhand howdy.
A few days before I left for the In Your Write Mind Workshop at Seton Hill last Thursday, I was at my sink, washing the dishes, when my glance fell upon one of the numerous (we're talking hundreds, folks) of framed photographs I hang from floor to ceiling in my rather overlarge single bedroom apartment. These pictures change from time to time, reflecting new experiences and cataloging old ones, but they are primarily of people that I care about, even if no longer speak to them anymore. This one depicted a much younger and infinitely more handsome version of myself standing between Chris and a third writer. I'd forgotten the photo was even there, and it pained me to see how badly I've decayed in the intervening years, but the mock-serious look on Chris's face made me laugh. It was stern and pompous, incredibly reminiscent of the character of Wesley Wyndham-Price in Buffy and Angel, so ably played by Alexis Denisoff, but from the very compression of Chris's lips in the picture, you knew the son of a bitch was about to start laughing. The guy was simply incapable of taking himself seriously. I thought, "I hope he goes to the conference. I miss that guy."
The next day, or the one after that, I was at my desk at work when a random e-mail from the Alumni Relations Department at the university hit my inbox. It informed me that Chris had passed away. For a few moments I just stared at it with what must have been a very puzzled look upon my face. Then I set out to prove that it was nonsense, a mistake, the wrong guy's obituary. If only. Chris was dead all right, gone.
The news hit me much harder than I would have expected. I am now almost 52 years old, and certainly past the age where one is rawly shocked by the news of a premature passing. My relationship with Chris was intermittent at best: no one was going to mistake us for Butch and Sundance, or even Fonzie and Richie. We were two guys who knew each other from graduate school and had gotten on well together; we respected each other's work, and that respect survived over the years we had little to no contact. So too did the knowledge that if we ran into each other in an airport lounge in Phoenix, a dive bar in Quebec City, or a charity marathon in Chicago, we'd be able to resume our last conversation as if it had ended the previous evening. Yet it is precisely because I was confident in my ability to reconnect with him at will that I never did so. I didn't even reach out to ask him if was going to attend IYWM this year, which would have been easy enough. I just took it for granted. I took him for granted. And now he's gone.
I am unashamed to say that later that night, long after work had ended and I was sitting here, where I write this now, I wept a little. What shames me is that the tears were not really for Chris. I did not know Chris well enough to weep for him. The tears were for myself. They were for the sadness that overcomes me when I see my reflection and realize I'm not looking at a picture of my father, who died at 54, but myself at almost 52. The tears were for the missed opportunities, the unfulfilled dreams, the lost horizons. To quote Lawrence Sanders: "I wept for all of us. The losers."
So yes, my four-day excursion to Seton Hill, successful as it was, left me feeling thoughtful and sad. Very few of the people attending the conference ever met Chris or even knew who he was, which furthered my feelings of isolation. It heartened me slightly to raise a toast to him at dinner with friends, but it heartened me more that I was having dinner with friends, and making new ones in the bargain. It heartened me that at least this tragedy had made me realize how rare and precious such moments truly are in our lives, how little time we actually spend with the people we care about. To quote Orwell, "There is time for everything in life except that which is worth doing."
There is a song which has been playing in my head for a week straight. Unlike most earworms it is not annoying or aggravating: it seems completely appropriate, even if the lyrics apply more to the vast circle of people I have cared about or care about than Chris specifically:
Do I have to die to hear you miss me?
Do I have to die to let you say goodbye?
I don't want to act like there's tomorrow
I don't want to wait to do this one more time
I miss you
Took time but I admit it
It still hurts even after all these years
And I know that next time
Ain't always gonna happen
I gotta say "I love you" while you're here
Somewhere in this apartment I actually have a crystal ball. Unfortunately -- or perhaps very fortunately -- it doesn't tell the future. Like everyone else, I've no idea how much time I'm granted on this rock. I could live to be 103 like Ernst Jünger, publishing all the way, or tap out shy of fifty-five like my old man, with my pen very far from having gleaned my teeming brain. The only thing I do know is that the death of Chris, as much as any of the losses I have sustained in this year of loss, has served to remind me just how fragile a thing life is and just how much of it I have taken for granted. To break the pattern of entitlement, to shatter the belief that "next time is always gonna happen" is going to be a job of work, but by God I am going to give it a crack. I owe that much to Chris.
I spent the weekend past at my alma mater, Seton Hill University, teaching and attending fiction-writing classes, appearing at a surprisingly successful book signing, reuniting with old friends and making new ones, and drinking entirely too much Yuengling Lager. It should have been a grand occasion. In a sense it was. But a pall hung over the lovely old campus (think: Hogwarts on a large green hill), and I could not escape its shadow -- the shadow of death.
There is never a good time to lose a good friend. Still, some losses can come at moments which seem not only to stick the knife between your ribs but slowly turn the blade, as if the Reaper is trying to exact as much pain as possible from the loss.
To be honest, I had not seen Chris in years, and it had been a long time since we had spoken even over the internet. We hardly fit the status of "good friends" as any reasonable person would define the term. But I am not a reasonable person, never have been, and don't really give a fuck if some would think I am appropriating the grief which rightfully belongs to others. There are times in life that you meet someone with whom you form a certain bond, feel a little simpatico, share a certain connection. You may not become friends in the classical sense, due to distance or other factors, but whenever you're together or even engage in a discussion by some cold electronic means, there's a strong unspoken sense of tribe. In my half-century of life I have had many friendships which seemed solid, complete and rang true when tested, yet also evaporated almost immediately upon the imposition of distance, leaving almost no trace behind. I have also enjoyed others -- not as many, but a number -- which shut down as if by a switch when one of us moved away, only to be reignited years or even decades later, the almost literal example of "picking up where we left off." And between these two and indeed, beyond them, there are a range of other types, the most precious I suppose being the sort that goes at full steam regardless of whether the two of you live next door or on other sides of the planet. My point is simply that friendship is harder to define than we would assume. It fits Michael Ruppert's quirky definition of a paradigm as "what we think about something before we think about it." I feel the same way about friends, and I feel the same way about Chris.
We met in graduate school, in the Masters of Fine Arts program, more years ago now than I care to tell you and certainly more than I believe possible. Actually we met without meeting, and this peculiar first impression lingers to this day. As an aspirant to the Writing Popular Fiction program, I was required to submit a sample of my fiction for the approval or disapproval of those responsible for my admittance to the school. It must have impressed somebody, because I was accepted, and thereafter as one of the tasks to be completed in preparation for my first residency at the school, I had to resubmit this piece to my peers for critique, as they had to submit their own pieces to me. I had a total of ten of these submissions to peruse, and it so happened that Chris P's was the first I plucked off the pile.
Now, I must confess here to a failing which I no longer believe applies to me generally as a person: arrogance. I retain a high belief in self, but only in certain specific areas, and I have come to understand that the more humble one tries to be even in those areas where one considers oneself greatly or supremely talented, the better one can become. And this process by necessity opens the door to further humility by virtue of understanding that if there is room for improvement, well, one is not as good as one thought. There is more to it than that, but for the moment we'll leave it there, and I'll just say that at the time, I always entered any situation assuming that I was the best in the room. So when I took Chris' work off the heap, I was prepared to look down my nose at it.
Five minutes later I distinctly recall feeling sweat on my upper lip. Not figurative sweat. Real sweat. I remember either saying aloud or thinking very loudly, "If this is representative of what they've got, how the hell am I even going to stand out?"
When I arrived at school -- this was the summer of 2006 -- I was eager to meet the guy that had clubbed my well-hidden insecurities with his typewriter. I don't actually remember if I wanted to hate him or not, but I do remember telling him what an amazing writer I thought he was, and meaning it, as Salieri meant his initial compliments to Mozart in Amadeus. Thankfully, Chris was not the sort to compete, or to gloat, or to let compliments go to his head. Indeed, as I was to discover, he was actually far too humble for his own good. Beneath that dryly witty-looking face (the more serious a look he tried to put on it, the more he looked as if he were about to burst out laughing) there lay a great creative genius, it is true, but that genius was untouched by egotism, by pride, or even self-belief as I understand the word. And it was here that I found him utterly infuriating, but I'm getting a touch ahead of myself.
Chris and I hit it off, and last weekend, as I was walking and driving around the campus and the town in which it resides, I kept encountering the places where he and I and others had gone while jammed into my wine-red Buick LaSaber sedan. I remember how he told me that Primani Bros boasted "The Salad As Big As Your Head" -- and it turned out to be bigger, since the last time I checked my dome was 61 cm around (must be all that brain). I remember when we needed beer on a Sunday, and the only place we could get it, thanks to Pennsylvania's blue laws, was a dirty hole-in-the-wall dive bar nestled in the basement of a run-down brick building in the shadow of an overpass. We walked in, the room -- full of barflies and meth-heads -- stopped, and then a smoky-faced old junkie drunk, with shards of yellow teeth, allegedly female, screamed, "Lookeee here at them handsome boys! Hows a bout youse buy an old girl a drink!" And Chris, who was kind to seemingly everyone, replied suavely, "Another time, ma'a'm, for sure," as she wolf-whistled us out the door. And I remembered the nerdy arguments we'd have in the dining hall or somebody's hotel room, where a dozen of us would sit around, drinking and eating take-out and fighting about this or that novelist, whether he sucked or was over-rated or truly the genius everyone said he was, and Chris was generally the sole voice of diplomacy, if not necessarily reason. He seemed to be a natural diplomat, incapable of giving or taking offense, genuinely concerned with keeping the peace, willing to take a stand but not willing to hurt someone as a result. And this was why he drove me nuts.
As a writer, as in every other creative pursuit and many which are not creative, it is necessary to have a certain core of arrogance. Not just self-belief; arrogance. I use the word specifically because to be great means to believe one is great even if the evidence periodically indicates otherwise. One must believe that one has a claim which one may in fact not have, or not have yet; and one must cling to this belief in the face of discouragement, false counsel, and counsel which is well-intentioned and possibly correct in the moment but not in the main. In short, one must possess a certainty of greatness independent of logic or likelihood. And this Chris did not possess. Not creatively, I mean. He was far too malleable and pliable, far too open to accepting criticism at face value, far too willing to accept suggestions and submit to attacks from people grossly unqualified to give them. He seemed to lack any ability to discriminate between remarks made by fools and those made by people of genuine talent. His natural goodness meant he had to take everyone seriously, even those operating out of stupidity or jealousy, and his natural diplomacy meant he had to accept every critique with perfect democracy. This seriously effected his writing and it was the subject of a number of arguments between us, conducted primarily over e-mail, but occasionally in person.
"Chris," I'd say in exasperation. "Not everyone with a voice box is worth listening to."
And of course Chris, ever the conciliator, would agree and fail to mention my own reputation, justly deserved at the time, as an arrogant asshole with little regard for othe people's feelings and little respect for their abilities. He would just agree with whatever I said, make one of his heavily ironic jokes, and then change the subject and go right on listening to clowns unfit to carry his pencil. His writing suffered accordingly, yet when we graduated, and I was chosen to give the valedictory (admittedly after an utterly shameless campaign of self-promotion), he was the only person in my graduation class of twenty-eight that I called out by name. There were of course other large talents in the bunch, but Chris was something special, someone with the potential to go all the way -- agent, traditional publishing contract, Hollywood options, all of it. And I was sufficiently respectful of his talent and his human qualities, few of which I shared at the time but all of which I admired, that I wanted him to succeed to the fullest even if it meant he would be running rings around my sorry ass for the rest of our respective writing careers.
After graduation, I had only sporadic contact with Chris. Every couple of years I'd get intensely curious as to what he was doing -- the guy was legitimately a stud, if you can use that word in relation to writers -- so I'd hit him up by e-mail, or on Facebook or by some other means, and we'd get to jawin'. Then, following the birth of his daughter, he disappeared from social media for a long time - years, if memory serves. Can't say as I blame him: by all accounts being a father was the focus of his being. But eventually our ships passed in the night once more, and I distinctly remember him telling me, the last time we communicated directly, that he'd fallen away from writing for a long time, but was now working on a project and would let me know when it was complete. I was excited enough to offer him the services of my editor without actually asking that long-suffering individual if he wanted another client. But I never did hear back from him and once again we fell out of touch completely, with the exception of the occasional "like" on a social media status or a secondhand howdy.
A few days before I left for the In Your Write Mind Workshop at Seton Hill last Thursday, I was at my sink, washing the dishes, when my glance fell upon one of the numerous (we're talking hundreds, folks) of framed photographs I hang from floor to ceiling in my rather overlarge single bedroom apartment. These pictures change from time to time, reflecting new experiences and cataloging old ones, but they are primarily of people that I care about, even if no longer speak to them anymore. This one depicted a much younger and infinitely more handsome version of myself standing between Chris and a third writer. I'd forgotten the photo was even there, and it pained me to see how badly I've decayed in the intervening years, but the mock-serious look on Chris's face made me laugh. It was stern and pompous, incredibly reminiscent of the character of Wesley Wyndham-Price in Buffy and Angel, so ably played by Alexis Denisoff, but from the very compression of Chris's lips in the picture, you knew the son of a bitch was about to start laughing. The guy was simply incapable of taking himself seriously. I thought, "I hope he goes to the conference. I miss that guy."
The next day, or the one after that, I was at my desk at work when a random e-mail from the Alumni Relations Department at the university hit my inbox. It informed me that Chris had passed away. For a few moments I just stared at it with what must have been a very puzzled look upon my face. Then I set out to prove that it was nonsense, a mistake, the wrong guy's obituary. If only. Chris was dead all right, gone.
The news hit me much harder than I would have expected. I am now almost 52 years old, and certainly past the age where one is rawly shocked by the news of a premature passing. My relationship with Chris was intermittent at best: no one was going to mistake us for Butch and Sundance, or even Fonzie and Richie. We were two guys who knew each other from graduate school and had gotten on well together; we respected each other's work, and that respect survived over the years we had little to no contact. So too did the knowledge that if we ran into each other in an airport lounge in Phoenix, a dive bar in Quebec City, or a charity marathon in Chicago, we'd be able to resume our last conversation as if it had ended the previous evening. Yet it is precisely because I was confident in my ability to reconnect with him at will that I never did so. I didn't even reach out to ask him if was going to attend IYWM this year, which would have been easy enough. I just took it for granted. I took him for granted. And now he's gone.
I am unashamed to say that later that night, long after work had ended and I was sitting here, where I write this now, I wept a little. What shames me is that the tears were not really for Chris. I did not know Chris well enough to weep for him. The tears were for myself. They were for the sadness that overcomes me when I see my reflection and realize I'm not looking at a picture of my father, who died at 54, but myself at almost 52. The tears were for the missed opportunities, the unfulfilled dreams, the lost horizons. To quote Lawrence Sanders: "I wept for all of us. The losers."
So yes, my four-day excursion to Seton Hill, successful as it was, left me feeling thoughtful and sad. Very few of the people attending the conference ever met Chris or even knew who he was, which furthered my feelings of isolation. It heartened me slightly to raise a toast to him at dinner with friends, but it heartened me more that I was having dinner with friends, and making new ones in the bargain. It heartened me that at least this tragedy had made me realize how rare and precious such moments truly are in our lives, how little time we actually spend with the people we care about. To quote Orwell, "There is time for everything in life except that which is worth doing."
There is a song which has been playing in my head for a week straight. Unlike most earworms it is not annoying or aggravating: it seems completely appropriate, even if the lyrics apply more to the vast circle of people I have cared about or care about than Chris specifically:
Do I have to die to hear you miss me?
Do I have to die to let you say goodbye?
I don't want to act like there's tomorrow
I don't want to wait to do this one more time
I miss you
Took time but I admit it
It still hurts even after all these years
And I know that next time
Ain't always gonna happen
I gotta say "I love you" while you're here
Somewhere in this apartment I actually have a crystal ball. Unfortunately -- or perhaps very fortunately -- it doesn't tell the future. Like everyone else, I've no idea how much time I'm granted on this rock. I could live to be 103 like Ernst Jünger, publishing all the way, or tap out shy of fifty-five like my old man, with my pen very far from having gleaned my teeming brain. The only thing I do know is that the death of Chris, as much as any of the losses I have sustained in this year of loss, has served to remind me just how fragile a thing life is and just how much of it I have taken for granted. To break the pattern of entitlement, to shatter the belief that "next time is always gonna happen" is going to be a job of work, but by God I am going to give it a crack. I owe that much to Chris.
June 29, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: COLIN MCDOUGALL'S "EXECUTION"
In fact, of course, he had done the most a man could do, and although this thought would never occur to him, the most a man can do is everything.
EXECUTION is a rare find, a novel about war viewed through the lens of execution. Not war or murder per se, but execution: the formal, legitimized process by which human life is taken in a civilized society.
Colin McDougall, a decorated veteran of the small but ferocious Canadian expeditionary force in WW2, takes us through a novelized version of his own experiences between 1943 - 1945, when the Allies were making their torturous hop-and-crawl from Sicily up the seemingly endless boot of Italy, in the face of resistance that seemed to increase rather than decrease over time. In the history of the Second World War, the contributions of Canada are often marginalized or forgotten altogether, just as the Mediterranean Theater of Operations is marginalized and forgotten; McDougall's novel serves from its opening lines as a valuable reminder that war is war wherever it is fought, and that if debts to those who fight war are owed by those they fight to protect, those debts must be paid equally.
EXECUTION's inciting incident is the summary and brutal execution of two Italian prisoners of war by the Canadians in a Sicilian barnyard. The second is a massive attack on the seemingly impregnable Adolf Hitler Line south of Rome by the Canadian division, a bloody massacre which its own commanding general likens to a formal execution of his own men. The last is the actual execution by firing squad of a Canadian soldier following his somewhat dubious court-martial for murder. All of these incidents are woven together, as are the lives and the deaths of the characters involved, to form a tapestry -- not about war exactly, but rather the effect that ending human lives has on the human beings tasked with ending them. McDougall is not merely writing a war novel, he is quite blatantly comparing the various forms of execution created by society: informal (murder), mass scale (battle), and formal (firing squad).
The novel's principal character is John Adam, a dutiful young lieutenant whose burning enthusiasm for the job of war is blown into a sort of existential vacuum by the two murders he is ordered to commit by his superior officer. Adam is left only with his sense of duty, and by periodic attempts to submerge himself into the pleasures of R & R, but even when coupling with "ladies of the evening" he is unable to be truly cynical or unfeeling, and he seems to come fully alive only when love, friendship, or duty beckon: at all other times the war has left him hollow, almost indifferent to his own fate. He is not a bold character despite his battle courage, nor is he intended to be: he is simply a victim, and the theme of victimhood runs throughout the entire book. The executioners and the executed share a bond: their roles can reverse any moment, and in this novel, they frequently do.
McDougall himself is a startling writer. His prose often rises to the lyrical, and his insights into human nature buckling and occasionally strengthening under the extreme pressures of war is profound. Nobody who reads EXECUTION will forget Ian Kildare, the cigar-waving brigade commander who travels with a personal bagpiper and takes sadistic relish in insulting his superiors; or Philip Doorn, the platoon chaplain known as The Ghoul, who goes so thoroughly insane he has nowhere to go but back to sanity; or Bunny Bazin, the quirky battalion commander who accepts his own inevitable death in battle so completely he takes conscious steps not to try to avoid it. And McDougall's description of the Battle of the Hitler Line rises to the truly epic: I actually got goosebumps at its mixture of mindless butchery and accidental glory. McDougall is the sort who grasps by virtue of bitter experience that war is a catalyst for the most terrible but also the most powerful chemistries within mankind, which is not profound in itself; it becomes profound because he understands this applies also to civilization, that instrument designed to enhance and protect human life, which through the process of war, or law, can extinguish life. There is a madness implicit in this which cannot help but chagrin the reader as it chagrins characters like John Adam, who is fully committed to committing executions in combat but is gutted by execution in its crueler, more personal forms.
The cultural links between Britain and Canada show strongly in McDougall's writing. EXECUTION, despite its dark subject matter, is laced with dry (but stinging) English-style wit which occasionally rises to the level of black comedy or even satire; fans of Evelyn Waugh and Derek Robinson will smile at his tongue-in-cheek depictions of idiot bureaucracy, fools in uniform, ironic outcomes and eccentricities often indistinguishable from madness. And indeed (and not to repeat myself), madness is a recurring theme in the book: it is arguable that nearly all the characters in EXECUTION are insane at one point or another, and some continually. The dissonance that creates this is not merely cognitive, it is psychological and spiritual. It is the end product of the paradox of execution itself.
One extremely memorable scene takes place when the soldiers are gathered to be told about the great benefits which await them when the war is over -- cash payouts, job assurance, free schooling, et cetera and so on. The civilian speaker is in true earnest as he informs them that the mistakes of WW1 will not be repeated, this time the government will take care of its soldiery and not abandon them as they did before. The commanding officer cuts the presentation short and orders his men out of the room in a cold rage, knowing that the speaker means well but that filling the men with thoughts of what they will do after the war will merely distract them and contribute to their deaths. He views his men as condemned, with commutation possible only if they focus entirely on their task -- itself execution.
No novel is perfect, of course, and there are admittedly a few sluggish chapters in this book, and some which fall into war-cliche tropes. The narrative is more fractured than I would have liked, and as a result we do not get to know some characters as well as we should. Because the novel is constructed in four acts, the pace of the narrative sometimes loses its rhythm. In the end however I would not only say this is a terrific novel, I think it's one of the better novels I've ever read and certainly a legitimate classic of war literature. McDougall apparently never wrote another one, which is perhaps just as well, because it is difficult to believe he could have topped EXECUTION.
EXECUTION is a rare find, a novel about war viewed through the lens of execution. Not war or murder per se, but execution: the formal, legitimized process by which human life is taken in a civilized society.
Colin McDougall, a decorated veteran of the small but ferocious Canadian expeditionary force in WW2, takes us through a novelized version of his own experiences between 1943 - 1945, when the Allies were making their torturous hop-and-crawl from Sicily up the seemingly endless boot of Italy, in the face of resistance that seemed to increase rather than decrease over time. In the history of the Second World War, the contributions of Canada are often marginalized or forgotten altogether, just as the Mediterranean Theater of Operations is marginalized and forgotten; McDougall's novel serves from its opening lines as a valuable reminder that war is war wherever it is fought, and that if debts to those who fight war are owed by those they fight to protect, those debts must be paid equally.
EXECUTION's inciting incident is the summary and brutal execution of two Italian prisoners of war by the Canadians in a Sicilian barnyard. The second is a massive attack on the seemingly impregnable Adolf Hitler Line south of Rome by the Canadian division, a bloody massacre which its own commanding general likens to a formal execution of his own men. The last is the actual execution by firing squad of a Canadian soldier following his somewhat dubious court-martial for murder. All of these incidents are woven together, as are the lives and the deaths of the characters involved, to form a tapestry -- not about war exactly, but rather the effect that ending human lives has on the human beings tasked with ending them. McDougall is not merely writing a war novel, he is quite blatantly comparing the various forms of execution created by society: informal (murder), mass scale (battle), and formal (firing squad).
The novel's principal character is John Adam, a dutiful young lieutenant whose burning enthusiasm for the job of war is blown into a sort of existential vacuum by the two murders he is ordered to commit by his superior officer. Adam is left only with his sense of duty, and by periodic attempts to submerge himself into the pleasures of R & R, but even when coupling with "ladies of the evening" he is unable to be truly cynical or unfeeling, and he seems to come fully alive only when love, friendship, or duty beckon: at all other times the war has left him hollow, almost indifferent to his own fate. He is not a bold character despite his battle courage, nor is he intended to be: he is simply a victim, and the theme of victimhood runs throughout the entire book. The executioners and the executed share a bond: their roles can reverse any moment, and in this novel, they frequently do.
McDougall himself is a startling writer. His prose often rises to the lyrical, and his insights into human nature buckling and occasionally strengthening under the extreme pressures of war is profound. Nobody who reads EXECUTION will forget Ian Kildare, the cigar-waving brigade commander who travels with a personal bagpiper and takes sadistic relish in insulting his superiors; or Philip Doorn, the platoon chaplain known as The Ghoul, who goes so thoroughly insane he has nowhere to go but back to sanity; or Bunny Bazin, the quirky battalion commander who accepts his own inevitable death in battle so completely he takes conscious steps not to try to avoid it. And McDougall's description of the Battle of the Hitler Line rises to the truly epic: I actually got goosebumps at its mixture of mindless butchery and accidental glory. McDougall is the sort who grasps by virtue of bitter experience that war is a catalyst for the most terrible but also the most powerful chemistries within mankind, which is not profound in itself; it becomes profound because he understands this applies also to civilization, that instrument designed to enhance and protect human life, which through the process of war, or law, can extinguish life. There is a madness implicit in this which cannot help but chagrin the reader as it chagrins characters like John Adam, who is fully committed to committing executions in combat but is gutted by execution in its crueler, more personal forms.
The cultural links between Britain and Canada show strongly in McDougall's writing. EXECUTION, despite its dark subject matter, is laced with dry (but stinging) English-style wit which occasionally rises to the level of black comedy or even satire; fans of Evelyn Waugh and Derek Robinson will smile at his tongue-in-cheek depictions of idiot bureaucracy, fools in uniform, ironic outcomes and eccentricities often indistinguishable from madness. And indeed (and not to repeat myself), madness is a recurring theme in the book: it is arguable that nearly all the characters in EXECUTION are insane at one point or another, and some continually. The dissonance that creates this is not merely cognitive, it is psychological and spiritual. It is the end product of the paradox of execution itself.
One extremely memorable scene takes place when the soldiers are gathered to be told about the great benefits which await them when the war is over -- cash payouts, job assurance, free schooling, et cetera and so on. The civilian speaker is in true earnest as he informs them that the mistakes of WW1 will not be repeated, this time the government will take care of its soldiery and not abandon them as they did before. The commanding officer cuts the presentation short and orders his men out of the room in a cold rage, knowing that the speaker means well but that filling the men with thoughts of what they will do after the war will merely distract them and contribute to their deaths. He views his men as condemned, with commutation possible only if they focus entirely on their task -- itself execution.
No novel is perfect, of course, and there are admittedly a few sluggish chapters in this book, and some which fall into war-cliche tropes. The narrative is more fractured than I would have liked, and as a result we do not get to know some characters as well as we should. Because the novel is constructed in four acts, the pace of the narrative sometimes loses its rhythm. In the end however I would not only say this is a terrific novel, I think it's one of the better novels I've ever read and certainly a legitimate classic of war literature. McDougall apparently never wrote another one, which is perhaps just as well, because it is difficult to believe he could have topped EXECUTION.
June 25, 2024
MURDERED IN LOVE
Today, come voleva la prassi, I was walking in the woods after work, and as if often the case on my hikes and rambles, my thoughts turned in a creative direction. I flatter, and probably delude, myself that some of you may remember the blog I wrote some time past on my experiments in poetry. They are humble experiments indeed, and today, as I climbed sweatily up a leaf-strewn, root-overgrown trail, I began to compose something which was not a poem but prose in what might be called the style of poetry. As soon as I arrived home, I sat down and wrote it out as best I could remember it, which, also come voleva la prassi, was not terribly well. But in the interests of sharing the creative process in its rawest form, here it is:
The Heart Murdered In Love
When a heart is murdered in love, it dies in five ways.
The first is the killing itself, which comes out of the dark, a flash of cold steel into the beating organ, yielding a moment of paralyzing shock, a moment of terrible comprehension when the full magnitude of the horror sinks in, and then the grim business of death itself, business of which we need not speak.
The second is the onset of decomposition. This is not visible to the eye and the heart murdered in love very much resembles the beating version, so much so that most onlookers cannot tell the difference. They may get a faint whiff of corruption, a vague sense that something is wrong, but their interest will be passive in character, and any questions they ask will not require answers – it will be enough for their consciences that the questions were asked. After all, they have their own hearts to tend.
The third is rot. This phase, which sets in when all other phases of surprise, dismay, and humiliation pass and leave only the sickening leprosy of betrayal in their wake, is particularly tragic because the disgusting nature of full decomposition draws a crowd, many of whom wish well; but their intervention will of necessity come too late and at any rate the heart murdered in love is so repulsive to them that they will soon flee, as the dead heart is now monstrous and like all monsters drives away all things good as it gets about the business of destroying itself even more thoroughly.
The fourth phase is mummification. What remains of the heart murdered in love slowly becomes as so many dried leaves and branches and sticks, neither offensive nor frightening and only a little sad to behold, only a reminder that things end. Any odor will be faint and perhaps even pleasing in a nostalgic sort of way, a smell of dust and foxed paper and decaying leather, like an old secondhand bookshop where no one ever goes. A lonely quiet surrounds the heart murdered in love because none wish to disturb its loneliness with their fellowship, and they will call this respect for the dead.
The fifth way is a choice. The heart murdered in love, having passed out of shock, out of horror, out of humiliation and pain, is now a ghost come to a crossroads. On the left is the existence of a ghost, which is not life, but assumes its shape; the heart murdered in love passes over things without leaving a trace, neither in nor of the world, an echo of itself growing ever-fainter until it passes into greater and truer death years hence, its one balm being that it has no more pain because it does not feel. On the right is the soil where the leaves of the heart murdered in love have decayed into nothingness, and this is soil which can be tended even by a ghost, though the tending is slow and laborious and may yield little at first and for years afterwards; but if the ghost keeps to his work and tends his soil well, it may realize one day it is no longer a ghost but has taken human form and their human heart is beating once again, and all the heritage and legacy of human emotions they foreswore in their darkest hours are theirs again if they are strong enough and stupid enough to feel them. And they will realize further that they have no guarantees not to be murdered in love once more, that there are other hearts beating out there in the night but also other murderers, and the choice is simply to beat or not to beat.
I will spare you the prosaic details of what led me to this line of thinking, except that it is at least partially dedicated to a female friend of mine, but I assure you that whatever you think of the product, it was sincerely written. Indeed, I have found that the sort of creative energies that often flow when I am hiking through nature are, like nature itself, rambling and raw yet also real in a way that more cooly and deliberately constructed thoughts are not. They have the vitality of nature itself, and assume their own forms which you are free to take with you and subject to carving if you wish. Exactly what the hell I am to do with raw, free-form compositions like "Murdered in Love" beyond publish them here in their still-dripping form is beyond me, but it seems rather a crime not to hold them up to the light, because it's in the light that they are created.
The Heart Murdered In Love
When a heart is murdered in love, it dies in five ways.
The first is the killing itself, which comes out of the dark, a flash of cold steel into the beating organ, yielding a moment of paralyzing shock, a moment of terrible comprehension when the full magnitude of the horror sinks in, and then the grim business of death itself, business of which we need not speak.
The second is the onset of decomposition. This is not visible to the eye and the heart murdered in love very much resembles the beating version, so much so that most onlookers cannot tell the difference. They may get a faint whiff of corruption, a vague sense that something is wrong, but their interest will be passive in character, and any questions they ask will not require answers – it will be enough for their consciences that the questions were asked. After all, they have their own hearts to tend.
The third is rot. This phase, which sets in when all other phases of surprise, dismay, and humiliation pass and leave only the sickening leprosy of betrayal in their wake, is particularly tragic because the disgusting nature of full decomposition draws a crowd, many of whom wish well; but their intervention will of necessity come too late and at any rate the heart murdered in love is so repulsive to them that they will soon flee, as the dead heart is now monstrous and like all monsters drives away all things good as it gets about the business of destroying itself even more thoroughly.
The fourth phase is mummification. What remains of the heart murdered in love slowly becomes as so many dried leaves and branches and sticks, neither offensive nor frightening and only a little sad to behold, only a reminder that things end. Any odor will be faint and perhaps even pleasing in a nostalgic sort of way, a smell of dust and foxed paper and decaying leather, like an old secondhand bookshop where no one ever goes. A lonely quiet surrounds the heart murdered in love because none wish to disturb its loneliness with their fellowship, and they will call this respect for the dead.
The fifth way is a choice. The heart murdered in love, having passed out of shock, out of horror, out of humiliation and pain, is now a ghost come to a crossroads. On the left is the existence of a ghost, which is not life, but assumes its shape; the heart murdered in love passes over things without leaving a trace, neither in nor of the world, an echo of itself growing ever-fainter until it passes into greater and truer death years hence, its one balm being that it has no more pain because it does not feel. On the right is the soil where the leaves of the heart murdered in love have decayed into nothingness, and this is soil which can be tended even by a ghost, though the tending is slow and laborious and may yield little at first and for years afterwards; but if the ghost keeps to his work and tends his soil well, it may realize one day it is no longer a ghost but has taken human form and their human heart is beating once again, and all the heritage and legacy of human emotions they foreswore in their darkest hours are theirs again if they are strong enough and stupid enough to feel them. And they will realize further that they have no guarantees not to be murdered in love once more, that there are other hearts beating out there in the night but also other murderers, and the choice is simply to beat or not to beat.
I will spare you the prosaic details of what led me to this line of thinking, except that it is at least partially dedicated to a female friend of mine, but I assure you that whatever you think of the product, it was sincerely written. Indeed, I have found that the sort of creative energies that often flow when I am hiking through nature are, like nature itself, rambling and raw yet also real in a way that more cooly and deliberately constructed thoughts are not. They have the vitality of nature itself, and assume their own forms which you are free to take with you and subject to carving if you wish. Exactly what the hell I am to do with raw, free-form compositions like "Murdered in Love" beyond publish them here in their still-dripping form is beyond me, but it seems rather a crime not to hold them up to the light, because it's in the light that they are created.
June 23, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: ROBERT PAYNE'S "THE LIFE AND DEATH OF STALIN"
Death is the solution to all problems.
For me, Stalin has always been an enigma. Unlike the other tyrants and giants of his era, from Lenin to Hitler, Stalin always struck me as a kind of black hole, a void of personality, a man whose actual beliefs, goals and personality were indistinct, or hidden from view. He had no personal charisma, lacked physical courage, was a dull speech-maker, disliked writing, created no new systems of thought, and did not entirely understand the ones he was supposedly upholding. His contributions to the Russian Revolution were meager, he proved an incompetent soldier, and he showed every evidence of pathological jealousy, paranoia, and vindictiveness. Those who met him noted that he was vulgar, insulting and rude at almost all times, and when drunk could be especially vicious. His bullying drove his wife to suicide, and during WW2 he refused to exchange his son, a soldier in the Soviet army had been captured by the Germans, for a German general, with the offhand remark, "To gain a private for a general would be a poor trade indeed." Just how did this terrible mediocrity, this deformed misanthrope, this lump of unpleasant qualities, rise to such titanic heights of power? How did he outmaneuver cleverer, braver, more appealing men within his own party? How did he find so many willing tools to serve his morbid ambitions, and come to rule an empire greater than that of Ghengis Khan?
To answer these questions, or rather in hopes of having the questions answered, I consulted Robert Payne, a prolific author and world-traveler of yesteryear who, among his many published works, authored biographies of most of the major tyrants of the 20th century. I have always regarded his biography of Hitler as one of the best-written (if not necessarily the best-researched) biographies I've ever read, and his prose style is so far above that of the ordinary historian that any deficiencies he has in that regard can and should be easily forgiven.
In any event, Payne answers a number of these lingering questions in his biopic THE RISE AND FALL OF STALIN. He describes a man who grew up in an atmosphere of abuse and cruelty, and whose black views about humanity were initially formed between beatings and privations during his miserable childhood in Georgia. Later, as a minor revolutionary figure in Siberian exile, they hardened further, as Stalin absorbed the bleak, harsh, pitiless attitudes of the people and the environment. Payne shows Stalin from later childhood as being drawn to the aggrandizing heroic fantasies of Georgian folk tales, which he coupled later to Communist ideology to produce his cult of personality; but even as a young, burgeoning Socialist revolutionary it was clear he intended on nothing less than supreme power. The powerlessness of his youth manifested in adulthood as an insatiable appetite for domination -- what the Romans referred to as libido domanandi. He managed for a time to convince Lenin he was a sincere communist and a valuable asset to the Party, and seems to have harbored some genuine admiration for the man, but he came to view Lenin as an impediment upon his boundless ambitions, and privately marked for death all Lenin's friends and loyalists, long before he was in a position to harm any of them. Stalin was a man with both eyes on the main chance. His devotion to Communism seems to have been limited to the fact it, being amoral and authoritarian, was an effective means to an end: unlike Lenin and Trotsky, he probably would have embraced any extreme ideology if he thought it would allow him to satisfy his lust for dominance.
What distinguished Stalin was his cunning, which must be distinguished from his intelligence. Stalin was not stupid, he had an alert mind and a restless curiosity, but unlike Lenin and Trotsky he lacked mastery of any one particular discipline or system of thought, was unimaginative and inflexible, and his need for control led him to rigidly enforce plans which often failed or performed poorly in execution, which in turn triggered his paranoia and incapacity for taking blame, which in turn led to his penchant for killing anyone who failed him. However, all of these failings were eclipsed by the one outstanding quality he had, which he may have possessed to a greater degree than any tyrant or political leader in history: his ability to outmaneuver his enemies, to slowly undercut their positions, to initiate slander, libel and whispering campaigns against them, to isolate them politically, to marginalize them and prepare them for the killing blow, and to do this years in advance of any quarrel with them and in so subtle and gradual a way that even his worst enemies, men who should have been on guard and perhaps were fully on guard against his machinations, were nonetheless stunned to see the degree to which they'd been compromised in the grisly moments before the blow finally fell. While still a relative nobody in the Party, Stalin managed to get appointed "general secretary," a presumably minor post which gave him the power of filling positions within the sprawling communist organization, including the secret police. In this way he quietly managed to isolate Lenin and neutralize Trotsky and the other Old Bolsheviks who had actually brought about the revolution: and later, to exterminate his opponents via huge purges carried out by hand-picked men who were later themselves murdered, on and on, ad nauseum. Payne describes the USSR of Stalin as transforming from a tyanny that used terror and murder to enforce its lofty political aims, to a terror which had no political aims and whose sole function was to murder on an industrial scale to please Stalin's paranoia and blood lust.
This brings us to his second quality, his absolute rejection of all ethics, morals, and scruples. Stalin was a man capable of friendship, but incapable of loyalty. He once remarked that "gratitude is a disease of dogs" and he endeavored to prove this true by killing most of the men who got him into power, and many who helped keep him there. His distrust and jealousy doomed those he professed to love as certainly as his bottomless fund of hatred doomed his many enemies. He murdered relatives, in-laws, close friends, old comrades. He murdered complete strangers. He arbitrarily ordered mass executions, and relished playing cat-and-mouse with his victims for months or years before he finally had them executed. He framed people for crimes he himself had committed, supervised their interrogation and torture, and then had them shot or hanged, believing in their guilt even when he consciously knew them to be innocent. He then just as often murdered his own executioners. Orwell's "doublethink" seems to have originated not merely within the Stalinite state but in Stalin's own personality. When Stalin rewrote history to make himself appear infallible, he did so knowing everything he wrote was a lie; but he believed the lies and forced the world to repeat them on pain of death. Death, Payne tells us, Stalin was determined to keep so busy it would have no time to come for him.
Stalin's appetite for murder proved to be boundless: he was having men shot long before he was in power, and seemed incapable of, or unwilling to, impose any other penalty. In his mind, a man or woman who failed to complete a task was a traitor: mere incompetence was no shield from a firing squad. This applied even to those given tasks Stalin himself knew to be impossible. He created a vast murder apparatus which he then obligingly fed at first thousands, and later tens of millions, human beings. By the time Hitler had killed his first hundred thousand, Stalin had killed ten million, and he seldom slackened the pace of his atrocities, sometimes committing them out of sheer boredom. (The machine had to be fed, after all.) In a position of unchallengable power, ruling much of the earth's surface, he was gearing up for a fresh series of terrors and purges among his own people when he finally died himself. Payne tells us "Stalin ruled Russia as if he bore it a personal grudge" and he was right. Hitler turned on Germany when he realized his war was lost, but Stalin turned on the Soviet Union he had helped create before it was even fully created. In some senses he seems in retrospect like a homicidal maniac whose main worry was that he someday might run out of victims.
STALIN is a good book, but Payne's depictions of endless frame-ups, show trials, engineered famines, mass shootings, midnight disappearances, and nonexistent plots punished as if they were quite real, become numbing after a time. The stark fact is that Stalin is a very difficult person to read about without becoming hopelessly depressed. Hitler, in comparison, had great charisma and a sense of aesthetic grandeur to go along with his hate and mania; Mussolini was a would-be conquerer in the 19th century style, a sort of tragic farce in uniform; Lenin, Trotsky and Mao shared the single saving grace of sincerity of aim, even if their methods were drenched in blood. But Stalin was a nullity. He stood for nothing. He had no redeeming qualities at all. He lacked even the superifical charms of the other tyrants. His craving for adoration -- constant and shameless adoration -- seems to have come from the knowledge that without it, he would cease to exist, because he himself was a void, a black hole. His entire career is a warning to the rest of us, but at the center of the warning remains a mystery: how did so many smarter, fitter, abler men end up as his victims? And how did such a fundamentally unlikeable and treacherous person find so many who were willing, when he was still essentially a nobody, to carry out his aims?
Payne does not manage, ultimately, to answer the riddle of Stalin. Perhaps there is no answer. Perhaps Stalin was simply the historical version of Michael Myers in Halloween: an ill wind, the bad seed, the Book of Job in human guise, the Bad Thing That Happens To Good People. But he brought me much closer to a final understanding by reminding me that evil, in its purest guise, lacks even a dark glamour: it is not a thing of sinister beauty or devilish charm. There is no bad-boy appeal to it, no seductive quality. Evil is dull. It is ugly. It is humorless and unintelligent and small. And at its core is the void. Someone once called Stalin "the man with the iron heart" but we now know precisely what Stalin's heart was made of.
Nothing.
For me, Stalin has always been an enigma. Unlike the other tyrants and giants of his era, from Lenin to Hitler, Stalin always struck me as a kind of black hole, a void of personality, a man whose actual beliefs, goals and personality were indistinct, or hidden from view. He had no personal charisma, lacked physical courage, was a dull speech-maker, disliked writing, created no new systems of thought, and did not entirely understand the ones he was supposedly upholding. His contributions to the Russian Revolution were meager, he proved an incompetent soldier, and he showed every evidence of pathological jealousy, paranoia, and vindictiveness. Those who met him noted that he was vulgar, insulting and rude at almost all times, and when drunk could be especially vicious. His bullying drove his wife to suicide, and during WW2 he refused to exchange his son, a soldier in the Soviet army had been captured by the Germans, for a German general, with the offhand remark, "To gain a private for a general would be a poor trade indeed." Just how did this terrible mediocrity, this deformed misanthrope, this lump of unpleasant qualities, rise to such titanic heights of power? How did he outmaneuver cleverer, braver, more appealing men within his own party? How did he find so many willing tools to serve his morbid ambitions, and come to rule an empire greater than that of Ghengis Khan?
To answer these questions, or rather in hopes of having the questions answered, I consulted Robert Payne, a prolific author and world-traveler of yesteryear who, among his many published works, authored biographies of most of the major tyrants of the 20th century. I have always regarded his biography of Hitler as one of the best-written (if not necessarily the best-researched) biographies I've ever read, and his prose style is so far above that of the ordinary historian that any deficiencies he has in that regard can and should be easily forgiven.
In any event, Payne answers a number of these lingering questions in his biopic THE RISE AND FALL OF STALIN. He describes a man who grew up in an atmosphere of abuse and cruelty, and whose black views about humanity were initially formed between beatings and privations during his miserable childhood in Georgia. Later, as a minor revolutionary figure in Siberian exile, they hardened further, as Stalin absorbed the bleak, harsh, pitiless attitudes of the people and the environment. Payne shows Stalin from later childhood as being drawn to the aggrandizing heroic fantasies of Georgian folk tales, which he coupled later to Communist ideology to produce his cult of personality; but even as a young, burgeoning Socialist revolutionary it was clear he intended on nothing less than supreme power. The powerlessness of his youth manifested in adulthood as an insatiable appetite for domination -- what the Romans referred to as libido domanandi. He managed for a time to convince Lenin he was a sincere communist and a valuable asset to the Party, and seems to have harbored some genuine admiration for the man, but he came to view Lenin as an impediment upon his boundless ambitions, and privately marked for death all Lenin's friends and loyalists, long before he was in a position to harm any of them. Stalin was a man with both eyes on the main chance. His devotion to Communism seems to have been limited to the fact it, being amoral and authoritarian, was an effective means to an end: unlike Lenin and Trotsky, he probably would have embraced any extreme ideology if he thought it would allow him to satisfy his lust for dominance.
What distinguished Stalin was his cunning, which must be distinguished from his intelligence. Stalin was not stupid, he had an alert mind and a restless curiosity, but unlike Lenin and Trotsky he lacked mastery of any one particular discipline or system of thought, was unimaginative and inflexible, and his need for control led him to rigidly enforce plans which often failed or performed poorly in execution, which in turn triggered his paranoia and incapacity for taking blame, which in turn led to his penchant for killing anyone who failed him. However, all of these failings were eclipsed by the one outstanding quality he had, which he may have possessed to a greater degree than any tyrant or political leader in history: his ability to outmaneuver his enemies, to slowly undercut their positions, to initiate slander, libel and whispering campaigns against them, to isolate them politically, to marginalize them and prepare them for the killing blow, and to do this years in advance of any quarrel with them and in so subtle and gradual a way that even his worst enemies, men who should have been on guard and perhaps were fully on guard against his machinations, were nonetheless stunned to see the degree to which they'd been compromised in the grisly moments before the blow finally fell. While still a relative nobody in the Party, Stalin managed to get appointed "general secretary," a presumably minor post which gave him the power of filling positions within the sprawling communist organization, including the secret police. In this way he quietly managed to isolate Lenin and neutralize Trotsky and the other Old Bolsheviks who had actually brought about the revolution: and later, to exterminate his opponents via huge purges carried out by hand-picked men who were later themselves murdered, on and on, ad nauseum. Payne describes the USSR of Stalin as transforming from a tyanny that used terror and murder to enforce its lofty political aims, to a terror which had no political aims and whose sole function was to murder on an industrial scale to please Stalin's paranoia and blood lust.
This brings us to his second quality, his absolute rejection of all ethics, morals, and scruples. Stalin was a man capable of friendship, but incapable of loyalty. He once remarked that "gratitude is a disease of dogs" and he endeavored to prove this true by killing most of the men who got him into power, and many who helped keep him there. His distrust and jealousy doomed those he professed to love as certainly as his bottomless fund of hatred doomed his many enemies. He murdered relatives, in-laws, close friends, old comrades. He murdered complete strangers. He arbitrarily ordered mass executions, and relished playing cat-and-mouse with his victims for months or years before he finally had them executed. He framed people for crimes he himself had committed, supervised their interrogation and torture, and then had them shot or hanged, believing in their guilt even when he consciously knew them to be innocent. He then just as often murdered his own executioners. Orwell's "doublethink" seems to have originated not merely within the Stalinite state but in Stalin's own personality. When Stalin rewrote history to make himself appear infallible, he did so knowing everything he wrote was a lie; but he believed the lies and forced the world to repeat them on pain of death. Death, Payne tells us, Stalin was determined to keep so busy it would have no time to come for him.
Stalin's appetite for murder proved to be boundless: he was having men shot long before he was in power, and seemed incapable of, or unwilling to, impose any other penalty. In his mind, a man or woman who failed to complete a task was a traitor: mere incompetence was no shield from a firing squad. This applied even to those given tasks Stalin himself knew to be impossible. He created a vast murder apparatus which he then obligingly fed at first thousands, and later tens of millions, human beings. By the time Hitler had killed his first hundred thousand, Stalin had killed ten million, and he seldom slackened the pace of his atrocities, sometimes committing them out of sheer boredom. (The machine had to be fed, after all.) In a position of unchallengable power, ruling much of the earth's surface, he was gearing up for a fresh series of terrors and purges among his own people when he finally died himself. Payne tells us "Stalin ruled Russia as if he bore it a personal grudge" and he was right. Hitler turned on Germany when he realized his war was lost, but Stalin turned on the Soviet Union he had helped create before it was even fully created. In some senses he seems in retrospect like a homicidal maniac whose main worry was that he someday might run out of victims.
STALIN is a good book, but Payne's depictions of endless frame-ups, show trials, engineered famines, mass shootings, midnight disappearances, and nonexistent plots punished as if they were quite real, become numbing after a time. The stark fact is that Stalin is a very difficult person to read about without becoming hopelessly depressed. Hitler, in comparison, had great charisma and a sense of aesthetic grandeur to go along with his hate and mania; Mussolini was a would-be conquerer in the 19th century style, a sort of tragic farce in uniform; Lenin, Trotsky and Mao shared the single saving grace of sincerity of aim, even if their methods were drenched in blood. But Stalin was a nullity. He stood for nothing. He had no redeeming qualities at all. He lacked even the superifical charms of the other tyrants. His craving for adoration -- constant and shameless adoration -- seems to have come from the knowledge that without it, he would cease to exist, because he himself was a void, a black hole. His entire career is a warning to the rest of us, but at the center of the warning remains a mystery: how did so many smarter, fitter, abler men end up as his victims? And how did such a fundamentally unlikeable and treacherous person find so many who were willing, when he was still essentially a nobody, to carry out his aims?
Payne does not manage, ultimately, to answer the riddle of Stalin. Perhaps there is no answer. Perhaps Stalin was simply the historical version of Michael Myers in Halloween: an ill wind, the bad seed, the Book of Job in human guise, the Bad Thing That Happens To Good People. But he brought me much closer to a final understanding by reminding me that evil, in its purest guise, lacks even a dark glamour: it is not a thing of sinister beauty or devilish charm. There is no bad-boy appeal to it, no seductive quality. Evil is dull. It is ugly. It is humorless and unintelligent and small. And at its core is the void. Someone once called Stalin "the man with the iron heart" but we now know precisely what Stalin's heart was made of.
Nothing.
June 20, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: DAVID GOGGINS "CAN'T HURT ME"
Pain unlocks a secret doorway in the mind, one that leads to both peak performance and beautiful silence.
Let's be real with each other. We live in the softest age in human history, and anyone with any sense or honesty understands that it is doing us precious little good as a race. Like everyone else, I benefit measurably from this softness: as I sit here, writing this, the temperature in my apartment is comfortable despite the furnace-like heat outside, thanks to the miracle of air conditioning; my laundry is washing itself; my dishes are drying themselves; an oven roasts my food, and the light within ensures that I don't even need to open the door to check to see if it's done. I am exercised, freshly bathed, and my belly is full. When I finish this blog, I will drink a beer, watch half an episode of Da Vinci's Inquest and then climb into my queen-sized bed with The Inimitable Jeeves and read myself to sleep. I have taken tomorrow off from work, but I will nevertheless be paid. I am not a wealthy man, but in many ways I probably live better than the millionaires of a century ago, and have instantaneous access to almost unlimited amounts of information and entertainment. I do not need to work for any it. It is enough to speak a few words into my phone, and presto, it's there, waiting for me.
You would think that this state of affairs, which is at least roughly attainable for the working class and even to some extent for the poor, would lead to a corresponding rise in our sense of psychological and spiritual well-being and perhaps our physical health as well: precisely the opposite has happened. Americans are fatter, lazier, more anxious, more depressed, more suicidal, more homicidal, more antisocial, more angry, more suspicious, more entitled, more cynical, and somehow more ignorant than they have ever been. All this material prosperity and softness has left us incapable of gratitude or the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes with truly earning things. We have run so far from the pain which is a normal part of life that we have fallen into a completely different form of suffering entirely, a suffering of the soul.
Enter David Goggins.
For those unfamiliar with the name, David Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL who is legendary for his determination, will-power and ability to edure pain. Now, before you throw up your hands, adopt an English accent, and exclaim, "Och, not another bloody book by a bloody SEAL!" let me assure you that CAN'T HURT ME is most definitely not like all the other SEAL accounts you may have read. The Chris Kyles and Marcus Lattrells and what-not were telling war stories and to some extent, making extended commercials for their own branch of the military. Goggins is not. In fact, when it comes to his deployed-in-a-war-zone days, he doesn't write enough to fill out a paragraph, much less a page. He talks about his military training extensively, but only with the larger focus of the book in mind. Which is as follows.
Goggins grew up in an abusive family. His dad was a physically and emotionally abusive hustler who treated him like a slave. He ended up living with his mom and taking comfort in food -- lots of food, so that he eventually became grossly and immensely fat. As one of the only blacks in an all-white school, he was also subjected to terrible racism. By the time he was in his late teens, early 20s, his life was a kind of morbid joke, with his job being to empty traps left in restaurants which were full of dead insects and rats. He had no self-respect and no future, and his only pleasure was sucking down immense quantities of food and drink, which gave him temporary pleasure but also increased his girth and therefore his isolation and self-loathing.
Goggins eventually came to the conclusion that he must stop seeking out the easy path in life, must "find comfort in being uncomfortable," and constantly seek to challenge himself in every aspect of life. This led him to the SEALs, whose training he had to go through several times due to injuries and illness -- a remarkable feat in itself given the mental and physical brutality of the training, which not infrequently kills its subjects.
Once a SEAL, however, Goggins continued to find ways to become uncomfortable by seeking out the toughest trainings he could sign up for, including the Rangers and the Delta Force, and by entering marathons and later, the masochistic enterprise known as the ultra-marathon. Eventually he competed in even more punishing activities such as trying to become the Guinness Book of World Records holder in the category of chin-ups (which sounds like my idea of hell). But the thing which distinguishes him from everyone else is the fact that he did most of this with some severe congenital defects he didn't even know he had at the time, including a sizeable hole in his heart. This discovery truly blew his mind and got him asking, "What if -- ?" He began to realize that we are largely prisoners of our own perceptions, and are capable of so much more than we think, but we habitually underestimate our potential and settle for what he calls "the 40%." This is different for different people, but it usually involves living a life in which even our "challenges" (working out, dieting, etc.) fall within our comfort zones. Take my hike today after work. I spent an hour trampling through the mud in the deep woods. It's good exercise, but it didn't push my limits in any way whatsoever. If I doubled the hike it would probably have not done this. And if I had doubled the hike and then thrown in a different sort of workout afterwards, lifting weights, say, or some calisthenics, I still would not have pushed my body to 100% of its limits. So basically my workout was at the 40% level -- enough to give me the sense that I earned my before-bed beer, but not enough to make me suffer.
Goggins goal for himself, and his goal for you, is to reach 100%. Not only in your workouts, but in every aspect of life. His language here is characteristic of the man: "You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft that you will die without ever realizing your true potential." The fact reaching one's true potential may not be possible is irrelevant to him. It's the striving, the discomfort, the pain that he seeks, not because it will get him to the goal but because it is the goal. Seeing what one can endure expands what one can achieve. As writers from Marcus Aurelius to Ernst Jünger have noted, "the obstacle is the way." One of the best passages in CAN'T HURT ME is as follows:
"Are you an experienced scuba diver? Great, shed your gear, take a deep breath and become a one-hundred-foot free diver. Are you a badass triathlete? Cool, learn how to rock climb. Are you enjoying a wildly successful career? Wonderful, learn a new language or skill. Get a second degree. Always be willing to embrace ignorance and become the dumb fuck in the classroom again, because that is the only way to expand your body of knowledge and body of work. It’s the only way to expand your mind."
CAN'T HURT ME is important not for its recitation of all the blisters and sweat and torn ligaments Goggins has endured, or for his achievements as a sailor or an athlete, but for the way he approaches the central questions regarding the difficulties we all face in life. Goggins has plenty of reason to play the vicitim, but chose another path, the path of self-ownership. It really is very simple. For example, when he discusses his obesity, he does not blame his father, racism or society: he blames himself. His mantra in every aspect of his life is that we own our own skin and our own decisions and too often, we use our traumas to justify things like laziness, apathy, cowardice, drug abuse, and alcoholism. Overcoming this self-sabotage requires being brutally honest with oneself. "Don't call yourself overweight," he all but shouts at the reader. "Say what you really are -- a fat fuck!" In an age when 700 lb women are called "curvy," this is not a message which is going to please many of the people who hear it, but it is a necessary antidote to the culture of weakness and victimhood in which we live. Goggins, however, is not making a philsophical statement: he is trying to get people to take an honest look at their lives so that they can understand what it is they need to change to fulfill their potential and live their dreams. Carl von Clausewitz called this technique, "The appreciation of the situation." Goggins calls it a self-audit. He audits himself regularly, especially when he fails at something, but also when he is successful, too. He encourages a mind-set of brutal honesty with an emphasis on the brutal. He is very frank that he "gets his strength from a very dark place," and his ethos illustrates that, as does this book. He isn't a shiny, happy person. He isn't interested in fame. He doesn't have many friends. He doesn't seem to own much of anything in the way of material objects. Even when he writes about the SEALs, he offers fairly harsh criticism -- something you won't see much if any of in other books by former members. Some readers may be offput by this very darkness, especially in an era in which whining and entitlement (something he especially despises) are now rampant everywhere. But that is why I consider CAN'T HURT ME to be so important. It comes at a time when many are beginning to suspect that the victim mentality they've been told to sharpen their entire lives is actually an albatross, weighing them down, stranding them in weakness, unhappiness, and failure.
CAN'T HURT ME is a fast and brutal read. It's inspiring, but it's not a feel-good memoir, and one can't help but wonder if Goggins takes any real pleasure out of life as we ordinary folk understand the word. He's sort of the Mace Windu of inspirational writers, a grim-faced warrior monk who is going to poke you in your love-handle and ask if you think that is the best you can do. But should you manage to sweat it off, don't look to him for a pat on the back. Look to him to ask if you couldn't have done it more efficiently...and then to ask you what's next on your list of challenges. And why you aren't working on them yet.
Let's be real with each other. We live in the softest age in human history, and anyone with any sense or honesty understands that it is doing us precious little good as a race. Like everyone else, I benefit measurably from this softness: as I sit here, writing this, the temperature in my apartment is comfortable despite the furnace-like heat outside, thanks to the miracle of air conditioning; my laundry is washing itself; my dishes are drying themselves; an oven roasts my food, and the light within ensures that I don't even need to open the door to check to see if it's done. I am exercised, freshly bathed, and my belly is full. When I finish this blog, I will drink a beer, watch half an episode of Da Vinci's Inquest and then climb into my queen-sized bed with The Inimitable Jeeves and read myself to sleep. I have taken tomorrow off from work, but I will nevertheless be paid. I am not a wealthy man, but in many ways I probably live better than the millionaires of a century ago, and have instantaneous access to almost unlimited amounts of information and entertainment. I do not need to work for any it. It is enough to speak a few words into my phone, and presto, it's there, waiting for me.
You would think that this state of affairs, which is at least roughly attainable for the working class and even to some extent for the poor, would lead to a corresponding rise in our sense of psychological and spiritual well-being and perhaps our physical health as well: precisely the opposite has happened. Americans are fatter, lazier, more anxious, more depressed, more suicidal, more homicidal, more antisocial, more angry, more suspicious, more entitled, more cynical, and somehow more ignorant than they have ever been. All this material prosperity and softness has left us incapable of gratitude or the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes with truly earning things. We have run so far from the pain which is a normal part of life that we have fallen into a completely different form of suffering entirely, a suffering of the soul.
Enter David Goggins.
For those unfamiliar with the name, David Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL who is legendary for his determination, will-power and ability to edure pain. Now, before you throw up your hands, adopt an English accent, and exclaim, "Och, not another bloody book by a bloody SEAL!" let me assure you that CAN'T HURT ME is most definitely not like all the other SEAL accounts you may have read. The Chris Kyles and Marcus Lattrells and what-not were telling war stories and to some extent, making extended commercials for their own branch of the military. Goggins is not. In fact, when it comes to his deployed-in-a-war-zone days, he doesn't write enough to fill out a paragraph, much less a page. He talks about his military training extensively, but only with the larger focus of the book in mind. Which is as follows.
Goggins grew up in an abusive family. His dad was a physically and emotionally abusive hustler who treated him like a slave. He ended up living with his mom and taking comfort in food -- lots of food, so that he eventually became grossly and immensely fat. As one of the only blacks in an all-white school, he was also subjected to terrible racism. By the time he was in his late teens, early 20s, his life was a kind of morbid joke, with his job being to empty traps left in restaurants which were full of dead insects and rats. He had no self-respect and no future, and his only pleasure was sucking down immense quantities of food and drink, which gave him temporary pleasure but also increased his girth and therefore his isolation and self-loathing.
Goggins eventually came to the conclusion that he must stop seeking out the easy path in life, must "find comfort in being uncomfortable," and constantly seek to challenge himself in every aspect of life. This led him to the SEALs, whose training he had to go through several times due to injuries and illness -- a remarkable feat in itself given the mental and physical brutality of the training, which not infrequently kills its subjects.
Once a SEAL, however, Goggins continued to find ways to become uncomfortable by seeking out the toughest trainings he could sign up for, including the Rangers and the Delta Force, and by entering marathons and later, the masochistic enterprise known as the ultra-marathon. Eventually he competed in even more punishing activities such as trying to become the Guinness Book of World Records holder in the category of chin-ups (which sounds like my idea of hell). But the thing which distinguishes him from everyone else is the fact that he did most of this with some severe congenital defects he didn't even know he had at the time, including a sizeable hole in his heart. This discovery truly blew his mind and got him asking, "What if -- ?" He began to realize that we are largely prisoners of our own perceptions, and are capable of so much more than we think, but we habitually underestimate our potential and settle for what he calls "the 40%." This is different for different people, but it usually involves living a life in which even our "challenges" (working out, dieting, etc.) fall within our comfort zones. Take my hike today after work. I spent an hour trampling through the mud in the deep woods. It's good exercise, but it didn't push my limits in any way whatsoever. If I doubled the hike it would probably have not done this. And if I had doubled the hike and then thrown in a different sort of workout afterwards, lifting weights, say, or some calisthenics, I still would not have pushed my body to 100% of its limits. So basically my workout was at the 40% level -- enough to give me the sense that I earned my before-bed beer, but not enough to make me suffer.
Goggins goal for himself, and his goal for you, is to reach 100%. Not only in your workouts, but in every aspect of life. His language here is characteristic of the man: "You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft that you will die without ever realizing your true potential." The fact reaching one's true potential may not be possible is irrelevant to him. It's the striving, the discomfort, the pain that he seeks, not because it will get him to the goal but because it is the goal. Seeing what one can endure expands what one can achieve. As writers from Marcus Aurelius to Ernst Jünger have noted, "the obstacle is the way." One of the best passages in CAN'T HURT ME is as follows:
"Are you an experienced scuba diver? Great, shed your gear, take a deep breath and become a one-hundred-foot free diver. Are you a badass triathlete? Cool, learn how to rock climb. Are you enjoying a wildly successful career? Wonderful, learn a new language or skill. Get a second degree. Always be willing to embrace ignorance and become the dumb fuck in the classroom again, because that is the only way to expand your body of knowledge and body of work. It’s the only way to expand your mind."
CAN'T HURT ME is important not for its recitation of all the blisters and sweat and torn ligaments Goggins has endured, or for his achievements as a sailor or an athlete, but for the way he approaches the central questions regarding the difficulties we all face in life. Goggins has plenty of reason to play the vicitim, but chose another path, the path of self-ownership. It really is very simple. For example, when he discusses his obesity, he does not blame his father, racism or society: he blames himself. His mantra in every aspect of his life is that we own our own skin and our own decisions and too often, we use our traumas to justify things like laziness, apathy, cowardice, drug abuse, and alcoholism. Overcoming this self-sabotage requires being brutally honest with oneself. "Don't call yourself overweight," he all but shouts at the reader. "Say what you really are -- a fat fuck!" In an age when 700 lb women are called "curvy," this is not a message which is going to please many of the people who hear it, but it is a necessary antidote to the culture of weakness and victimhood in which we live. Goggins, however, is not making a philsophical statement: he is trying to get people to take an honest look at their lives so that they can understand what it is they need to change to fulfill their potential and live their dreams. Carl von Clausewitz called this technique, "The appreciation of the situation." Goggins calls it a self-audit. He audits himself regularly, especially when he fails at something, but also when he is successful, too. He encourages a mind-set of brutal honesty with an emphasis on the brutal. He is very frank that he "gets his strength from a very dark place," and his ethos illustrates that, as does this book. He isn't a shiny, happy person. He isn't interested in fame. He doesn't have many friends. He doesn't seem to own much of anything in the way of material objects. Even when he writes about the SEALs, he offers fairly harsh criticism -- something you won't see much if any of in other books by former members. Some readers may be offput by this very darkness, especially in an era in which whining and entitlement (something he especially despises) are now rampant everywhere. But that is why I consider CAN'T HURT ME to be so important. It comes at a time when many are beginning to suspect that the victim mentality they've been told to sharpen their entire lives is actually an albatross, weighing them down, stranding them in weakness, unhappiness, and failure.
CAN'T HURT ME is a fast and brutal read. It's inspiring, but it's not a feel-good memoir, and one can't help but wonder if Goggins takes any real pleasure out of life as we ordinary folk understand the word. He's sort of the Mace Windu of inspirational writers, a grim-faced warrior monk who is going to poke you in your love-handle and ask if you think that is the best you can do. But should you manage to sweat it off, don't look to him for a pat on the back. Look to him to ask if you couldn't have done it more efficiently...and then to ask you what's next on your list of challenges. And why you aren't working on them yet.
June 18, 2024
TAKE ONE DOWN AND PASS IT AROUND, OR 300 BOTTLES OF BLOG
The purpose of all goal achievement is to develop a sense of mastery. -- Mike Mentzer
Yesterday I posted the 300th blog I have written for Goodreads. I do not expect you to be impressed by that. As the saying goes, "That and five bucks will buy you a cup of coffee."
For the independent author, however, even these pebbly little milestones can have great significance, if only by a species of necessity. When I began blogging here in 2016, I had just released my first novel, CAGE LIFE, and was clumsily trying to learn how to navigate the seas of independent authordom. To paraphrase one of my favorite songs:
There was I time I saw a man
Who traveled in a caravan
He said "seek and ye shall find"
But I haven't found
And I wonder where you are
Curious
And to continue with a paraphrase of the same song:
eight years down the road
haven't found the pot of gold
Yes, it's been eight years. Kind of hard to believe, really. I find myself older, less ignorant, much better regarded, and not terribly richer than when I set out. I've received more awards and accolades than I can list, I've been an Amazon bestseller on many occasions in half a dozen different countries, but if I piled up every coin I have ever earned in the writing game, it would come to a little less than twenty thousand dollars. I had a fairly famous literary agent once, but nothing came of it, any more than anything came of those damnable Hollywood meetings I used to have two or three times a year, in which I sat in the presence of the great and powerful and got a great deal of smoke blown up my ass and nothing else out of the experience save a free lunch.
Am I discouraged by this? Angry? Bitter? The answer is yes on all fronts, but to a varying degree. Discouragement is not really part of my makeup as a writer. As yet another song goes, I get knocked down, but I get up again – and quickly. In fact my whole tenure as an independent author comes out of a brutal defeat I suffered at the hands of a movie producer who balked at a script I had worked on in tandem with a well-established partner for no less than six years. I spent one day in denial, three days in an alcohol-soaked depression, and then dusted myself off and put plans in motion to publish CAGE LIFE independently, a decision that changed the course of my life. This resilience not courage nor is it pride. It exists simply because writing is not something I do, it's something I am. You cannot separate me from it, we are one and the same. Step on a flower and it's still a flower, however crushed in appearance. Tear it out of the ground and it leaves its roots. Dig out the roots and, well, you get the picture. There will always be some spore, some particle of creativity within me that cannot be extinguished so long as I have breath and life. This of course does not preclude anger or bitterness. I do get frustrated sometimes, frustration is just a type of anger, and in my weaker moments I do succumb to bitterness. I've had my share of successes, but they never seem to resonate, never seem to lead to anything more substantive. The dream – the one in which I am free to do nothing but write for a living and not keep a “day job” – remains just that. And of course this situation can also lead me back to discouragement. It's a loop, and there is not a helluva lot of comfort in the knowledge that every artist who has ever lived, regardless of medium, has walked this circle at some point or other in their career. Vincent Van Gogh walked it all the way to his grave, which is not a pleasant thing to contemplate. I should not care to achieve massive success when I am in the ground and unable to take pleasure in it, or to see the pleasure it produces in others.
There is, however, more to an independent writer's life than absinthe and self-pity. There is also freedom. Every writer I know under a traditional publishing contract writes books in the same vein because this is their brand. The mystery writer writes mystery, the erotica writer, erotica, and so forth, into infinity. None of them are permitted to deviate from their chosen or appointed genre, unless of course they do so under a pen name, which is not as easy a course as you might think, since debuting a new line under a pseudonym means sacrificing your name recognition and starting again from scratch with no built-in audience. Traditional authors, too, are subject to the “slate,” the schedule of releases which often delays publication of their work for several years after its completion. Then there is the money. Even successful mid-list authors cannot live solely on the income they derive from writing. The fact is only a tiny fraction of writers, barely rising to the level of a measurable percentage, make enough money to live exclusively on their royalties and production deals. For most of the rest it is (at best) a lucrative side-hustle, or (at worst) an expensive hobby. In other words, writing is a business in which you can make a killing, but not a living.
As an indie author I can write whatever the hell I want and publish whenever the hell I wish. I am not subject to the whims of an agent or a publishing house or even my own audience, since by embracing no one particular genre, my audience, such as it is, are buying the books because I wrote them and not because they have any particular label assigned. It has taken me eight years, but I now have a small but slowly growing cadre of people who will buy anything I release whether it falls in a genre they ordinarily read or no. I am my own boss, my own guiding star. And it follows that this is more valuable than you might expect.
When I still lived in Los Angeles, I knew a content creator on YouTube who, despite having no master but himself, and while still in his 20s able to live a life of fairly exaggerated decadence in the sense that he could sleep as late as he wished, stay up all night, work the hours he chose, produce the content he wished, and so forth, nevertheless felt oppressed and exhausted by the necessity of doing what amounted to the same thing every day in a different way. His “brand,” you see, was commentary on the video game industry; his audience was interested in him only for that reason and any time he tried to move away from that subject his views plummeted and he was forced to return to his principal, indeed only, subject. While still very young he was already burning out from the demands imposed upon him by his narrow specialty. There was so much more to him as a human being, but no one seemed interested in it. In my present guise I will never have that problem. The problem I have is actually several smaller problems balled together to form one large trouble: lack of recognition leads to lack of money which leads to the loop previously mentioned. Egoistically or no, I crave more fame and more cash; but while I may be a shallow, materialistic fool in this regard, and sacrificing some abstract level of credibility in the artistic community for not starving impassively in my garret with the dignity of a true martyr, I am not such a complete fool that I believe there is a moment in which anyone truly “makes it.” Your profile grows larger, your paychecks have more zeroes, your ability to do things or buy things increases, but you remain a human being with all of a human's attendant problems and worries. They simply change in character. I will give you an example from my own experience, since I have no other to offer.
When I received my black belt in White Tiger Tae Kwon Do, my master smiled at me in his cheerful but slightly sadistic Korean way and said, “Now we can begin.” For him it was an axiom: the black belt was not an end point, it was a turning point. It marked the moment in the education of the student where he had proven he was capable of absorbing knowledge, submitting to discipline, and mastering the fundamental techniques necessary to advance further. Nothing more than that. And I guess that is the way I view myself presently: as a student who has advanced his studies to the point where greater responsibilities should now await him: not greater successes per se, but greater challenges with longer odds but also longer payoffs. Because, you might care to read this twice as it is one way of summing up everything I've learned in the last eight years in a sentence, perfect freedom is not the freedom to succeed but the freedom to fail. This is also perfect democracy. The reason people resent "industry plants" like Billie Eilish is not because life positioned them for success, and not even because they usually lie about how they came to that success, but because mastery is supposed to be a difficult proposition. It is supposed to come about by an effort of will, by constant homage to both an inner and an outer discipline, by humility in the face of superior knowledge, and by a great deal of effort and hard word spread consistently over time. It is not a mantle to be inherited, a crown to be passed on. It is a process. And in order for the process to have validity it should be the same for everyone. Not what they experience through the process or what they take away from it but rather what they endure going through it.
You may think I have lost the thread here. Not at all. We are speaking of freedom, which also includes the freedom to suffer for your choices, or in this case for your art. Art and suffering walk hand in hand in this journey. Meaningful art may be produced in a state of bliss but far more has been born out of pain than any emotional state. A writer operating in a state of security who has not paid any dues nor undergone any suffering nor submitted to any school of discipline may produce art out of sheer talent but he will certainly not develop his talent to its fullest extent. He will be like a flower that grows in shadow, which however large and beautiful it comes to be, never actually fulfills its potential.
Some might be tempted to believe I am smoking copium of the highest grade but it is they and not I who have lost the plot. Many roads lead to the same destination and many words describe the same thing. When I describe freedom I am describing suffering and when I describe suffering and I am describing freedom. I suffer by necessity because I am, or rather I was, the artist I am describing above. I was born into security and paid no dues and refused to submit to discipline or training. In spite of this I was able to be traditionally published at the age of seventeen and to place in various prestigious literary contests by the time I was twenty. I came to believe I was perfect as I was and could succeed on sheer talent. I paid very dearly for this mistake, but everything I am now and everything I have produced is the result of the suffering I experienced in consequence; the freedom I now enjoy is the result of the life experiences granted to me by my failure to achieve wealth and success at a young age, when I took them as my due and therefore could not have appreciated them nor experienced any gratitude as a result of them. My development as a writer and a human occurred because of negative consequences. Over and over again in life I am reminded that we value only that which we have struggled to obtain and the greater the struggle the greater the value. I have not been positioned for success, but I have positioned myself for success, so success when it comes will be all the sweeter even though it is not the endgame. There is no endgame for a writer except to write great words, to brood over them, to crush out the cigarette and sip the whiskey and blow away the pencil shavings and try and make the words greater and greater still, until finally there is nothing to add or take away and they must be released to their audience, be that a single individual or ten thousand individuals. But even if no one ever reads another word I write I would write for the void. I do not have any choice nor do I want one. Like Sherlock Homles, I play the game for the game's own sake. Until then I remain merely your Watson.
Yesterday I posted the 300th blog I have written for Goodreads. I do not expect you to be impressed by that. As the saying goes, "That and five bucks will buy you a cup of coffee."
For the independent author, however, even these pebbly little milestones can have great significance, if only by a species of necessity. When I began blogging here in 2016, I had just released my first novel, CAGE LIFE, and was clumsily trying to learn how to navigate the seas of independent authordom. To paraphrase one of my favorite songs:
There was I time I saw a man
Who traveled in a caravan
He said "seek and ye shall find"
But I haven't found
And I wonder where you are
Curious
And to continue with a paraphrase of the same song:
eight years down the road
haven't found the pot of gold
Yes, it's been eight years. Kind of hard to believe, really. I find myself older, less ignorant, much better regarded, and not terribly richer than when I set out. I've received more awards and accolades than I can list, I've been an Amazon bestseller on many occasions in half a dozen different countries, but if I piled up every coin I have ever earned in the writing game, it would come to a little less than twenty thousand dollars. I had a fairly famous literary agent once, but nothing came of it, any more than anything came of those damnable Hollywood meetings I used to have two or three times a year, in which I sat in the presence of the great and powerful and got a great deal of smoke blown up my ass and nothing else out of the experience save a free lunch.
Am I discouraged by this? Angry? Bitter? The answer is yes on all fronts, but to a varying degree. Discouragement is not really part of my makeup as a writer. As yet another song goes, I get knocked down, but I get up again – and quickly. In fact my whole tenure as an independent author comes out of a brutal defeat I suffered at the hands of a movie producer who balked at a script I had worked on in tandem with a well-established partner for no less than six years. I spent one day in denial, three days in an alcohol-soaked depression, and then dusted myself off and put plans in motion to publish CAGE LIFE independently, a decision that changed the course of my life. This resilience not courage nor is it pride. It exists simply because writing is not something I do, it's something I am. You cannot separate me from it, we are one and the same. Step on a flower and it's still a flower, however crushed in appearance. Tear it out of the ground and it leaves its roots. Dig out the roots and, well, you get the picture. There will always be some spore, some particle of creativity within me that cannot be extinguished so long as I have breath and life. This of course does not preclude anger or bitterness. I do get frustrated sometimes, frustration is just a type of anger, and in my weaker moments I do succumb to bitterness. I've had my share of successes, but they never seem to resonate, never seem to lead to anything more substantive. The dream – the one in which I am free to do nothing but write for a living and not keep a “day job” – remains just that. And of course this situation can also lead me back to discouragement. It's a loop, and there is not a helluva lot of comfort in the knowledge that every artist who has ever lived, regardless of medium, has walked this circle at some point or other in their career. Vincent Van Gogh walked it all the way to his grave, which is not a pleasant thing to contemplate. I should not care to achieve massive success when I am in the ground and unable to take pleasure in it, or to see the pleasure it produces in others.
There is, however, more to an independent writer's life than absinthe and self-pity. There is also freedom. Every writer I know under a traditional publishing contract writes books in the same vein because this is their brand. The mystery writer writes mystery, the erotica writer, erotica, and so forth, into infinity. None of them are permitted to deviate from their chosen or appointed genre, unless of course they do so under a pen name, which is not as easy a course as you might think, since debuting a new line under a pseudonym means sacrificing your name recognition and starting again from scratch with no built-in audience. Traditional authors, too, are subject to the “slate,” the schedule of releases which often delays publication of their work for several years after its completion. Then there is the money. Even successful mid-list authors cannot live solely on the income they derive from writing. The fact is only a tiny fraction of writers, barely rising to the level of a measurable percentage, make enough money to live exclusively on their royalties and production deals. For most of the rest it is (at best) a lucrative side-hustle, or (at worst) an expensive hobby. In other words, writing is a business in which you can make a killing, but not a living.
As an indie author I can write whatever the hell I want and publish whenever the hell I wish. I am not subject to the whims of an agent or a publishing house or even my own audience, since by embracing no one particular genre, my audience, such as it is, are buying the books because I wrote them and not because they have any particular label assigned. It has taken me eight years, but I now have a small but slowly growing cadre of people who will buy anything I release whether it falls in a genre they ordinarily read or no. I am my own boss, my own guiding star. And it follows that this is more valuable than you might expect.
When I still lived in Los Angeles, I knew a content creator on YouTube who, despite having no master but himself, and while still in his 20s able to live a life of fairly exaggerated decadence in the sense that he could sleep as late as he wished, stay up all night, work the hours he chose, produce the content he wished, and so forth, nevertheless felt oppressed and exhausted by the necessity of doing what amounted to the same thing every day in a different way. His “brand,” you see, was commentary on the video game industry; his audience was interested in him only for that reason and any time he tried to move away from that subject his views plummeted and he was forced to return to his principal, indeed only, subject. While still very young he was already burning out from the demands imposed upon him by his narrow specialty. There was so much more to him as a human being, but no one seemed interested in it. In my present guise I will never have that problem. The problem I have is actually several smaller problems balled together to form one large trouble: lack of recognition leads to lack of money which leads to the loop previously mentioned. Egoistically or no, I crave more fame and more cash; but while I may be a shallow, materialistic fool in this regard, and sacrificing some abstract level of credibility in the artistic community for not starving impassively in my garret with the dignity of a true martyr, I am not such a complete fool that I believe there is a moment in which anyone truly “makes it.” Your profile grows larger, your paychecks have more zeroes, your ability to do things or buy things increases, but you remain a human being with all of a human's attendant problems and worries. They simply change in character. I will give you an example from my own experience, since I have no other to offer.
When I received my black belt in White Tiger Tae Kwon Do, my master smiled at me in his cheerful but slightly sadistic Korean way and said, “Now we can begin.” For him it was an axiom: the black belt was not an end point, it was a turning point. It marked the moment in the education of the student where he had proven he was capable of absorbing knowledge, submitting to discipline, and mastering the fundamental techniques necessary to advance further. Nothing more than that. And I guess that is the way I view myself presently: as a student who has advanced his studies to the point where greater responsibilities should now await him: not greater successes per se, but greater challenges with longer odds but also longer payoffs. Because, you might care to read this twice as it is one way of summing up everything I've learned in the last eight years in a sentence, perfect freedom is not the freedom to succeed but the freedom to fail. This is also perfect democracy. The reason people resent "industry plants" like Billie Eilish is not because life positioned them for success, and not even because they usually lie about how they came to that success, but because mastery is supposed to be a difficult proposition. It is supposed to come about by an effort of will, by constant homage to both an inner and an outer discipline, by humility in the face of superior knowledge, and by a great deal of effort and hard word spread consistently over time. It is not a mantle to be inherited, a crown to be passed on. It is a process. And in order for the process to have validity it should be the same for everyone. Not what they experience through the process or what they take away from it but rather what they endure going through it.
You may think I have lost the thread here. Not at all. We are speaking of freedom, which also includes the freedom to suffer for your choices, or in this case for your art. Art and suffering walk hand in hand in this journey. Meaningful art may be produced in a state of bliss but far more has been born out of pain than any emotional state. A writer operating in a state of security who has not paid any dues nor undergone any suffering nor submitted to any school of discipline may produce art out of sheer talent but he will certainly not develop his talent to its fullest extent. He will be like a flower that grows in shadow, which however large and beautiful it comes to be, never actually fulfills its potential.
Some might be tempted to believe I am smoking copium of the highest grade but it is they and not I who have lost the plot. Many roads lead to the same destination and many words describe the same thing. When I describe freedom I am describing suffering and when I describe suffering and I am describing freedom. I suffer by necessity because I am, or rather I was, the artist I am describing above. I was born into security and paid no dues and refused to submit to discipline or training. In spite of this I was able to be traditionally published at the age of seventeen and to place in various prestigious literary contests by the time I was twenty. I came to believe I was perfect as I was and could succeed on sheer talent. I paid very dearly for this mistake, but everything I am now and everything I have produced is the result of the suffering I experienced in consequence; the freedom I now enjoy is the result of the life experiences granted to me by my failure to achieve wealth and success at a young age, when I took them as my due and therefore could not have appreciated them nor experienced any gratitude as a result of them. My development as a writer and a human occurred because of negative consequences. Over and over again in life I am reminded that we value only that which we have struggled to obtain and the greater the struggle the greater the value. I have not been positioned for success, but I have positioned myself for success, so success when it comes will be all the sweeter even though it is not the endgame. There is no endgame for a writer except to write great words, to brood over them, to crush out the cigarette and sip the whiskey and blow away the pencil shavings and try and make the words greater and greater still, until finally there is nothing to add or take away and they must be released to their audience, be that a single individual or ten thousand individuals. But even if no one ever reads another word I write I would write for the void. I do not have any choice nor do I want one. Like Sherlock Homles, I play the game for the game's own sake. Until then I remain merely your Watson.
June 17, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: JOSEPH SHOEMON'S "CROSSES IN THE WIND"
Here was a royal fellowship of death. -- "Henry V," Act IV, Scene 8
There are certain aspects of war which have been written about endlessly. Memoirs by infantrymen, for example, abound. Ditto paratroopers, fighter pilots, bomber crewmen, snipers, commandos, submariners, and Marines. And when we think of the Second World War, it's important to remember that something like fifteen million men and several hundred thousand women served in the military in one capacity or other. There are other areas, however, which are neglected or in some cases, totally unexplored. CROSSES IN THE WIND covers a subject which, up 'til now, I had only seen briefly examined by the legendary WW2 journalist Ernie Pyle: Graves Registration. The soldiers who had to collect the dead, identify them, and bury their remains. Author Joseph Shoeman was well qualified to paint this picture, having commanded a G.R. company in WW2 (European Theater) which buried 21,000 American soldiers and probably two or three times that many Germans.
Now, and at the risk of interjecting a commercial for my own work in this review, I must say that when it comes to the Second World War especially, Americans have a protective and occasionally stupid attitude -- stupid meaning literally stupid, i.e. willfully ignorant. WW2 is for Americans a sacred moment in our history: it is far more mythologized than the Revolutionary War or even the Civil War, and as a result of a mountain of half-fantastical war movies and libraries full of cheerleading "history" books heavy on propaganda and light on history which have been produced in the last eighty years, the uglier and nastier realities of our involvement in the conflict have been forgotten, denied or dressed up in angelic clothing. When I wrote SINNER'S CROSS, the first of my own WW2 novels, I did so with the conscious purpose of discussing subjects which by and large have been ignored because they don't fit the haloed Ambrose - Spielberg narrative. Now, I am not claiming this haloed narrative, complete with stirring and elegaic music by John Williams, is wrong per se: I am merely stating it is incomplete, because it ignores or minimizes much of what is uncomfortable.
If you doubt me on this, allow me to provide irrefutable evidence provided by none other that General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, who, when he wrote his own memoir of the war, CRUSADE IN EUROPE, devoted exactly fifteen words to the Battle of the Huertgen Forest, which was the longest battle ever fought in the history of the United States Army. Those words were: "The Germans, aided by geography, put up an unusually stubborn defense, but Yankee doggedness won through." That's it. That's all the ink he spent on a battle in which 14,000 American soldiers were killed and anywhere between 33,000 and 50,000 were wounded. Dear old Ike could not afford to say more, because even a cursory analysis of the campaign would have exposed glaring deficiencies in his leadership, the leadership of Omar Bradley, Courtney Hodges, "Lightning" Joe Collins and various other much celebrated brass hats who could think of no better strategy than feeding one infantry division after another into the meatgrinder almost without results. It was better for Ike to stay silent. As a result, the American public is almost totally ignorant of the Huertgen Forest Campaign, because it is "inconvenient to history." It is the spatter of blood, the clot of mud, the faint smell of decomposition, the scream in the distance that unsettles our pride and makes nonsens of the red, white and blue cartoon we see up on the screen.
CROSSES IN THE WIND is a short but very effective memoir of Shoemon's service with the Graves Registration company, and by its very existence it goes against this sanitized, deficient sort of narrative, by probing the grisly, unglamorous side of the war, one which cannot be made attractive by beautiful sountracks, snappy dialog or brilliant cinematography. Shoemon takes the reader from his training in the States, to deployment to England, and finally to France just after D-Day. He explains how the unit operated and what its responsibilities were, which included the creation of both temporary and permanent military cemeteries. He explains what tasks the individual soldiers in the company had, and some of the difficulties they faced -- internally, from interfering superiors, and externally, from German bombs and shells. (In one instance he records a massive night air raid by the Luftwaffe which blew up some fuel and ammo dumps near his position.) He takes the reader from Normandy to the end of the war, when much additional work was done locating bodies, identifying and burying them, and erecting some of the largest military cemeteries in Europe. I was struck, and moved, by his pride in his unit and by the reverence he and his men had for the dead. They took everything they did with the utmost seriousness and never seemed to become cynical, taking great care to produce cemeteries, even temporary ones, of the greatest aesthetic beauty possible: they went as far as to obtain truckloads of gravel, enormities of seeds and flowers, and all other items necessary to beautify the cemeteries. They even created grave sites for dead Germans, though they were somewhat less ornate and always kept well separated from Allied dead. His greatest passion, and that of his men, was in doing everything possible to identify unknown soldiers. Dental records, photographs, fingerprints and various other methods were used, including the rehydration of fingertips to get prints, and when these sometimes failed, the unit did not give up but sidelined the case for additional investigation when time permitted. The respect an army shows its fallen goes a long way to explaining what kind of values it has -- witness the dead of the present-day Russian army in Ukraine, abandoned and left to rot.
Now I would be lying if I said the book had the detail that I wanted. It's under 200 pages (a lengthy appendix gives it a deceptive thickness), and Shomon provides too much poorly written historical background, and not enough detail about what he and his company did, sometimes -- quite often -- resorting to bland generalities when the narrative calls for disgusting honesty. If memory serves, he explicitly states in the opening that he doesn't want to go into too much anecdotal detail because it would be too painful for those who lost loved ones in the war to read about. Since he wrote this book in 1947, just two years after the end of the war, I completely understand this impulse, but it left me with the feeling that there was a great deal left on the table. Gruesome details kind of go hand in hand with war memoirs, and I would think most especially in this case. Lest I seem as if I'm contradicting myself here, Shoemon is manifestly not trying to sanitize the war or glamorize it in any way whatsoever, but his humanity prevented him from slamming home its full horror.
That having been said, Shomon's picture of the Graves Registration companies in war is just about the only one we have of which I'm aware, and this little book is highly readable and quite informative despite its omissions and modest size. It's fascinating to think that the graves of which he speaks are still standing and still just as meticulously tended in 2022 as they were in 1946. Whatever your opinion of the military, anyone who claims that it is disrespectful to the memory of its dead is simply lying to you. (How it treats its living veterans is another matter entirely. But then again, how American society treats its living veterans vs. its "honored dead" is also another matter entirely, and one in which we are all of us complicit.
Now, it so happens I have a slight, accidental connection to the author. At a criminal trial that took place this year, I was chatting with one of my witnesses before he took the stand, and somehow the subject of this book came up. He expressed complete astonishment that I had read it, and told me that his father not only had served with Shoemon's company, he is mentioned no less than nine times in Shoemon's book. I confirmed this to be true. It is a mark of what a small world we live in, and how closely connected we are both to each other and to the dead who gave up their tomorrows so that we could sit here in comfort and, perhaps, spare a moment to reflect upon their sacrifice.
There are certain aspects of war which have been written about endlessly. Memoirs by infantrymen, for example, abound. Ditto paratroopers, fighter pilots, bomber crewmen, snipers, commandos, submariners, and Marines. And when we think of the Second World War, it's important to remember that something like fifteen million men and several hundred thousand women served in the military in one capacity or other. There are other areas, however, which are neglected or in some cases, totally unexplored. CROSSES IN THE WIND covers a subject which, up 'til now, I had only seen briefly examined by the legendary WW2 journalist Ernie Pyle: Graves Registration. The soldiers who had to collect the dead, identify them, and bury their remains. Author Joseph Shoeman was well qualified to paint this picture, having commanded a G.R. company in WW2 (European Theater) which buried 21,000 American soldiers and probably two or three times that many Germans.
Now, and at the risk of interjecting a commercial for my own work in this review, I must say that when it comes to the Second World War especially, Americans have a protective and occasionally stupid attitude -- stupid meaning literally stupid, i.e. willfully ignorant. WW2 is for Americans a sacred moment in our history: it is far more mythologized than the Revolutionary War or even the Civil War, and as a result of a mountain of half-fantastical war movies and libraries full of cheerleading "history" books heavy on propaganda and light on history which have been produced in the last eighty years, the uglier and nastier realities of our involvement in the conflict have been forgotten, denied or dressed up in angelic clothing. When I wrote SINNER'S CROSS, the first of my own WW2 novels, I did so with the conscious purpose of discussing subjects which by and large have been ignored because they don't fit the haloed Ambrose - Spielberg narrative. Now, I am not claiming this haloed narrative, complete with stirring and elegaic music by John Williams, is wrong per se: I am merely stating it is incomplete, because it ignores or minimizes much of what is uncomfortable.
If you doubt me on this, allow me to provide irrefutable evidence provided by none other that General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, who, when he wrote his own memoir of the war, CRUSADE IN EUROPE, devoted exactly fifteen words to the Battle of the Huertgen Forest, which was the longest battle ever fought in the history of the United States Army. Those words were: "The Germans, aided by geography, put up an unusually stubborn defense, but Yankee doggedness won through." That's it. That's all the ink he spent on a battle in which 14,000 American soldiers were killed and anywhere between 33,000 and 50,000 were wounded. Dear old Ike could not afford to say more, because even a cursory analysis of the campaign would have exposed glaring deficiencies in his leadership, the leadership of Omar Bradley, Courtney Hodges, "Lightning" Joe Collins and various other much celebrated brass hats who could think of no better strategy than feeding one infantry division after another into the meatgrinder almost without results. It was better for Ike to stay silent. As a result, the American public is almost totally ignorant of the Huertgen Forest Campaign, because it is "inconvenient to history." It is the spatter of blood, the clot of mud, the faint smell of decomposition, the scream in the distance that unsettles our pride and makes nonsens of the red, white and blue cartoon we see up on the screen.
CROSSES IN THE WIND is a short but very effective memoir of Shoemon's service with the Graves Registration company, and by its very existence it goes against this sanitized, deficient sort of narrative, by probing the grisly, unglamorous side of the war, one which cannot be made attractive by beautiful sountracks, snappy dialog or brilliant cinematography. Shoemon takes the reader from his training in the States, to deployment to England, and finally to France just after D-Day. He explains how the unit operated and what its responsibilities were, which included the creation of both temporary and permanent military cemeteries. He explains what tasks the individual soldiers in the company had, and some of the difficulties they faced -- internally, from interfering superiors, and externally, from German bombs and shells. (In one instance he records a massive night air raid by the Luftwaffe which blew up some fuel and ammo dumps near his position.) He takes the reader from Normandy to the end of the war, when much additional work was done locating bodies, identifying and burying them, and erecting some of the largest military cemeteries in Europe. I was struck, and moved, by his pride in his unit and by the reverence he and his men had for the dead. They took everything they did with the utmost seriousness and never seemed to become cynical, taking great care to produce cemeteries, even temporary ones, of the greatest aesthetic beauty possible: they went as far as to obtain truckloads of gravel, enormities of seeds and flowers, and all other items necessary to beautify the cemeteries. They even created grave sites for dead Germans, though they were somewhat less ornate and always kept well separated from Allied dead. His greatest passion, and that of his men, was in doing everything possible to identify unknown soldiers. Dental records, photographs, fingerprints and various other methods were used, including the rehydration of fingertips to get prints, and when these sometimes failed, the unit did not give up but sidelined the case for additional investigation when time permitted. The respect an army shows its fallen goes a long way to explaining what kind of values it has -- witness the dead of the present-day Russian army in Ukraine, abandoned and left to rot.
Now I would be lying if I said the book had the detail that I wanted. It's under 200 pages (a lengthy appendix gives it a deceptive thickness), and Shomon provides too much poorly written historical background, and not enough detail about what he and his company did, sometimes -- quite often -- resorting to bland generalities when the narrative calls for disgusting honesty. If memory serves, he explicitly states in the opening that he doesn't want to go into too much anecdotal detail because it would be too painful for those who lost loved ones in the war to read about. Since he wrote this book in 1947, just two years after the end of the war, I completely understand this impulse, but it left me with the feeling that there was a great deal left on the table. Gruesome details kind of go hand in hand with war memoirs, and I would think most especially in this case. Lest I seem as if I'm contradicting myself here, Shoemon is manifestly not trying to sanitize the war or glamorize it in any way whatsoever, but his humanity prevented him from slamming home its full horror.
That having been said, Shomon's picture of the Graves Registration companies in war is just about the only one we have of which I'm aware, and this little book is highly readable and quite informative despite its omissions and modest size. It's fascinating to think that the graves of which he speaks are still standing and still just as meticulously tended in 2022 as they were in 1946. Whatever your opinion of the military, anyone who claims that it is disrespectful to the memory of its dead is simply lying to you. (How it treats its living veterans is another matter entirely. But then again, how American society treats its living veterans vs. its "honored dead" is also another matter entirely, and one in which we are all of us complicit.
Now, it so happens I have a slight, accidental connection to the author. At a criminal trial that took place this year, I was chatting with one of my witnesses before he took the stand, and somehow the subject of this book came up. He expressed complete astonishment that I had read it, and told me that his father not only had served with Shoemon's company, he is mentioned no less than nine times in Shoemon's book. I confirmed this to be true. It is a mark of what a small world we live in, and how closely connected we are both to each other and to the dead who gave up their tomorrows so that we could sit here in comfort and, perhaps, spare a moment to reflect upon their sacrifice.
June 15, 2024
AS I PLEASE XXV: SATURDAY RAMBLE
So you may have noticed I've been a little busier on this blog than usual lately. I guess the whole "this wedsite is dedicated to books and reading, why the hell don't I talk about books and reading more often?" question finally required an answer, in the form of adding frequent book reviews to the stew of other-subject blogs which makes up Stone Cold Prose. In any event, I plan on releasing several of these short but I hope impactful book reviews each week in addition to anything else I may be doing. For the moment I'm concentrating more on novels, but as I read nonfiction to fiction at a rate of anywhere from 3: 1 to 5:1, depending on my yearly whims, I can't promise I won't be reviewing a lot of history, biography, autiobiography, and so on as well. I really am making a concerted effort this year to read more novels, especially by authors I've never read before, and it is paying off, but it will take years to redress this particular balance.
Exactly why I, a novelist, do not read more fiction is a curious question. The most obvious answer is that I enjoy nonfiction, especially history and biography/autobiography/memoir. This is true, but it is not the whole story. The answer also lies within my own mental laziness -- novels take more imagination and therefore more energy -- and in my own fragile egotism. As a writer I find great inspiration in reading fiction, but I also get very frustrated when I read "the best book this year" and find it, or merely believe it anyway, to be a huge pile of crap. As someone who fleetingly had a top literary agent, and who has sat down with mega-producers, or had such meetings inked onto the schedule only to see them go up in smoke due to freakish circumstances such as vehicular accidents or last-moment changes in studio regime, you can perhaps understand my bitterness and jealousy in this area even if it is childish and does me no good and probably much harm. But here at any rate is what I'm working on to push my "brand" a little farther forward in the Year of our Lord, 2024:
* In a week or so I'm sitting down to lunch with a publicity agent I met down in Miami when I accepted the Readers Favorite Gold Medal for my novel Sinner's Cross. I have previously been on his podcast, and was deeply impressed by the seriousness of the questions he posed to me. I've done just enough interviews and podcasts to distinguish between the guys that are just looking to fill up space in their posting schedule with a warm body, and those that actually want to coax some interesting responses out of their guests/interviewees, and this gentleman falls into the latter. I won't mention his name here because I've not asked permission to do so, but if anything substantive happens at our luncheon (and what a fancy word that is for a cheeseburger and a beer consumed in a diner), rest assured I will announce it here.
* I now have five, count 'em, five novels (rather, four novels and a short story anthology) submitted to Readers' Favorite's book awards for this year. I have another novel called The Night Hunter, which I finished some time ago but chose not to publish myself, submitted to a contest for, you guessed it, unpublished novels. I also subbed Sinner's Cross, to two other contests I've never entered before, and put my latest (Exiles) up for a review via Author's Reading, with intentions of entering that contest as well, provided the review is good enough.
* In two weeks I will be at the In Your Write Mind conference at Seton Hill University, both as an attendee and a presenter. I shall be teaching two hour-long modules, "Writing Violence" and "Writing Dialog" and look forward to sitting down to dinner with my old writing mentor and occasional partner, Patrick Picciarelli, and my editor, Michael Dell. Writing by nature is a solitary occupation so it is always good to be able to mingle with your own kind in both a learning and a social capacity.
* I have now bought most of the equipment I need to begin either a podcast or a YouTube channel, or both. I am still gunshy about these projects, because a) I'm intimidated by learning such things as editing and so on, and b) I have so many ideas that it's impossible for me to focus on anything specific. But in this day and age it's impossible to get anywhere unless you're willing to embrace technology, meaning social media and so forth, to its fullest extent.
* As I said above, I plan on being much more active with blogging than usual, but also possibly joining Word Press or some other popular blogging site since Goodreads by its nature is rather a niche market and not really suited to the sort of blogs I often produce. I also plan a massive overhaul of my (cough) charming but (cough cough) rather dated author site, mileswatsonauthor.com, which (cough cough cough) offers my entire catalog of paperback books, autographed and personalized.
* I spent the last two days drafting Dark Trade, the third installment of my CAGE LIFE series. I am really very happy with the manuscript, but the time has come for me to pass it off to my editor for a really thorough scourging, the dreaded "structural edit" which tests not grammar and spelling and syntax and the rest of that crap, but the stuff that really matters, story and style and continuity and logic and plot. There is always a kind of tussle in these moments between my vision and his suggestions for improving it, and while the final say is of course mine I have learned to trust his instincts. A good editor is, like a good mechanic or a good doctor, absolutely indispensible; the very best writer in the world can only improve if he has the right guy scribbling notes in his margins, and the very worst will improve under the prod of his red pen, even if he lacks talent. In any event, Dark Trade will be released sometime in the fall of this year, I hope to the same acclaim that greeted its two antecedents.
I believe that covers the updates. Dunno about where you live, but here in Pennsylvania it is a beautiful sunny day, not too hot and not too humid, and a lengthy hike in the woods is calling my name. After that, I must return to the salt mine that is South of Hell, the third installment of my SINNER'S CROSS series. This book is giving me a hard time, as every book in this particular series has given me, but I expect nothing less. A novel is very much like a human being: it has its own personality, its own identity, and its own journey to take; the difference is it takes the author with it, from first word to final period...and sometimes that journey is a castiron sonofabitch. So be it. Unlike some vocations, nobody ever tells a writer, "This is gonna be easy." In fact, everyone usually tells you the exact opposite, and they're right. Writing is, if nothing else, one endeavor in which you will generally find there is truth in advertising.
Exactly why I, a novelist, do not read more fiction is a curious question. The most obvious answer is that I enjoy nonfiction, especially history and biography/autobiography/memoir. This is true, but it is not the whole story. The answer also lies within my own mental laziness -- novels take more imagination and therefore more energy -- and in my own fragile egotism. As a writer I find great inspiration in reading fiction, but I also get very frustrated when I read "the best book this year" and find it, or merely believe it anyway, to be a huge pile of crap. As someone who fleetingly had a top literary agent, and who has sat down with mega-producers, or had such meetings inked onto the schedule only to see them go up in smoke due to freakish circumstances such as vehicular accidents or last-moment changes in studio regime, you can perhaps understand my bitterness and jealousy in this area even if it is childish and does me no good and probably much harm. But here at any rate is what I'm working on to push my "brand" a little farther forward in the Year of our Lord, 2024:
* In a week or so I'm sitting down to lunch with a publicity agent I met down in Miami when I accepted the Readers Favorite Gold Medal for my novel Sinner's Cross. I have previously been on his podcast, and was deeply impressed by the seriousness of the questions he posed to me. I've done just enough interviews and podcasts to distinguish between the guys that are just looking to fill up space in their posting schedule with a warm body, and those that actually want to coax some interesting responses out of their guests/interviewees, and this gentleman falls into the latter. I won't mention his name here because I've not asked permission to do so, but if anything substantive happens at our luncheon (and what a fancy word that is for a cheeseburger and a beer consumed in a diner), rest assured I will announce it here.
* I now have five, count 'em, five novels (rather, four novels and a short story anthology) submitted to Readers' Favorite's book awards for this year. I have another novel called The Night Hunter, which I finished some time ago but chose not to publish myself, submitted to a contest for, you guessed it, unpublished novels. I also subbed Sinner's Cross, to two other contests I've never entered before, and put my latest (Exiles) up for a review via Author's Reading, with intentions of entering that contest as well, provided the review is good enough.
* In two weeks I will be at the In Your Write Mind conference at Seton Hill University, both as an attendee and a presenter. I shall be teaching two hour-long modules, "Writing Violence" and "Writing Dialog" and look forward to sitting down to dinner with my old writing mentor and occasional partner, Patrick Picciarelli, and my editor, Michael Dell. Writing by nature is a solitary occupation so it is always good to be able to mingle with your own kind in both a learning and a social capacity.
* I have now bought most of the equipment I need to begin either a podcast or a YouTube channel, or both. I am still gunshy about these projects, because a) I'm intimidated by learning such things as editing and so on, and b) I have so many ideas that it's impossible for me to focus on anything specific. But in this day and age it's impossible to get anywhere unless you're willing to embrace technology, meaning social media and so forth, to its fullest extent.
* As I said above, I plan on being much more active with blogging than usual, but also possibly joining Word Press or some other popular blogging site since Goodreads by its nature is rather a niche market and not really suited to the sort of blogs I often produce. I also plan a massive overhaul of my (cough) charming but (cough cough) rather dated author site, mileswatsonauthor.com, which (cough cough cough) offers my entire catalog of paperback books, autographed and personalized.
* I spent the last two days drafting Dark Trade, the third installment of my CAGE LIFE series. I am really very happy with the manuscript, but the time has come for me to pass it off to my editor for a really thorough scourging, the dreaded "structural edit" which tests not grammar and spelling and syntax and the rest of that crap, but the stuff that really matters, story and style and continuity and logic and plot. There is always a kind of tussle in these moments between my vision and his suggestions for improving it, and while the final say is of course mine I have learned to trust his instincts. A good editor is, like a good mechanic or a good doctor, absolutely indispensible; the very best writer in the world can only improve if he has the right guy scribbling notes in his margins, and the very worst will improve under the prod of his red pen, even if he lacks talent. In any event, Dark Trade will be released sometime in the fall of this year, I hope to the same acclaim that greeted its two antecedents.
I believe that covers the updates. Dunno about where you live, but here in Pennsylvania it is a beautiful sunny day, not too hot and not too humid, and a lengthy hike in the woods is calling my name. After that, I must return to the salt mine that is South of Hell, the third installment of my SINNER'S CROSS series. This book is giving me a hard time, as every book in this particular series has given me, but I expect nothing less. A novel is very much like a human being: it has its own personality, its own identity, and its own journey to take; the difference is it takes the author with it, from first word to final period...and sometimes that journey is a castiron sonofabitch. So be it. Unlike some vocations, nobody ever tells a writer, "This is gonna be easy." In fact, everyone usually tells you the exact opposite, and they're right. Writing is, if nothing else, one endeavor in which you will generally find there is truth in advertising.
June 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: CLIVE BARKER'S "THE THIEF OF ALWAYS"
What did it matter, anyway, he thought, whether this was a real place or a dream? It felt real, and that was all that mattered.
Cliver Barker is one of the most underrated of all modern novelists. Viewed initially as a putative successor to Stephen King back in the 80s when he first burst on the scene, he is in fact a writer of unlimited imagination and surprising daring, simply ignoring genre labels and letting his pen flow freely in any direction he chooses. If more of his works were on the screen (which is the main reason King is as famous as he is), and if not for the freak illness which has perhaps permanently sidelined his writing career, he might be as celebrated as King, albeit for somewhat different reasons.
Although one could argue it is unnecessary to include any biographical information in a book review, since all authors reveal themselves to some extent or other through their writing whether they intend to or not, in Barker's case, his approach is so unique that I feel it incumbent upon me to say that his original works -- THE BOOKS OF BLOOD, DAMNATION GAME, and THE HELLBOUND HEART -- were all flat-out horror stories. And what horror stories they were. Even when operating within the broad but hard-shouldered confines of genre expectations, however, Barker's personal backstory -- he's gay, English, and started his career in the theater, writing numerous plays and even starting his own theater troupe -- colored much of his work. His work was highly intellectual yet pulsed with sexuality, he seemed not so much to destroy taboos as act as if they did not exist (without ever coming off as a mere provocateur), and his imagination seemed almost too big for his actual writing talent, as considerable as it was. Anyone who read the amazing six-volume BOOKS OF BLOOD knew within a few pages that this was not someone who would, or possibly even could, restrict himself to a single category of storytelling.
THE THIEF OF ALWAYS is Barker's demonstration that as well as displaying a frighteningly vast imaginative capacity, he understands the basics of storytelling. A children's/YA novel illustrated with his own art -- I forgot to mention he is a passionate and prolific artist -- it is the story of Harvey Swick, a smart but disgruntled kid bored senseless by a bleak winter. Indeed, the story opens with one of the more memorable passages I've read in years:
"The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive. Here he was, buried in the belly of that smothering month, wondering if he would ever find his way out through the cold coils that lay between here and Easter."
Is there anyone raised in a climate that includes winter that cannot relate to this? I myself can do so on two levels: the level of childhood and young adulthood, where for me, winter -- minus the snow -- was simply a dull, cold, dispiriting bore in which seemingly huge stretches of time passed between school holidays; and the level of adulthood, where winter often loses even its periodic Wonderland charms and serves simply as a reminder of mortality.
So Swick is bored, but needless to say, his boredom will not last. One night he is invited by a mysterious stranger to spend some time at Holiday House, an isolated and equally mysterious home on the far edge of town where each day contains all four seasons, and every wish Harvey has immediately comes true. This is obviously preferable to the great gray beast February, with its crap weather and tedious homework assignments; nevertheless Harvey has to think it over before he decides to embark on his visit. Our protagonist is not a fool: he only crosses the threshold after extracting a promise that he can leave whenever he wishes. He soon discovers the description of the place is accurate: it's a kid's paradise, in which the course of a single day contains not only all the sweets and toys he could ever desire, but every holiday, including the natural kid's favorites -- Halloween and Christmas.
Naturally, there is a price to pay, and naturally Harvey doesn't figure this out until he's been partially compromised by the unseen "Mr. Hood," who operates Holiday House, and whose one rule is not to ask too many questions. Harvey, tempted by unending irresponsibility and gluttony, must make a choice between unquestioning acceptance of this largesse and his own growing sense of suspicion and unease. Why are there so many heaps of children's clothes in Holiday House, some of them very old, but so few children? What is in the sinister lake on the fringes of the grounds, where nobody wants to go? Why won't Mr. Hood show his face? What will happen if Harvey tries to leave? Harvey's struggles with whether to accept the paradise he has found at the expense of his instincts, or begun tugging on the threads of inconsistency he has discovered in his wanderings, are handled more deftly than you might imagine for a YA novel:
"However this miraculous place worked, it seemed real enough. The sun was hot, the soda was cold, the sky was blue, the grass was green. What more did he need to know?”
And indeed, Harvey goes a fair distance down the path of temptation, including being tempted by such things as power and revenge, before his instincts prevail and he begins to wonder if Holiday House isn't as much of a prison as the great gray beast February, i.e. real life. After that, his thoughts shift to escape, and following escape, to undoing the consequences of his time at Holiday House, which has a very peculiar effect on all of its residents....
In writing THE THIEF OF ALWAYS, Barker poses a question which has always been with mankind at one point or another in his development, but has gained new currency in the post-MATRIX era, where the nature of reality itself is coming into actual rather than merely philosophical question. Put simply, Barker is asking exactly what the meaning of life is for human beings: is it in the fulfillment of physical desires and impulses, or does it lay in less tangible territory, say, within the human heart itself, as a philosophy, an ability to appreciate, an understanding that winter pays for spring and unending pleasure is perhaps as dull a prison as "the great gray beast February?" This is the question he poses to Swick and the reader, and while it's a YA novel and therefore the question is going to get a definite answer, it's the right answer and it doesn't come easily or without risk, or cost. Like Neo, who is asked by Morpheus to choose between the blue and the red pill, Harvey must decide.
When I said Barker understands the fundamentals of tale-telling, I wasn't kidding. The surface of this story is rich, but beyond the fundamental question posed above, the underlying messages and morals are just as simple and strong and timeless. This brief novel -- or is it a novella? -- is in some ways a horror story, of course, pitched toward young adults so as not to be too unsettingly, but it bears a similarity to Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, the Arthurian legends, and any other coming-of-age tale in which the refusal, or acceptance, of adult responsibility by the young hero are the hinge of the story. It also has some very definite things to say about appreciating what you have and the dangers of immersing yourself in fantasy to escape reality; and finally about the nature of evil, embodied by Mr. Hood and his minions, and where embracing such evil inevitably leads.
THE THIEF OF ALWAYS was a fast, enjoyable and vivid read from a writer who will probably not get his full due until Hollywood finally starts to mine his imagination more fully and audiences pick up his novels as a consequence of seeing his ideas on screen. Until then, however, Barker is probably doomed to be remembered by the big public only as the guy behind the HELLRAISER franchise. But damn, he's got a lot to say and damn, does he (usually) say it well.
Cliver Barker is one of the most underrated of all modern novelists. Viewed initially as a putative successor to Stephen King back in the 80s when he first burst on the scene, he is in fact a writer of unlimited imagination and surprising daring, simply ignoring genre labels and letting his pen flow freely in any direction he chooses. If more of his works were on the screen (which is the main reason King is as famous as he is), and if not for the freak illness which has perhaps permanently sidelined his writing career, he might be as celebrated as King, albeit for somewhat different reasons.
Although one could argue it is unnecessary to include any biographical information in a book review, since all authors reveal themselves to some extent or other through their writing whether they intend to or not, in Barker's case, his approach is so unique that I feel it incumbent upon me to say that his original works -- THE BOOKS OF BLOOD, DAMNATION GAME, and THE HELLBOUND HEART -- were all flat-out horror stories. And what horror stories they were. Even when operating within the broad but hard-shouldered confines of genre expectations, however, Barker's personal backstory -- he's gay, English, and started his career in the theater, writing numerous plays and even starting his own theater troupe -- colored much of his work. His work was highly intellectual yet pulsed with sexuality, he seemed not so much to destroy taboos as act as if they did not exist (without ever coming off as a mere provocateur), and his imagination seemed almost too big for his actual writing talent, as considerable as it was. Anyone who read the amazing six-volume BOOKS OF BLOOD knew within a few pages that this was not someone who would, or possibly even could, restrict himself to a single category of storytelling.
THE THIEF OF ALWAYS is Barker's demonstration that as well as displaying a frighteningly vast imaginative capacity, he understands the basics of storytelling. A children's/YA novel illustrated with his own art -- I forgot to mention he is a passionate and prolific artist -- it is the story of Harvey Swick, a smart but disgruntled kid bored senseless by a bleak winter. Indeed, the story opens with one of the more memorable passages I've read in years:
"The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive. Here he was, buried in the belly of that smothering month, wondering if he would ever find his way out through the cold coils that lay between here and Easter."
Is there anyone raised in a climate that includes winter that cannot relate to this? I myself can do so on two levels: the level of childhood and young adulthood, where for me, winter -- minus the snow -- was simply a dull, cold, dispiriting bore in which seemingly huge stretches of time passed between school holidays; and the level of adulthood, where winter often loses even its periodic Wonderland charms and serves simply as a reminder of mortality.
So Swick is bored, but needless to say, his boredom will not last. One night he is invited by a mysterious stranger to spend some time at Holiday House, an isolated and equally mysterious home on the far edge of town where each day contains all four seasons, and every wish Harvey has immediately comes true. This is obviously preferable to the great gray beast February, with its crap weather and tedious homework assignments; nevertheless Harvey has to think it over before he decides to embark on his visit. Our protagonist is not a fool: he only crosses the threshold after extracting a promise that he can leave whenever he wishes. He soon discovers the description of the place is accurate: it's a kid's paradise, in which the course of a single day contains not only all the sweets and toys he could ever desire, but every holiday, including the natural kid's favorites -- Halloween and Christmas.
Naturally, there is a price to pay, and naturally Harvey doesn't figure this out until he's been partially compromised by the unseen "Mr. Hood," who operates Holiday House, and whose one rule is not to ask too many questions. Harvey, tempted by unending irresponsibility and gluttony, must make a choice between unquestioning acceptance of this largesse and his own growing sense of suspicion and unease. Why are there so many heaps of children's clothes in Holiday House, some of them very old, but so few children? What is in the sinister lake on the fringes of the grounds, where nobody wants to go? Why won't Mr. Hood show his face? What will happen if Harvey tries to leave? Harvey's struggles with whether to accept the paradise he has found at the expense of his instincts, or begun tugging on the threads of inconsistency he has discovered in his wanderings, are handled more deftly than you might imagine for a YA novel:
"However this miraculous place worked, it seemed real enough. The sun was hot, the soda was cold, the sky was blue, the grass was green. What more did he need to know?”
And indeed, Harvey goes a fair distance down the path of temptation, including being tempted by such things as power and revenge, before his instincts prevail and he begins to wonder if Holiday House isn't as much of a prison as the great gray beast February, i.e. real life. After that, his thoughts shift to escape, and following escape, to undoing the consequences of his time at Holiday House, which has a very peculiar effect on all of its residents....
In writing THE THIEF OF ALWAYS, Barker poses a question which has always been with mankind at one point or another in his development, but has gained new currency in the post-MATRIX era, where the nature of reality itself is coming into actual rather than merely philosophical question. Put simply, Barker is asking exactly what the meaning of life is for human beings: is it in the fulfillment of physical desires and impulses, or does it lay in less tangible territory, say, within the human heart itself, as a philosophy, an ability to appreciate, an understanding that winter pays for spring and unending pleasure is perhaps as dull a prison as "the great gray beast February?" This is the question he poses to Swick and the reader, and while it's a YA novel and therefore the question is going to get a definite answer, it's the right answer and it doesn't come easily or without risk, or cost. Like Neo, who is asked by Morpheus to choose between the blue and the red pill, Harvey must decide.
When I said Barker understands the fundamentals of tale-telling, I wasn't kidding. The surface of this story is rich, but beyond the fundamental question posed above, the underlying messages and morals are just as simple and strong and timeless. This brief novel -- or is it a novella? -- is in some ways a horror story, of course, pitched toward young adults so as not to be too unsettingly, but it bears a similarity to Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, the Arthurian legends, and any other coming-of-age tale in which the refusal, or acceptance, of adult responsibility by the young hero are the hinge of the story. It also has some very definite things to say about appreciating what you have and the dangers of immersing yourself in fantasy to escape reality; and finally about the nature of evil, embodied by Mr. Hood and his minions, and where embracing such evil inevitably leads.
THE THIEF OF ALWAYS was a fast, enjoyable and vivid read from a writer who will probably not get his full due until Hollywood finally starts to mine his imagination more fully and audiences pick up his novels as a consequence of seeing his ideas on screen. Until then, however, Barker is probably doomed to be remembered by the big public only as the guy behind the HELLRAISER franchise. But damn, he's got a lot to say and damn, does he (usually) say it well.
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