December 02nd, 2025

                                Against the Zeitgeist: Stopping the Ghost of Time

Yesterday my new novel came out, Church of the Last Lamb. I hate describing my work—summarizing it, synopsizing it—but it has to be done in this business. If you’re curious, the book can be described as a postapocalyptic zombie novel. Just writing that—“postapocalyptic zombie novel”—made me feel like I’d just gotten punched in the gut. I imagine some of the other people reading it took it the same way. How many postapocalyptic zombie novels, movies, TV shows, and comic books have there already been? And now we’ve got another one?!
Yawn. 
And while it’s true that the “dance is in the doing,” and a stale subject can always be made fresh, it’s very hard to do. To even try is a fool’s errand, but since writing (and the arts in general) is for fools chasing dreams rather than money, I guess it’s okay. I can forgive myself for the folly of devoting a year and some change to a project some people will reject out of hand, having become fatigued with the subject.
Do you want to hear something else foolish I did recently? I’ll tell you. While waiting for the novel to come out, I began writing another novel. It’s finished—shorter than the last one, about 89,000 words—and is currently being edited. It’s titled Animal World and (here comes the elevator pitch) it’s about a transsexual prostitute and her drug dealer boyfriend. Their plan is to raise enough money to get her the full sex change operation, after which they will presumably live happily ever after.
With this project at least I had a decent “high concept” X meets Y sales pitch that even a cokehead film producer could get behind. “It’s sort of an update of Dog Day Afternoon meets Scarface.” That hardly gets to the heart of the work, but it might at least get my foot into a door when shopping the work around. 
Still, there is a larger problem with the work, namely its subject. And I think it is fair to say at this point that everyone—trans ally and transphobic—is exhausted with the topic of trans. Comedians no longer have bits about transgenders but do meta bits on how the subject itself is passé and any comedian touching it is a hack. 
Not only is everyone tired of the subject, but there are other perils waiting, built-in to the topic, waiting even if it reaches a receptive audience. It is such a charged issue that attempting to tell a fictional story about a transsexual character won’t be accepted in most quarters. Your vision must comport with the reader’s own standards, definitions, and perceptions of the subject. Even those who don’t want to have a bias on the subject will be prey to kneejerk reactions on works that touch upon it. This is somewhat understandable, as sexuality is a tricky issue, and identity is a slippery thing under the best of circumstances. Many people have struggled with these issues, endured mockery, undergone painful and expensive operations and nonsurgical procedures in their quest to find themselves. And now you (me in this instance), a cisgendered white male, are going to presume to use this as simply grist for a story? Just to spin a yarn and maybe, hopefully, sell it to a publisher?
To which I could only honestly answer: yes. The essentialists (as my professor called them in college) believe it a kind of heresy to write from the perspective of someone unlike oneself. At least, males should not try to write from the perspective of females, and straight men from the perspective of queers. Even writing in “close-third person,” is probably too close for these people.
But to the point…
A zombie novel followed by a novel about a transwoman. One subject is played out beyond belief, and even bringing up the other subject causes eyes to roll and both binary and nonbinary sphincters to pucker.
Why, I keep asking myself, am I making it so hard on myself? Why am I mining this territory when the lode appears most exhausted? Shouldn’t I—to mix mining and forging metaphors—have struck while the iron was hot? Harnessed the zeitgeist? (there’s a third metaphor thrown in for you, harnessing a draft animal, God I suck.)
“Zeitgeist” is one of those funny German compound words that doesn’t really translate literally to English. It’s also a word that you never really see the same way again after you become fluent in German. “Geist,” by itself can mean anything from “spirit” to “mind” to a more literal sort of “ghost.”
“Geisteskrank,” could literally be taken as “ghost sick,” (I’m tired of these damn ghosts haunting our house!) but it means “mentally ill.” Take “polter,” which means “to clatter” and pair it with “geist” and you get “poltergeist,” a pretty good movie by the late Tobe Hooper that means “clatter ghost.”
But that’s all etymology. And I’m only bringing it up because if I don’t I’ll only feel even more foolish about squandering my GI bill on getting my master’s degree in German Studies. My real point is that I think the zeitgeist (the time ghost / spirit of the times) is overrated, at least when it comes to art. 
I think there’s something to be said about seizing on the spirit of the times if you’re a journalist, though. The best example of this would probably be gonzo gadfly Hunter Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” The book did a wonderful job of capturing the tragicomic moment when idealism is betrayed and one man chooses drug-induced madness over cynical acceptance. Thompson captured not just a feeling but a clash of contradictory feelings, that still resonates in the American psyche. It’s not just the barefoot burnout hippy girl walking around with her canvases of Barbara Streisand portraits. Or the polyester kitsch casualties of the Silent Majority sporting Hawaiian shirts and black sock garters bitching about the longhairs. It’s these elements and more soaked together in a psychedelic mélange that make the book what it is. Thompson experiences disgust in the face of many people—most of humanity, including himself and his “Samoan attorney” friend sometimes. But the judgment of his subjects is more keenly sociological and anthropological than moral. It’s not for nothing that Thomas Wolfe called the book “a scorching epochal sensation.”
Having praised it, though, I must say that my favorite works of art do not feel of their time, but existing out of time. For an artist to devote time to a work while letting the world pass them by—ignoring not just the news but the cultural temperature—produces the most interesting results. I like the anachronistic magical realism of Borges, the claustrophobic under-described urban nowheresvilles of Kafka, Thomas Ligotti’s fantastical and therefore more real than our real worlds.
Think also of something David Lynch’s Eraserhead. The sense it gives not of being a mirror of its time and place (late seventies Philadelphia) but of being an artifact both ancient and futuristic. A labor of love fashioned by someone who had their back turned to the world and instead chose to face the darkness of a roominghouse closet.
I could go on, but I think you get what I’m trying to get at, in my own muddled, thinking out loud at 2:30 am way. When I create, I am less interested in what is currently interesting, what is currently going on, using my butterfly net to snatch something ephemeral from the ether. Instead, I want to build something that stands against time, to the extent that anything can. Obviously it can’t in the long run, but I believe, as Bob Dylan once said, the purpose of art is to stop time.
At least for a time. And the best way for me to do that is to ignore the clock, media (especially the news) and even the world around me. To not rush by speaking to the moment, but instead to take enough time that the passage of time in some way becomes the subject of the work.