Jason Dias's Blog
November 12, 2020
A brief anti-racism reading list
A brief anti-racism reading list
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
read this last:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
read this last:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/...
June 7, 2019
Blood on the Tracks
Blood on the Tracks by Barbara NicklessMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I picked up this book because Barb Nickless came to my book signing. Authors support each other. And I'd heard great things about Blood On The Tracks.
They were all true.
This is hard-boiled-detective style thriller, except the lead character (Syndey Rose Parnell) has a heart - and a dog. She's come back from the war with a wounded spirit and an adopted military dog. Her and Clyde both lost the same man over there; she lost a little more. Clyde IS her heart, the mission that keeps her going when the despair threatens to overtop her levies.
She's taken work as a railroad cop. The story centers around people who ride the rails, vets back from Afghanistan, and a murder that might involve all of them. The vic is family. Sydney's lost so much already that she'll do anything to find out who the killer is and get justice for the victim.
Clyde really does a lot for the story. We could throw in dogs all day long as devices to garner sympathy from the reader. But this dog, as such dogs do, is a way to explicate the inner workings of Syndey Rose that would otherwise go unremarked and unnoticed. Minus Clyde, she's nearly a sociopath like Jack Reacher. Clyde keeps her human, both in the plot and the reading of it. Dog or no dog, Syndey's as tough as they came, hard-boiled all the way.
Some unique settings and twink knowledge dwell with expert, moody prose. If you're read my reviews here, you know what I like is prose that borders on purple, writing that has character and emotion, almost poetry but also so smooth that it doesn't distract from the story. That's what we have here: every word carefully chosen to de exactly the job it needs to do.
There are others in the series. I read so slowly that I almost never consider sequels written by friends - I want to read everything from all my local writers. But here I think I'll make an exception. Nickless makes me look like the amateur I am.
That's not to say the story is completely without faults. There are a couple of tiny little issues that I was relieved to find because otherwise this book would have been so perfect there was no point in me every writing anything. Barbara Nickless wrote the perfect book, the rest of us should just quit. Luckily, I can still strive to be 10% as good as her.
Read this book immediately.
View all my reviews
May 26, 2019
Brightburn
The Great Man Problem: A review of Brightburn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGgNx...
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
I’ve been waiting for this movie for a long time. Decades.
Superheroes never appealed to me. As a child, I was too literalist to suspend disbelief and, as an adult, watched superheroes’ powers escalate to levels beyond ridiculous. In Superman Returns, the filmmakers acknowledge Kal-El is a sort of god: In one scene, he hovers high above the world, his super-hearing detecting every word said on the planet far below like God above listening to prayers.
I just can’t.
But there’s a deeper problem, too: the ongoing assertion that one great man can make things better. This is a philosophic problem that troubled political scientists and moral philosophers greatly during the rise of nation-states and the eventually drafting of the U.S. Constitution. How do we form a government that does the most good for the most people? One proposition is to trust a single great man – an American President with supreme authority. We could have had King George the First in George Washington.
But we decided to do something else: to decentralize power, to impose checks and balances, to give power to the people. This is the birth of liberal democracy: an educated voting class with competing interests making collective decisions.
It’s true that a few great men seem to have shaped history for the better. Generals, kings, scientists (often cribbing from their female research assistants). Abe Lincoln and Martin Luther King.
But think about The Reverend Doctor King a moment. He was the face of a movement, of thousands of people working in concert towards a common end. We rightly revere him. At the same time, the movement might have succeeded without him. For every leader we know about, there were more people ready to step up and take the reins. John Lewis took a skull fracture for Dr. King. He could easily have become the face of the movement.
Moreover, look at the history of great men turning out not to be so great. Charismatic leaders given power and authority whose actions result in the most terrible consequences. Everyone knows Hitler, the Great War and the Holocaust. The West, though, is forgetting about Joseph Stalin who killed between six and nine million deliberately and a many as fourteen million by sheer incompetence. We forget about King Leopold the Second who colonized the Congo. His genocidal mania resulted in between eight and ten million deaths of Africans by modern estimates.
Enter Brightburn.
We’re all so familiar with the Superman origin story by now that the film was able to touch on the tropes and skip quickly into the story. We all remember baby Clark Kent lifting the truck so his new father could change the tire. We remember his parents loading him into the spaceship, and him growing up with traditional small-town values.
Brandon Breyer is this orphaned baby sent to Earth in his own private rocket, but it’s clear from the outset he hasn’t managed to learn the small-town, American bread-and-butter values of Smallville (the town of Brightburn, in this instance). Now an awkwardly pubescent boy of 12, complete with bullies and a pretty crush, he accidentally discovers he has super-strength trying to start a cranky gas mower.
I remember that mower. Dad could start it in one or two pulls and had no patience for the fact that I couldn’t. Ten or twelve pulls into frustration, he’d come and take over. But Brandon pulls on it so hard he launches the thing. It lands, running and upside down, the blades whirling like a fan.
The very first thing Brandon does on discovering he has super-strength is find out if it’s accompanied by invulnerability.
Seems like a strange choice. But it’s also somewhat clear that Brandon is a psychopath. He doesn’t experience fear. Not much by way of joy, or shame, or guilt. Absent the normal range of human emotions, the choice to jam his fingers into the spinning blades seems the slightest bit more logical.
Things escalate when the gym teacher has the kids doing trust falls the next day. His crush, now creeped out by him, precipitates the crisis by stepping to the side. The kids let him fall.
Brandon crushes her hand when the teacher forces her to help him up.
So here’s a lesson in forcing forgiveness, buried in the deeper narrative. When men harass women, bosses are tempted to preserve order by telling the victim how to feel and how to act. But if a man has harassed you in the past, the chances his future behavior will be proper are slim. Trust the women.
Anyway. This incident leads to an escalating spiral of violence and general mayhem. A twelve-year-old boy, given tremendous power and no responsibility, becomes a vicious predator literally overnight.
It’s written into the movie that he was always destined, even programmed, to be a monster. It’s foreshadowed (with such lack of subtlety that we might as well say explicated) in science class when the teacher asks Brandon the difference between wasps and bees. He answers, more deeply than needed and in a way that makes everyone uncomfortable, that wasps are predators but bees are pollinators. In fact, there’s a kind of wasp that has lost the ability to procreate on its own; it lays its eggs in bees’ nests and forces the bees to raise it.
Yeah, not subtle.
So, power and responsibility. Values training didn’t stick because Brandon has no empathy. He’s at least a psychopath and maybe a narcissist. In a counseling session, he tells the counselor he’s discovered he’s special, “something superior.” A catastrophic lack of empathy makes American values impossible.
This is a horror film. The combination of power without feelings is driven home in brilliantly gory scenes that will stick with you later. Try not to be slurping your smoothie while you watch this one.
So is it all just entertainment, or is this social commentary? Superman’s opponents have alleged from time to time that a godlike alien has no moral authority here and is not to be trusted; he could change allegiances at any moment and go from being a great savior to a living cataclysm at any moment and we’d be totally powerless. Becoming powerless is a total trope in horror fiction. Coincidence?
There’s one thing that makes me say this is about politics, a cautionary tale about trusting billionaires and centralizing power with the president. Brandon is obsessed with human reproduction, particularly women.
His parents find some pictures under his mattress. The first couple are women in bathing suits, cropped from magazines. But then they get more and more anatomical. Biology textbook renderings of the uterus and fallopian tubes. And at the end, we see his first victim splayed out in front of the cradle-ship, her reproductive organs dissected and on display.
If that’s not commentary on our American political system, then I don’t know what is. Who remains in power by focusing on the control of female sexual activity? And if that’s too blunt, you’re not going to like this part: can you think of someone extremely powerful who shows no empathy, signs of narcissism, and is obsessed with female body-parts, even to the point of describing his own daughter in terms of her breasts and backside? Anyone? Bueller?
If there’s a point here, it isn’t that one single person is bad; it’s that we should be wary of powerful people. They have their own goals and motivations. They can play-act for us to get their way, to get us to raise them as it were. But when they come into their power, very powerful people are dangerous in proportion to their power.
Hitler. Stalin. Leopold. Mussolini. Saddam Hussein.
JasonDiasAuthor.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGgNx...
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
I’ve been waiting for this movie for a long time. Decades.
Superheroes never appealed to me. As a child, I was too literalist to suspend disbelief and, as an adult, watched superheroes’ powers escalate to levels beyond ridiculous. In Superman Returns, the filmmakers acknowledge Kal-El is a sort of god: In one scene, he hovers high above the world, his super-hearing detecting every word said on the planet far below like God above listening to prayers.
I just can’t.
But there’s a deeper problem, too: the ongoing assertion that one great man can make things better. This is a philosophic problem that troubled political scientists and moral philosophers greatly during the rise of nation-states and the eventually drafting of the U.S. Constitution. How do we form a government that does the most good for the most people? One proposition is to trust a single great man – an American President with supreme authority. We could have had King George the First in George Washington.
But we decided to do something else: to decentralize power, to impose checks and balances, to give power to the people. This is the birth of liberal democracy: an educated voting class with competing interests making collective decisions.
It’s true that a few great men seem to have shaped history for the better. Generals, kings, scientists (often cribbing from their female research assistants). Abe Lincoln and Martin Luther King.
But think about The Reverend Doctor King a moment. He was the face of a movement, of thousands of people working in concert towards a common end. We rightly revere him. At the same time, the movement might have succeeded without him. For every leader we know about, there were more people ready to step up and take the reins. John Lewis took a skull fracture for Dr. King. He could easily have become the face of the movement.
Moreover, look at the history of great men turning out not to be so great. Charismatic leaders given power and authority whose actions result in the most terrible consequences. Everyone knows Hitler, the Great War and the Holocaust. The West, though, is forgetting about Joseph Stalin who killed between six and nine million deliberately and a many as fourteen million by sheer incompetence. We forget about King Leopold the Second who colonized the Congo. His genocidal mania resulted in between eight and ten million deaths of Africans by modern estimates.
Enter Brightburn.
We’re all so familiar with the Superman origin story by now that the film was able to touch on the tropes and skip quickly into the story. We all remember baby Clark Kent lifting the truck so his new father could change the tire. We remember his parents loading him into the spaceship, and him growing up with traditional small-town values.
Brandon Breyer is this orphaned baby sent to Earth in his own private rocket, but it’s clear from the outset he hasn’t managed to learn the small-town, American bread-and-butter values of Smallville (the town of Brightburn, in this instance). Now an awkwardly pubescent boy of 12, complete with bullies and a pretty crush, he accidentally discovers he has super-strength trying to start a cranky gas mower.
I remember that mower. Dad could start it in one or two pulls and had no patience for the fact that I couldn’t. Ten or twelve pulls into frustration, he’d come and take over. But Brandon pulls on it so hard he launches the thing. It lands, running and upside down, the blades whirling like a fan.
The very first thing Brandon does on discovering he has super-strength is find out if it’s accompanied by invulnerability.
Seems like a strange choice. But it’s also somewhat clear that Brandon is a psychopath. He doesn’t experience fear. Not much by way of joy, or shame, or guilt. Absent the normal range of human emotions, the choice to jam his fingers into the spinning blades seems the slightest bit more logical.
Things escalate when the gym teacher has the kids doing trust falls the next day. His crush, now creeped out by him, precipitates the crisis by stepping to the side. The kids let him fall.
Brandon crushes her hand when the teacher forces her to help him up.
So here’s a lesson in forcing forgiveness, buried in the deeper narrative. When men harass women, bosses are tempted to preserve order by telling the victim how to feel and how to act. But if a man has harassed you in the past, the chances his future behavior will be proper are slim. Trust the women.
Anyway. This incident leads to an escalating spiral of violence and general mayhem. A twelve-year-old boy, given tremendous power and no responsibility, becomes a vicious predator literally overnight.
It’s written into the movie that he was always destined, even programmed, to be a monster. It’s foreshadowed (with such lack of subtlety that we might as well say explicated) in science class when the teacher asks Brandon the difference between wasps and bees. He answers, more deeply than needed and in a way that makes everyone uncomfortable, that wasps are predators but bees are pollinators. In fact, there’s a kind of wasp that has lost the ability to procreate on its own; it lays its eggs in bees’ nests and forces the bees to raise it.
Yeah, not subtle.
So, power and responsibility. Values training didn’t stick because Brandon has no empathy. He’s at least a psychopath and maybe a narcissist. In a counseling session, he tells the counselor he’s discovered he’s special, “something superior.” A catastrophic lack of empathy makes American values impossible.
This is a horror film. The combination of power without feelings is driven home in brilliantly gory scenes that will stick with you later. Try not to be slurping your smoothie while you watch this one.
So is it all just entertainment, or is this social commentary? Superman’s opponents have alleged from time to time that a godlike alien has no moral authority here and is not to be trusted; he could change allegiances at any moment and go from being a great savior to a living cataclysm at any moment and we’d be totally powerless. Becoming powerless is a total trope in horror fiction. Coincidence?
There’s one thing that makes me say this is about politics, a cautionary tale about trusting billionaires and centralizing power with the president. Brandon is obsessed with human reproduction, particularly women.
His parents find some pictures under his mattress. The first couple are women in bathing suits, cropped from magazines. But then they get more and more anatomical. Biology textbook renderings of the uterus and fallopian tubes. And at the end, we see his first victim splayed out in front of the cradle-ship, her reproductive organs dissected and on display.
If that’s not commentary on our American political system, then I don’t know what is. Who remains in power by focusing on the control of female sexual activity? And if that’s too blunt, you’re not going to like this part: can you think of someone extremely powerful who shows no empathy, signs of narcissism, and is obsessed with female body-parts, even to the point of describing his own daughter in terms of her breasts and backside? Anyone? Bueller?
If there’s a point here, it isn’t that one single person is bad; it’s that we should be wary of powerful people. They have their own goals and motivations. They can play-act for us to get their way, to get us to raise them as it were. But when they come into their power, very powerful people are dangerous in proportion to their power.
Hitler. Stalin. Leopold. Mussolini. Saddam Hussein.
JasonDiasAuthor.com
May 13, 2019
We're all Spiderman
We’re all Spiderman.
https://youtu.be/4D9Zyxd_CqY
That’s what happens when you crack open the Multiverse. Given infinite universes, everything must happen. Murphy’s Law (or Sod’s Law in Britain, or the butter-side-down rule) states that all that can go wrong must go wrong. When we start to speculate about infinity, though, we get a less pessimistic stance. If there are infinite universes, then everything that can happen must happen.
Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, by kicking open the door to infinite possibilities, invites us all to imagine that we might be Spiderman.
I’ve asked before why Superman has to be so burly. Why is he a gorgeous, 6’4” white man with blue eyes? Why all those muscles? Thing is, no amount of muscle can account for the ability to fly, or lift continents, or zoom around the planet so fast it spins time in reverse. Moreover, Superman breaks every law of physics. Most relevant: when he pushes against a train or catches a falling plane, what is he pushing against? The air? How?
His physical strength cannot account for his feats of force.
Because of this, his musculature is absurd. We build muscle through resistance. We lift more than we’re capable of lifting, and get stronger. Because Superman is infinitely strong, he can never encounter any resistance. Therefore, he cannot build muscle.
It’s ridiculous.
Spidey started as fairly ordinary (as did Superman) gaining in power through the years until he could punch Hulk in the face so hard Hulk ends up trapped in orbit. But Spiderman, Peter Parker, was a gangly kid. It’s the tiniest bit more explicit that his strength doesn’t come strictly from his musculature. The initial explanation-proportion strength-doesn’t hold up under any sort of scrutiny. His power is, ultimately, supernatural, like Superman’s.
I loved Into the Spiderverse. It’s a tender-hearted story and very inclusive. Great animation and lovely story-telling, even in a medium I don’t tend to enjoy (comics) because of persistently disagreeable tropes (A hero can save us). Spiderverse did more than tell a lovely story, though. In opening up the ‘verse, it showed us that we’re all Spiderman. Somewhere in the cosmos, given infinity, each of us was bitten by the radioactive spider and each of us faced the struggle of Peter Parker: Assume responsibility, or fail to act.
I could relate to thirty-something Peter Parker, failing at relationships, a little depressed, eating pizza in bed. He’s got a belly now and can’t squeeze into the uniform, so he wears the top but zooms around the city with his legs clad in gray sweat-pants, the ultimate symbol of a man who’s given up at some level.
I never could see myself in a Super character before. I don’t have the physicality. But here’s a guy who as Parker always did, has normal guy problems.
They didn’t write in every possible identity. There’s a way it could have been done, sure. It could have been more explicit. But they did imply it, that out there in the swirling multiverse, everyone could be Spidey.
Miles Morales is a multiracial kid whose intellectual gifts alienate him from his peers. Gwen Stacey is a white girl who watched Peter Parker die. Spider-Ham, Peni Parker and Spiderman Noir are just plain weird. Given infinite possibility, though, they’re all necessary, and they drive home a deeper point: ANYthing is possible.
So, I’m a middle-aged pacifist with, objectively, a weight problem. Autism-induced sensitivity. I would be a weird candidate for Spider powers. But not weirder than Peni Parker, the Asian girl from the future who befriends a sentient spider and builds it a mech suit. What’s limiting you from seeing yourself in Spiderman? A disability? A body issue (or merely a body-image issue)? Race? Sexual orientation? Are you too tall or too small?
Spiderverse calls bullshit on all of that. You’ll never be weirder than Spiderman Noir, so get over it, kid.
You’re Spiderman.
Wait – Spidey himself is weird and violates the laws of physics? Sit down, Derek. Given an infinite universe, there must be combinations of factors that allow Spiderman, that necessitate Spiderman. In fact, as any slice of infinity IS infinity, there are infinite such universes, and in some of them (an infinite number of them) it’s you.
Just accept it. You are Spiderman. So am I.
Like the Stranger in The Big Lebowski, I take a small measure of comfort in that.
https://youtu.be/4D9Zyxd_CqY
That’s what happens when you crack open the Multiverse. Given infinite universes, everything must happen. Murphy’s Law (or Sod’s Law in Britain, or the butter-side-down rule) states that all that can go wrong must go wrong. When we start to speculate about infinity, though, we get a less pessimistic stance. If there are infinite universes, then everything that can happen must happen.
Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, by kicking open the door to infinite possibilities, invites us all to imagine that we might be Spiderman.
I’ve asked before why Superman has to be so burly. Why is he a gorgeous, 6’4” white man with blue eyes? Why all those muscles? Thing is, no amount of muscle can account for the ability to fly, or lift continents, or zoom around the planet so fast it spins time in reverse. Moreover, Superman breaks every law of physics. Most relevant: when he pushes against a train or catches a falling plane, what is he pushing against? The air? How?
His physical strength cannot account for his feats of force.
Because of this, his musculature is absurd. We build muscle through resistance. We lift more than we’re capable of lifting, and get stronger. Because Superman is infinitely strong, he can never encounter any resistance. Therefore, he cannot build muscle.
It’s ridiculous.
Spidey started as fairly ordinary (as did Superman) gaining in power through the years until he could punch Hulk in the face so hard Hulk ends up trapped in orbit. But Spiderman, Peter Parker, was a gangly kid. It’s the tiniest bit more explicit that his strength doesn’t come strictly from his musculature. The initial explanation-proportion strength-doesn’t hold up under any sort of scrutiny. His power is, ultimately, supernatural, like Superman’s.
I loved Into the Spiderverse. It’s a tender-hearted story and very inclusive. Great animation and lovely story-telling, even in a medium I don’t tend to enjoy (comics) because of persistently disagreeable tropes (A hero can save us). Spiderverse did more than tell a lovely story, though. In opening up the ‘verse, it showed us that we’re all Spiderman. Somewhere in the cosmos, given infinity, each of us was bitten by the radioactive spider and each of us faced the struggle of Peter Parker: Assume responsibility, or fail to act.
I could relate to thirty-something Peter Parker, failing at relationships, a little depressed, eating pizza in bed. He’s got a belly now and can’t squeeze into the uniform, so he wears the top but zooms around the city with his legs clad in gray sweat-pants, the ultimate symbol of a man who’s given up at some level.
I never could see myself in a Super character before. I don’t have the physicality. But here’s a guy who as Parker always did, has normal guy problems.
They didn’t write in every possible identity. There’s a way it could have been done, sure. It could have been more explicit. But they did imply it, that out there in the swirling multiverse, everyone could be Spidey.
Miles Morales is a multiracial kid whose intellectual gifts alienate him from his peers. Gwen Stacey is a white girl who watched Peter Parker die. Spider-Ham, Peni Parker and Spiderman Noir are just plain weird. Given infinite possibility, though, they’re all necessary, and they drive home a deeper point: ANYthing is possible.
So, I’m a middle-aged pacifist with, objectively, a weight problem. Autism-induced sensitivity. I would be a weird candidate for Spider powers. But not weirder than Peni Parker, the Asian girl from the future who befriends a sentient spider and builds it a mech suit. What’s limiting you from seeing yourself in Spiderman? A disability? A body issue (or merely a body-image issue)? Race? Sexual orientation? Are you too tall or too small?
Spiderverse calls bullshit on all of that. You’ll never be weirder than Spiderman Noir, so get over it, kid.
You’re Spiderman.
Wait – Spidey himself is weird and violates the laws of physics? Sit down, Derek. Given an infinite universe, there must be combinations of factors that allow Spiderman, that necessitate Spiderman. In fact, as any slice of infinity IS infinity, there are infinite such universes, and in some of them (an infinite number of them) it’s you.
Just accept it. You are Spiderman. So am I.
Like the Stranger in The Big Lebowski, I take a small measure of comfort in that.
March 30, 2019
A Life of Weeping
Would you surrender the ability to weep if you could? What would that cost you?
Part four of my ongoing webseries on existential psychology for people who don't want to go to school for eight years.
https://youtu.be/pnYujwOV354
A life of weeping
"I can't just cry my whole life," she said.
She was a therapy client during my internship year. But she wasn't the only one to say so. A student said it later - I failed this important test, but I had to get over it or else cry my whole life over it. A friend said it - "I almost cried." So why didn't you? Some resistance to it, some instinct that crying is painful, to be avoided.
I wondered.
If you were offered a life of weeping, would you take it? Or would you find a handgun, abort
such a life before it could get rolling?
When my father died, I couldn't cry. At the funeral I couldn't; with my family I couldn't; with my mother I couldn't cry. The capacity for weeping had been beaten out of my through two decades of a mobile life, too many goodbyes, too many losses, too much violence. So much scorn for feelings in those years, so much pain buried.
These days I can cry at the drop of a hat, and I like to. Yeah, it hurts, it sucks in many ways - but it also points me towards things that are true, and it affirms I've regained or simply gained some measure of humanity.
The turning point was therapy. I would never have gone except my graduate school required it. But since I was there I made the most of it.
We were talking about the funeral, even then fourteen years in the past, about soldiers folding a flag and handing it to my sister while I choked on my grief. Every time the tears came up, they would recede again as if shoved back down - but nothing conscious in me was doing the shoving. And while I described this scene, the doctor started to cry.
A few little tears in red eyes, a bit of nasal congestion, and that easily he pushed through three decades of learned repression.
I said, "why are you crying?" I wasn't totally certain he didn't just have allergies.
But he said back, "I'm crying for you, because you can't cry for yourself."
And I still couldn't, not then, but I learned how. He opened me up, let me become soft, tender-hearted. Open. The more I learned to wonder at the world, to comprehend ambiguity, to chase things of meaning, the more I did those things the more that tears have come into my life.
If you were offered a life of tears, would you turn away from it? Or would you accept them as your guide to humanity, to truth and beauty, your proof of life? Would you turn away from your tears into a living death, towards empty pleasures, days of sunshine you could not see, of warmth that never touched your face? Would you give up all that weeping entails to escape it?
Love, I mean.
Would you choose never to love anyone so you would never have to mourn them?
I write to destroy myself. My fiction is a labor of annihilation. If I'm not covered in tears and snot by the time a chapter is done, I toss it out and start over. This is life: finding what is true and worthy, finding what is authentic, and putting it into words or pictures or gestures. The crying is what lets me know I have been honest with myself, true to the labor. Tender-hearted.
I remember the years of being unable to do this, unable to see love or truth or beauty because they were hidden behind whatever veil was holding back the tears. If my choices were either a life of weeping or a life of never being able, I know what I would choose. It's easy. No contest.
It hurts to cry, at least a little, but I am not distressed by it. I am fulfilled by it, enriched, informed. Created.
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken things using gold to highlight the fractures. The breaks are beautiful, the repairs beautiful. A broken vessel, once repaired, is more beautiful than before it was broken. That's why I do it. That's why I smash myself to pieces, over and over, in pursuit of something genuine.
It doesn't matter to me whether it makes you cry, too. I mean, I like to hear about it when it does - it is my privilege to help people weep over the important things - but I am not disturbed or insulted if my work doesn't push your buttons. I know I've told truth as I see it, given away what is inside me, and that has to be good enough.
So... would you? Give up every future tear knowing the cost - truth, beauty and love?
Hemingway knew. He said, "The world breaks everyone and afterward, some are strong at the broken places." "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed." "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." "All things truly wicked start from innocence." "A man can be destroyed, but not defeated." "All good books have one thing in common: they are truer than if they had actually happened."
+++
My first novel to be published has much to do with all of this. The first pages describe the death of my father, couched in metaphors, fictionalized. I'd like to share them with you because, while they are fiction, they say something true.
“Goodbye, Ernest. I love you and I’ll see you in Heaven.”
“I don’t want you to die,” he said, knowing he couldn’t change it and that she was most likely right. Tonight was the night, her last night. She had been a big lady in life, big in body, big in spirit, always loving and giving and letting the looks and comments about her and about him just slide right off, though they secretly hurt very much.
“It’s all right, dear, I’m ready now. I’ve plenty of morphine. It won’t hurt. Once you’re away, I’ll just press the button and drift off to sleep for the last time. I won’t even know. I’m not afraid. Jesus is waiting for me in Heaven.”
He knew Jesus was not waiting for her in Heaven and he did not know if she was teasing him. Ernest had never been a believer, but she loved him anyway.
“Just tell me you love me and kiss me once more and then I’ll be off,” she said, as though getting ready to go to the shops for tea and milk. “I’m ready now.”
But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t say it. He didn’t love her, not as she understood the word. He couldn’t, didn’t know how.
He let himself be choked up, absently brushed away a tear, and kissed her gently on the cheek. Her skin was parchment-thin, dry, her lush body now sunken in and skeletal. He’d never carried her over the threshold when they had married but he had carried her into this hospital bed in this sterile hospice room with the television in the corner with the broken volume control. Now it was whispering about how to cook pasta in a microwave container.
He held her hand for a few minutes, then reached over for her other hand, the one holding the controller for her morphine. He looked at her eyes, she looked back at his and nodded. And he helped her push in the plunger, the one that would make all the pain stop – her pain, not his. She had said she would do it but she was really too weak now to do anything. He did this last thing for her because he could not do the other, could not give her the pretty lie she wanted, that he loved her and always had.
When her eyes closed for the last time, when he was sure she was sleeping peacefully, he said softly, “No, love, I never did. I couldn’t. I don’t love you, but I’ve done my best all this time.”
And then it was time to go. The heart rate monitor in the corner, so familiar now it was unnoticed, let out its high-pitched alarm and the nurses came. The doctor double checked the do-not-resuscitate order and went off to do the paperwork. And Ernest, more lost than ever before, went home to make breakfast.
Part four of my ongoing webseries on existential psychology for people who don't want to go to school for eight years.
https://youtu.be/pnYujwOV354
A life of weeping
"I can't just cry my whole life," she said.
She was a therapy client during my internship year. But she wasn't the only one to say so. A student said it later - I failed this important test, but I had to get over it or else cry my whole life over it. A friend said it - "I almost cried." So why didn't you? Some resistance to it, some instinct that crying is painful, to be avoided.
I wondered.
If you were offered a life of weeping, would you take it? Or would you find a handgun, abort
such a life before it could get rolling?
When my father died, I couldn't cry. At the funeral I couldn't; with my family I couldn't; with my mother I couldn't cry. The capacity for weeping had been beaten out of my through two decades of a mobile life, too many goodbyes, too many losses, too much violence. So much scorn for feelings in those years, so much pain buried.
These days I can cry at the drop of a hat, and I like to. Yeah, it hurts, it sucks in many ways - but it also points me towards things that are true, and it affirms I've regained or simply gained some measure of humanity.
The turning point was therapy. I would never have gone except my graduate school required it. But since I was there I made the most of it.
We were talking about the funeral, even then fourteen years in the past, about soldiers folding a flag and handing it to my sister while I choked on my grief. Every time the tears came up, they would recede again as if shoved back down - but nothing conscious in me was doing the shoving. And while I described this scene, the doctor started to cry.
A few little tears in red eyes, a bit of nasal congestion, and that easily he pushed through three decades of learned repression.
I said, "why are you crying?" I wasn't totally certain he didn't just have allergies.
But he said back, "I'm crying for you, because you can't cry for yourself."
And I still couldn't, not then, but I learned how. He opened me up, let me become soft, tender-hearted. Open. The more I learned to wonder at the world, to comprehend ambiguity, to chase things of meaning, the more I did those things the more that tears have come into my life.
If you were offered a life of tears, would you turn away from it? Or would you accept them as your guide to humanity, to truth and beauty, your proof of life? Would you turn away from your tears into a living death, towards empty pleasures, days of sunshine you could not see, of warmth that never touched your face? Would you give up all that weeping entails to escape it?
Love, I mean.
Would you choose never to love anyone so you would never have to mourn them?
I write to destroy myself. My fiction is a labor of annihilation. If I'm not covered in tears and snot by the time a chapter is done, I toss it out and start over. This is life: finding what is true and worthy, finding what is authentic, and putting it into words or pictures or gestures. The crying is what lets me know I have been honest with myself, true to the labor. Tender-hearted.
I remember the years of being unable to do this, unable to see love or truth or beauty because they were hidden behind whatever veil was holding back the tears. If my choices were either a life of weeping or a life of never being able, I know what I would choose. It's easy. No contest.
It hurts to cry, at least a little, but I am not distressed by it. I am fulfilled by it, enriched, informed. Created.
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken things using gold to highlight the fractures. The breaks are beautiful, the repairs beautiful. A broken vessel, once repaired, is more beautiful than before it was broken. That's why I do it. That's why I smash myself to pieces, over and over, in pursuit of something genuine.
It doesn't matter to me whether it makes you cry, too. I mean, I like to hear about it when it does - it is my privilege to help people weep over the important things - but I am not disturbed or insulted if my work doesn't push your buttons. I know I've told truth as I see it, given away what is inside me, and that has to be good enough.
So... would you? Give up every future tear knowing the cost - truth, beauty and love?
Hemingway knew. He said, "The world breaks everyone and afterward, some are strong at the broken places." "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed." "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." "All things truly wicked start from innocence." "A man can be destroyed, but not defeated." "All good books have one thing in common: they are truer than if they had actually happened."
+++
My first novel to be published has much to do with all of this. The first pages describe the death of my father, couched in metaphors, fictionalized. I'd like to share them with you because, while they are fiction, they say something true.
“Goodbye, Ernest. I love you and I’ll see you in Heaven.”
“I don’t want you to die,” he said, knowing he couldn’t change it and that she was most likely right. Tonight was the night, her last night. She had been a big lady in life, big in body, big in spirit, always loving and giving and letting the looks and comments about her and about him just slide right off, though they secretly hurt very much.
“It’s all right, dear, I’m ready now. I’ve plenty of morphine. It won’t hurt. Once you’re away, I’ll just press the button and drift off to sleep for the last time. I won’t even know. I’m not afraid. Jesus is waiting for me in Heaven.”
He knew Jesus was not waiting for her in Heaven and he did not know if she was teasing him. Ernest had never been a believer, but she loved him anyway.
“Just tell me you love me and kiss me once more and then I’ll be off,” she said, as though getting ready to go to the shops for tea and milk. “I’m ready now.”
But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t say it. He didn’t love her, not as she understood the word. He couldn’t, didn’t know how.
He let himself be choked up, absently brushed away a tear, and kissed her gently on the cheek. Her skin was parchment-thin, dry, her lush body now sunken in and skeletal. He’d never carried her over the threshold when they had married but he had carried her into this hospital bed in this sterile hospice room with the television in the corner with the broken volume control. Now it was whispering about how to cook pasta in a microwave container.
He held her hand for a few minutes, then reached over for her other hand, the one holding the controller for her morphine. He looked at her eyes, she looked back at his and nodded. And he helped her push in the plunger, the one that would make all the pain stop – her pain, not his. She had said she would do it but she was really too weak now to do anything. He did this last thing for her because he could not do the other, could not give her the pretty lie she wanted, that he loved her and always had.
When her eyes closed for the last time, when he was sure she was sleeping peacefully, he said softly, “No, love, I never did. I couldn’t. I don’t love you, but I’ve done my best all this time.”
And then it was time to go. The heart rate monitor in the corner, so familiar now it was unnoticed, let out its high-pitched alarm and the nurses came. The doctor double checked the do-not-resuscitate order and went off to do the paperwork. And Ernest, more lost than ever before, went home to make breakfast.
March 25, 2019
Why won't the zombie trope die? A review of Savages
Why Won’t the Zombie Obsession Die?
A Review of Savages (Bergling)
https://youtu.be/cp71TYHpWnU
I just finished reading Savages, by Christina Bergling.
This is a courageous book on a number of levels. Bergling’s treatment of the main protagonist, the last woman on Earth (Parker), cracks open tropes. At the opening of the story, she and her partner (Marcus) lay exhausted in a field of dismembered corpses. A whole town of savages, bestial ex-humans that may or may not be zombies. The protagonists pic themselves up and raid the town for supplies. They find more than they expected: both a survivalist’s horde of food, and a living infant.
Rather than being a slave to her womb, Parker’s reaction to the infant is far from motherly. She’s a skillfully painted three-dimensional portrait. Marcus is the one to insist on trying to save the child. We get some wonderful character growth from both characters over the child.
This is a horror story. Horrible things happen. Bergling seems to have read the formula guidebook “Save the cat” and thrown it out. Don’t expect any pulled punches. Horror, like comedy, is all about going too far and she does so skillfully.
At the same time, she mixes scenes of disgust and terror with beautiful, elegant prose. Not purple by any measure, the writing is nevertheless someone poetic, and definitely moody. This writing adds to the atmosphere expertly.
Additionally, the work takes on existential themes as I think only horror really can. Bergling poses to the readers a number of important questions. The biggest ones – what does it mean to be human? and How can we live with sure knowledge of death? both remain unanswered, as they should. But she does hazard some guesses about smaller questions, like, how are we to love when existence is impermanent? and what is the value of painful emotions and experiences?
This isn’t a huge novel. You could read it in one sitting if you’re a fast reader (it took me a day but I read about as fast as the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice). I think, though, that it will stick with you.
Now, I’ve been waiting for some time to get into the topic of zombies: why does the genre persist so strongly? Other fads come and go. Vampires were big for a while. Then werewolves. Ghost stories. But the zombie phenomenon, like zombies themselves, is relentless. It goes on and on and on.
Savages may or may not be a zombie story. You decide. Bergling explicitly notes that it hardly matters; whether her “savages” are undead or merely have shed the last of their moral restraint, the effect is identical.
I think that’s at the heart of the persistence of this genre.
Old people have always hated young people. Like half the Socratic dialogues were Socrates bitching about young people losing their moral compass. In the 20’s, we thought flappers would destroy America with their bobbed haircuts and beaded purses. The so-called “greatest generation,” which is what happens when you let generations name themselves, thought the Baby Boomers were useless lay-abouts of dubious moral character. Free-love hippies and eco-terrorists, the lot of them. And we like nothing better in this modern age than to hate on Millennials, the largest bloc of voters, parents and workers. My generation, Gen X, seem to have faded to invisibility in the generation wars, skipped over like Prince Charles, and maybe that’s for the best.
In an increasingly frustrating political landscape, it’s easy to paint both Baby Boomers and Millennials as having lost their way, as being brainwashed by political advertising and social media. It’s easy to cast social media itself as sucking the life out of everyone, turning them into mindless machine servitors.
Tastes in manners change. Young people don’t show respect the same way their elders do. Elders tend to have ritualized forms of respect – calling people by their gendered marriage status, last names and honorifics, sir and ma’am; we treat people the way we were trained to treat them. Younger people don’t just know the rules, they know what underlies the rules. Respect has deeper connotations than special language. We call people by the names they ask us to use, disregarding honorifics and gendered marriage status. We treat people the way they want to be treated.
From both sides of this equation, we see shambling, even monstrous subhumans, all banding together, threatening to overwhelm democracy based on inadequate moral reasoning. We’ve been brainwashed into social justice motives or we’ve been brainwashed into accepting capitalism, but we’ve all be been brainwashed.
During the 2016 elections, there was a spate of clown sightings. Do you remember them? Menacing clowns by the roadside, gathered around campfires in the woods, caught on security cameras trying doors at night? I don’t think that’s an accident. We had clearly insincere political candidates vying for our attention, and we had so much hypocrisy from potential voters as they rationalized their choices. Clowns are fundamentally human beings made up to be unrecognizable, with insincere smiles on their faces. That’s why they trouble us.
I don’t think the undying zombie craze is a coincidence, either. The shuffling, rotting corpses, disgusting and relentless, symbolize so much about American society at almost every time in history that I think the craze is likely to continue into an indefinite future.
George A. Romero famously described zombies as innocents. Being mindless, they have no choice about feeding. It’s just what they do. His stories, and all good horror, aren’t about rambling, mindless monsters. They’re about us, and how we react. In the face of threats, do we accept authoritarian leadership? Do we degrade into mindless murderers ourselves? Or do we manage to retain some spark of humanity, somehow, against all odds?
A Review of Savages (Bergling)
https://youtu.be/cp71TYHpWnU
I just finished reading Savages, by Christina Bergling.
This is a courageous book on a number of levels. Bergling’s treatment of the main protagonist, the last woman on Earth (Parker), cracks open tropes. At the opening of the story, she and her partner (Marcus) lay exhausted in a field of dismembered corpses. A whole town of savages, bestial ex-humans that may or may not be zombies. The protagonists pic themselves up and raid the town for supplies. They find more than they expected: both a survivalist’s horde of food, and a living infant.
Rather than being a slave to her womb, Parker’s reaction to the infant is far from motherly. She’s a skillfully painted three-dimensional portrait. Marcus is the one to insist on trying to save the child. We get some wonderful character growth from both characters over the child.
This is a horror story. Horrible things happen. Bergling seems to have read the formula guidebook “Save the cat” and thrown it out. Don’t expect any pulled punches. Horror, like comedy, is all about going too far and she does so skillfully.
At the same time, she mixes scenes of disgust and terror with beautiful, elegant prose. Not purple by any measure, the writing is nevertheless someone poetic, and definitely moody. This writing adds to the atmosphere expertly.
Additionally, the work takes on existential themes as I think only horror really can. Bergling poses to the readers a number of important questions. The biggest ones – what does it mean to be human? and How can we live with sure knowledge of death? both remain unanswered, as they should. But she does hazard some guesses about smaller questions, like, how are we to love when existence is impermanent? and what is the value of painful emotions and experiences?
This isn’t a huge novel. You could read it in one sitting if you’re a fast reader (it took me a day but I read about as fast as the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice). I think, though, that it will stick with you.
Now, I’ve been waiting for some time to get into the topic of zombies: why does the genre persist so strongly? Other fads come and go. Vampires were big for a while. Then werewolves. Ghost stories. But the zombie phenomenon, like zombies themselves, is relentless. It goes on and on and on.
Savages may or may not be a zombie story. You decide. Bergling explicitly notes that it hardly matters; whether her “savages” are undead or merely have shed the last of their moral restraint, the effect is identical.
I think that’s at the heart of the persistence of this genre.
Old people have always hated young people. Like half the Socratic dialogues were Socrates bitching about young people losing their moral compass. In the 20’s, we thought flappers would destroy America with their bobbed haircuts and beaded purses. The so-called “greatest generation,” which is what happens when you let generations name themselves, thought the Baby Boomers were useless lay-abouts of dubious moral character. Free-love hippies and eco-terrorists, the lot of them. And we like nothing better in this modern age than to hate on Millennials, the largest bloc of voters, parents and workers. My generation, Gen X, seem to have faded to invisibility in the generation wars, skipped over like Prince Charles, and maybe that’s for the best.
In an increasingly frustrating political landscape, it’s easy to paint both Baby Boomers and Millennials as having lost their way, as being brainwashed by political advertising and social media. It’s easy to cast social media itself as sucking the life out of everyone, turning them into mindless machine servitors.
Tastes in manners change. Young people don’t show respect the same way their elders do. Elders tend to have ritualized forms of respect – calling people by their gendered marriage status, last names and honorifics, sir and ma’am; we treat people the way we were trained to treat them. Younger people don’t just know the rules, they know what underlies the rules. Respect has deeper connotations than special language. We call people by the names they ask us to use, disregarding honorifics and gendered marriage status. We treat people the way they want to be treated.
From both sides of this equation, we see shambling, even monstrous subhumans, all banding together, threatening to overwhelm democracy based on inadequate moral reasoning. We’ve been brainwashed into social justice motives or we’ve been brainwashed into accepting capitalism, but we’ve all be been brainwashed.
During the 2016 elections, there was a spate of clown sightings. Do you remember them? Menacing clowns by the roadside, gathered around campfires in the woods, caught on security cameras trying doors at night? I don’t think that’s an accident. We had clearly insincere political candidates vying for our attention, and we had so much hypocrisy from potential voters as they rationalized their choices. Clowns are fundamentally human beings made up to be unrecognizable, with insincere smiles on their faces. That’s why they trouble us.
I don’t think the undying zombie craze is a coincidence, either. The shuffling, rotting corpses, disgusting and relentless, symbolize so much about American society at almost every time in history that I think the craze is likely to continue into an indefinite future.
George A. Romero famously described zombies as innocents. Being mindless, they have no choice about feeding. It’s just what they do. His stories, and all good horror, aren’t about rambling, mindless monsters. They’re about us, and how we react. In the face of threats, do we accept authoritarian leadership? Do we degrade into mindless murderers ourselves? Or do we manage to retain some spark of humanity, somehow, against all odds?
March 16, 2019
Review of Travelers: Nel Bently #1
Review of V.S.Holmes’ Travelers
Nel Bently runs a dig in South America. She’s good at the digging and the recording, if not everyone’s favorite professor. This time out, she’s run into some local trouble – protectionists who vandalize her site and try to run the team off the dig. This leads to stranger and stranger events, and the site itself refuses to conform to logical expectations.
This story has everything you want: Cool archaeology, a kick-ass female lead, a spicy little romance element, mystery, adventure, and tragedy.
The story starts of the tiniest bit frantic, giving it a bit of a YA feel, but settles in after the first chapter. This might be because of how stories get written or how they get pitched. Agents are always on us to cram a bunch of stuff in the first few pages to hook readers, but actually readers can be more patient than agents give us credit for.
There is a bit of sex, if that’s a worry for you. And a bit of violence, mostly off-camera.
Oh, and there’s at least two more of these. If you’re looking for a series to get obsessed with for a minute that won’t wear you out, give Nel Bently a try.
Nel Bently runs a dig in South America. She’s good at the digging and the recording, if not everyone’s favorite professor. This time out, she’s run into some local trouble – protectionists who vandalize her site and try to run the team off the dig. This leads to stranger and stranger events, and the site itself refuses to conform to logical expectations.
This story has everything you want: Cool archaeology, a kick-ass female lead, a spicy little romance element, mystery, adventure, and tragedy.
The story starts of the tiniest bit frantic, giving it a bit of a YA feel, but settles in after the first chapter. This might be because of how stories get written or how they get pitched. Agents are always on us to cram a bunch of stuff in the first few pages to hook readers, but actually readers can be more patient than agents give us credit for.
There is a bit of sex, if that’s a worry for you. And a bit of violence, mostly off-camera.
Oh, and there’s at least two more of these. If you’re looking for a series to get obsessed with for a minute that won’t wear you out, give Nel Bently a try.
February 3, 2019
Hope versus optimism
Couple redirects on this one.
Is Finding Life on Mars an optimistic book? Absolutely not. Is it hopeful? I hope so. But you have to know the difference, and that's hard to explain to humans. Here's a couple of attempts I made in my column-writing days.
http://anewdomain.net/jason-dias-opti...
https://www.saybrook.edu/blog/2012/02...
In short, if you're looking for optimistic outlooks in your fiction, I respect that, but it isn't what I'm selling. If you're looking for hope, well, me too - and I'm willing to dig deep to find it.
J
Is Finding Life on Mars an optimistic book? Absolutely not. Is it hopeful? I hope so. But you have to know the difference, and that's hard to explain to humans. Here's a couple of attempts I made in my column-writing days.
http://anewdomain.net/jason-dias-opti...
https://www.saybrook.edu/blog/2012/02...
In short, if you're looking for optimistic outlooks in your fiction, I respect that, but it isn't what I'm selling. If you're looking for hope, well, me too - and I'm willing to dig deep to find it.
J
January 1, 2019
Transference: A review
Transference
This is contemporary fiction. Really GOOD contemporary fiction. There’s a paranormal element but it really just creates an unusual situation; it’s not really something that gets explored, goes to world-building, or has larger scale implications.
In 2018, I created a set of memes with the theme, #notyouDerek. “Derek” was just a name basically drawn from a hat, and I used it to troll motivational memes. When people asked who was Derek and why did I hate him, I’d just mysteriously respond, “Derek knows who he is,” and “Derek knows what he did.”
It’s a complete coincidence, but it makes this review actually delicious.
The main POV character is Derek. He’s both a snooty psychiatrist fallen from high station to neighborhood drug dealer and skeezy perv. As long as his misogyny lives in his own head, he doesn’t see any particular problem in objectifying women. In psychotherapy, he goes through the motions, saying the right things at the right times, but in his head imagining his patients naked and in compromising positions.
At the same time, his patients are neighborhood women doctor shopping for Xanax.
Everything changes when a new patient arrives who can read his mind. She also seeks oblivion, just a prescription for something to dull down sudden-onset telepathy. She’s so overwhelmed by the thoughts and feelings of others, she just wants relief.
Trouble is, she can see inside his dirty mind. Derek is a walking, talking #MeToo moment.
I’m a psychologist, and my training is psychotherapy. I think Kate did a great job with her psychiatrist, writing from his point of view. I don’t know how, but she did. Nothing in her bio suggests insider status here but she writes like an insider.
It’s unusual for a psychiatrist to actually engage in therapeutic endeavors these days. Med school is expensive and so is malpractice insurance; and there’s so much money in med management that, well, why bother earning a hundred dollars an hour to sit with distressed people?
This particular psychiatrist, though, is inconvenienced. He did a bad thing: He had sex with a patient. In Colorado, that’s a prison-time sort of offense but, because of privilege, he avoids the big penalty and just gets stuck doing therapy out of his home office like a plebian.
“Transference” is a Freudian, psychoanalysis sort of term and doesn’t come up explicitly in the story. It means when the patient responds to the therapist as though the therapist were someone else they have a relationship with. Freud would always present himself as an ambiguous stimulus, sitting outside the view of the patient and (at least on paper) not interacting much, so that the patient could project onto him and create transference.
Here, the doctor (Derek) is anything but ambiguous. He’s a repulsive toad. The relationship isn’t any more complicated than that.
His patient, though, Janet, turns out to be nearly as repulsive. She’s judgmental, resorts almost instantly to blackmail, and degrades poor Derek almost every chance she gets. When she can’t get her way, she stalks him (as one of Carl Roger’s patients famously did, actually) demanding an apology from him.
Here we get to issues of redemption, a theme cropping up in a lot of indi-lit in 2018. Can a repulsive man like Derek be rehabilitated? Can we have empathy for him, or at least compassion?
Think of all the men who went away under pressure from #metoo and #timesup. I’m thinking especially of Louis C.K.. Some of his comedy is really soulful and brilliant, but the man is undeniably a complete toad. Can we try to understand why he is as he is? Should we care? Is he allowed to apologize and re-enter the public scene? Am I allowed to go on YouTube and laugh at the stand-up bit where his daughter keeps asking “why?” in an infinitely regressive sequence?
All rhetorical, of course. Please don’t troll me with your hypotheticals, OK?
Anyway.
How could we rehab someone with habitually misogynistic thoughts? Jonuska throws him together with a telepath who he genuinely wants to help. He quickly learns to redirect his own unconscious process with intentional meditations. The meditations help Janet calm down and he quickly becomes her safe haven.
Let’s switch gears to Dexter real fast. Dexter is one of my favorite literary characters, and Jeff Lindsey is a pretty neat cat, too. Jeff is another author who understands psychology without being a psychologist. Dexter is always looking for someone to whom he can reveal his true self. What we’re afraid of as humans is that people will, if they get a glimpse under our performed presentations of self, believe we are monsters. Dexter is a literal monster, and so his fear is well-founded. Everyone who learns either tries to kill him, arrest him or use him.
Now Derek is pretty gross. He isn’t a monster, but he’s hardly sympathetic. His patient doesn’t accept him; she tries to use him, and, perhaps because he’s disgusting, has no problem mistreating him.
But she does see him. And she does, in her way, accept him. She accepts his function while rejecting his behavior. In this case, because his thoughts are visible, his thoughts qualify as behavior.
In the end, without really trying to, Derek changes his attitudes towards women. He examines his childhood traumas (very Freudian), manages his thoughts, and comes through a crucible changed. We have some explicit insight at work here (have a look at my review called “what is insight”) and some more noetic change.
We have a national crisis on our hands. When the current president leaves office, that crisis won’t be over. In some ways, it will be just beginning. I just finished writing a novel called Waking the Dead, about what happens when the people around you become monstrous. When awakened with a serum, can they be accepted back into humanity? I’m not the first to finish such a story. We’re wondering this.
The current POTUS is completely toxic. People voted for him and continue to support him despite explicitly racist and sexist comments and homophobic, transphobic policies. He’s mobilized hate for Muslims, immigrants and refugees, Mexicans, the queer community, and POC generally.
When he’s gone, what are we to do with the people who continue to rationalize supporting him?
Can we understand them? Have empathy or just plain compassion? Should we try?
And, finding them disgusting, are we likely to help?
Consider visiting me at jasondiasauthor.com.
For a video version of this review, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwWcU....
This is contemporary fiction. Really GOOD contemporary fiction. There’s a paranormal element but it really just creates an unusual situation; it’s not really something that gets explored, goes to world-building, or has larger scale implications.
In 2018, I created a set of memes with the theme, #notyouDerek. “Derek” was just a name basically drawn from a hat, and I used it to troll motivational memes. When people asked who was Derek and why did I hate him, I’d just mysteriously respond, “Derek knows who he is,” and “Derek knows what he did.”
It’s a complete coincidence, but it makes this review actually delicious.
The main POV character is Derek. He’s both a snooty psychiatrist fallen from high station to neighborhood drug dealer and skeezy perv. As long as his misogyny lives in his own head, he doesn’t see any particular problem in objectifying women. In psychotherapy, he goes through the motions, saying the right things at the right times, but in his head imagining his patients naked and in compromising positions.
At the same time, his patients are neighborhood women doctor shopping for Xanax.
Everything changes when a new patient arrives who can read his mind. She also seeks oblivion, just a prescription for something to dull down sudden-onset telepathy. She’s so overwhelmed by the thoughts and feelings of others, she just wants relief.
Trouble is, she can see inside his dirty mind. Derek is a walking, talking #MeToo moment.
I’m a psychologist, and my training is psychotherapy. I think Kate did a great job with her psychiatrist, writing from his point of view. I don’t know how, but she did. Nothing in her bio suggests insider status here but she writes like an insider.
It’s unusual for a psychiatrist to actually engage in therapeutic endeavors these days. Med school is expensive and so is malpractice insurance; and there’s so much money in med management that, well, why bother earning a hundred dollars an hour to sit with distressed people?
This particular psychiatrist, though, is inconvenienced. He did a bad thing: He had sex with a patient. In Colorado, that’s a prison-time sort of offense but, because of privilege, he avoids the big penalty and just gets stuck doing therapy out of his home office like a plebian.
“Transference” is a Freudian, psychoanalysis sort of term and doesn’t come up explicitly in the story. It means when the patient responds to the therapist as though the therapist were someone else they have a relationship with. Freud would always present himself as an ambiguous stimulus, sitting outside the view of the patient and (at least on paper) not interacting much, so that the patient could project onto him and create transference.
Here, the doctor (Derek) is anything but ambiguous. He’s a repulsive toad. The relationship isn’t any more complicated than that.
His patient, though, Janet, turns out to be nearly as repulsive. She’s judgmental, resorts almost instantly to blackmail, and degrades poor Derek almost every chance she gets. When she can’t get her way, she stalks him (as one of Carl Roger’s patients famously did, actually) demanding an apology from him.
Here we get to issues of redemption, a theme cropping up in a lot of indi-lit in 2018. Can a repulsive man like Derek be rehabilitated? Can we have empathy for him, or at least compassion?
Think of all the men who went away under pressure from #metoo and #timesup. I’m thinking especially of Louis C.K.. Some of his comedy is really soulful and brilliant, but the man is undeniably a complete toad. Can we try to understand why he is as he is? Should we care? Is he allowed to apologize and re-enter the public scene? Am I allowed to go on YouTube and laugh at the stand-up bit where his daughter keeps asking “why?” in an infinitely regressive sequence?
All rhetorical, of course. Please don’t troll me with your hypotheticals, OK?
Anyway.
How could we rehab someone with habitually misogynistic thoughts? Jonuska throws him together with a telepath who he genuinely wants to help. He quickly learns to redirect his own unconscious process with intentional meditations. The meditations help Janet calm down and he quickly becomes her safe haven.
Let’s switch gears to Dexter real fast. Dexter is one of my favorite literary characters, and Jeff Lindsey is a pretty neat cat, too. Jeff is another author who understands psychology without being a psychologist. Dexter is always looking for someone to whom he can reveal his true self. What we’re afraid of as humans is that people will, if they get a glimpse under our performed presentations of self, believe we are monsters. Dexter is a literal monster, and so his fear is well-founded. Everyone who learns either tries to kill him, arrest him or use him.
Now Derek is pretty gross. He isn’t a monster, but he’s hardly sympathetic. His patient doesn’t accept him; she tries to use him, and, perhaps because he’s disgusting, has no problem mistreating him.
But she does see him. And she does, in her way, accept him. She accepts his function while rejecting his behavior. In this case, because his thoughts are visible, his thoughts qualify as behavior.
In the end, without really trying to, Derek changes his attitudes towards women. He examines his childhood traumas (very Freudian), manages his thoughts, and comes through a crucible changed. We have some explicit insight at work here (have a look at my review called “what is insight”) and some more noetic change.
We have a national crisis on our hands. When the current president leaves office, that crisis won’t be over. In some ways, it will be just beginning. I just finished writing a novel called Waking the Dead, about what happens when the people around you become monstrous. When awakened with a serum, can they be accepted back into humanity? I’m not the first to finish such a story. We’re wondering this.
The current POTUS is completely toxic. People voted for him and continue to support him despite explicitly racist and sexist comments and homophobic, transphobic policies. He’s mobilized hate for Muslims, immigrants and refugees, Mexicans, the queer community, and POC generally.
When he’s gone, what are we to do with the people who continue to rationalize supporting him?
Can we understand them? Have empathy or just plain compassion? Should we try?
And, finding them disgusting, are we likely to help?
Consider visiting me at jasondiasauthor.com.
For a video version of this review, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwWcU....
December 27, 2018
Excerpt from Finding Life on Mars
The next day she had left his apartment early, before sunrise, before he was awake. Gone down to the main street to find a spot on a rooftop. People were already starting to stake out their spots to view the running. They smiled at each other, waved. She got a position on a flat rooftop with a guardrail, stood there and watched the sun rise orange and dusty, felt the sweat intensify on her neck again. Her hair stuck there, uncomfortable, until she tied it into a bun.
An hour later she was hip-to-hip and shoulder-to-shoulder with a hundred other people on a rooftop with room for twenty, wondering if it could support their weight - but of course this rooftop had seen a hundred such runnings and it was just her first. And what did it matter? It had been a good life, because she had taken chances and seen everything she could while she could.
A mile away, men gathered - and some women, too - nervously stretching and laughing and pretending not to be nervous. Raffael would be among them, but Madelaine could not tell one person from another at this range. She could feel their tension, could almost taste it with the dust on her tongue, see it building up around them like a brown haze.
She told herself she would not look for him, would just feel the spectacle without intention, but when the men came charging through the street below she could not help herself. She never saw him, though. She saw so many men, all of them just the same. They wore different clothes, had different hair, different faces, different eyes and hands and watches, but they were all the same that day: runners looking for life in a dusty street, steps ahead of death.
The bulls thundered along behind them, boulder-sized mounds of flesh and hair and bone, juggernauts of thunder, rolling drums of force. There was the maned beast that had eyeballed her the night before. There was a huge black bull with white flashes on his hooves. They didn't catch any of the runners that year. One young woman tripped and fell and skinned her hands but they just ran by and she picked herself up and chased them, fifty-five kilos of woman after ten thousand kilos of bull, running with her head back and laughter streaming from her throat as her hair streamed back from her head.
Madelaine had seen everything Earth could offer in those five years. Snorkeled off a hundred coasts, touched groupers and sharks and rays, hiked under Kilimanjaro, carried water in the Masai Mara, ran with wild horses in Montana. Climbed through towers and dungeons in European castles a thousand years old, eaten rice in a New Delhi slum even older. Thrown paint and been painted in Bangladesh. Painted coffins in Chengdu before eating scorpions off skewers from a Chinese street vendor.
Later, she had held a daughter in her arms, Olivia. Seen the dusty Martian sky, the ground so much like the Montana badlands. Seen Earth from space, seen alien moons, the tiny white Sun in the sky.
What good were eyes, what could they show her now that her memory could not? And what she remembered best was that young woman running after the bulls, chasing them with no mind for the consequences should she catch them, just the joy of life, doing, being.
An hour later she was hip-to-hip and shoulder-to-shoulder with a hundred other people on a rooftop with room for twenty, wondering if it could support their weight - but of course this rooftop had seen a hundred such runnings and it was just her first. And what did it matter? It had been a good life, because she had taken chances and seen everything she could while she could.
A mile away, men gathered - and some women, too - nervously stretching and laughing and pretending not to be nervous. Raffael would be among them, but Madelaine could not tell one person from another at this range. She could feel their tension, could almost taste it with the dust on her tongue, see it building up around them like a brown haze.
She told herself she would not look for him, would just feel the spectacle without intention, but when the men came charging through the street below she could not help herself. She never saw him, though. She saw so many men, all of them just the same. They wore different clothes, had different hair, different faces, different eyes and hands and watches, but they were all the same that day: runners looking for life in a dusty street, steps ahead of death.
The bulls thundered along behind them, boulder-sized mounds of flesh and hair and bone, juggernauts of thunder, rolling drums of force. There was the maned beast that had eyeballed her the night before. There was a huge black bull with white flashes on his hooves. They didn't catch any of the runners that year. One young woman tripped and fell and skinned her hands but they just ran by and she picked herself up and chased them, fifty-five kilos of woman after ten thousand kilos of bull, running with her head back and laughter streaming from her throat as her hair streamed back from her head.
Madelaine had seen everything Earth could offer in those five years. Snorkeled off a hundred coasts, touched groupers and sharks and rays, hiked under Kilimanjaro, carried water in the Masai Mara, ran with wild horses in Montana. Climbed through towers and dungeons in European castles a thousand years old, eaten rice in a New Delhi slum even older. Thrown paint and been painted in Bangladesh. Painted coffins in Chengdu before eating scorpions off skewers from a Chinese street vendor.
Later, she had held a daughter in her arms, Olivia. Seen the dusty Martian sky, the ground so much like the Montana badlands. Seen Earth from space, seen alien moons, the tiny white Sun in the sky.
What good were eyes, what could they show her now that her memory could not? And what she remembered best was that young woman running after the bulls, chasing them with no mind for the consequences should she catch them, just the joy of life, doing, being.
