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​“Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic — if it is pulled out I shall die.”
That’s a quote from Soren Kierkegaard, one I think about from time to time, especially as it relates to artists. How serious should an artist be? How serious can they afford to be? Is irony always a smokescreen to conceal real emotion, or is it sometimes employed, as an aftereffect, to take the edge off real emotion? If one’s not careful, hard-won emotion evoked in the audience can quickly deteriorate to sentimentality, melodrama.
I was watching some Simpsons DVD commentary a little while back (yes, to quote Bukowski, some lives are meant to be wasted.) On the commentary track a writer said that the staff always made it a point to follow every strong emotional moment in the show with something that undercut it. Watch enough of The Simpsons, especially those seasons in the halcyon days between the third and eighth year, and you’ll see this technique constantly employed. It’s so obvious on second and third viewings that you wonder how you missed it the first time. But then, that’s how magic works.
Remember Lisa on Ice, when Bart and Lisa are pitted against each other in the hockey rink, on rival teams? Bart is a goalie while Lisa is discovering a heretofore-untapped kind of bloodlust coursing through her veins, turning her into a reckless enforcer with a wicked slapshot.
The episode comes to a climax with Lisa’s team facing Bart’s, and Homer egging on both, stoking their unhealthy competition until it becomes toxic.
Finally, with the score tied, Lisa is given a penalty shot against Bart.
Homer is baying for blood from the stands along with all the other fans, while Marge is doing her trademark disconcerted groan and clutching Maggie to her breasts.
Bart and Lisa, rather than breaking the tie, flash back to fond memories of their early childhood together, eating ice cream, playing pranks on Homer. Then they throw down their sticks and go to embrace each other in the center of the ring.
It’s a sweet moment. But then it’s followed by a massive brawl in the stands. As usual when Springfield devolves into a mob, Hans Moleman gets the worst of it while the ornery types like Snake and Willie thrive in the melee.
Does this final scene work?
Sure, though not quite as well as the one where Rod and Bart are playing miniature golf and Bart coaxes Rod into calling it a draw. That episode ends with Homer and Flanders in their wives’ Sunday dresses, mowing their lawns while the entire neighborhood looks on, laughing and pointing.
Still, there’s a principle at work here, first spotted by that writer on the commentary track, that I’ve been mulling over for some time.
It makes me think of David Lynch, and the film critic Roger Ebert’s relationship to the surrealist auteur’s work.
Don’t ask me how I hopped from The Simpsons to David Lynch. That’s just how my mind works, in wild improvisational leapfrogs, from one subject to an only tentatively related tangent.
I remember reading Ebert’s review of Wild at Heart, Lynch’s adaptation of the hardboiled road novel by noir writer Barry Gifford. Wild at Heart wasn’t a massive hit, but it did alright at the box office and with most critics. It also boasted a killer soundtrack featuring Chris Isaac’s haunting croon, and showed genuine chemistry between its leads, Nic Cage and Laura Dern.
The film won the Palm D’Or at Cannes, which pissed Ebert off to no end, as he thought Cyrano de Bergerac should have won. In the beginning of his review Ebert at least had the decency to admit that his problem with Lynch was his problem, some kind of inbuilt bias. He allowed that something in him resisted Lynch, that he saw the man’s talent, but sensed Lynch was hiding behind a façade, playing a shell game. Ebert claimed Lynch would make a good movie again, something that fulfilled the promise of the groundbreaking Eraserhead. But first Lynch had to stop playing games and say what was really on his mind.  
Was Lynch playing a game, not really speaking the truth of his heart (as corny as that sounds), but rather defending that well-placed barb that kept him insulated?
Facing one’s emotions in their art is terrifying. It involves trying to see oneself as they really are, not as they wish they were, or wish the world to see them. James Jones used to say that there wasn’t much separating the serial flasher from the writer, that they were driven pretty much by the same impulse. Author Damon Knight once said that the sign of the amateur writer, just starting out, is to create a main character who is flawless, in complete control of themselves and their environment. There’s a tendency toward wish fulfillment, and fantasy that has nothing to do with genuine imagination.
But that’s neither here nor there, and, returning to the question about Lynch, I have to admit stalemate, say I understand where Ebert’s coming from but can’t quite concur. And there’s something Laura Dern said during an interview about Wild at Heart, something that makes me doubt Ebert’s take. “Most modern love stories are basically just ‘I turn you on, you turn me on, and fuck you.’ But there’s a sweetness to David and the relationship between Sailer and Lulu.”
That sweetness is found in a lot of Lynch’s other works, fused so tightly to the darkness that it tends to get overlooked.
To be fair, the fear of being perceived as melodramatic was not just a theoretical pitfall for Lynch. For a lot of his fans and his tougher detractors like Ebert, The Elephant Man is a maudlin and manipulative misfire. It’s not quite I Am Sam (John Hurt goes neither full nor half retard), but it is an unabashed tearjerker.
Maybe Lynch feared emotion for practical reasons, as a matter of a bad experience, for the same reason he didn’t like to talk about Dune. Or knew directing Return of the Jedi wasn’t for him when George Lucas—who hadn’t quite yet devolved into a total whore—showed him some concept art for a bunch of little spear-throwing furries called Ewoks.
The Coen Brothers have seemed to have undergone a similar transformation from smirking irony to something much more profound and vulnerable. I loved Raising Arizona as a kid, but again, as an adult and reading Ebert’s review, I see where he was coming from. It’s a funny movie, but it’s glib and somewhat condescending to its characters.
And watching Miller’s Crossing, I felt (but could not yet articulate) what bugged Ebert about the movie. You hear the characters speak, and rather than seeing them as people, you think of the writers and admire their skill with the dialogue. It’s too self-conscious, and obsessed with its own prowess to the point of being smarmy.
It's facile and mechanical, even beneath all the rousing and melancholy bagpipe dirges and a truly inspired performance by John Turturro as a wormy slimeball with a genius for self-preservation. But Bernie Bernbaum is still just a cipher, a trope, despite Turturro’s gameness and willingness to go way over the top. “The Schmatta Kid,” ends up less a tragicomic, loathsome weasel than an antisemitic caricature through which the Coens work out their deep-seated self-loathing.
It wasn’t until Fargo that the figurative ice cracked (ironic, that their warmest and most human film to date took place in such a cold locale.) No Country for Old Men proved that this leap into the unknown, barb-free world was not a one-off, that the Coens, like Lynch, had finally ceased fucking around.
I know what you’re going to say:
That they did The Big Lebowski between Fargo and No Country. But Lebowski, while lighter in tone, is still all heart, a smarmless (sic) soul-bearing by two unrepentant stoner savants. The glibness and facileness really belong now to the characters rather than the directors. And the eyes of the directors—while gimlet—are much more forgiving than mocking of the foibles. They sees the Vietnam-obsessed, petty Walter Sobchak and his nebbish jinx of a schlub sidekick Donny as oddly noble, worthy not just of sport but admiration. If only for their enduring friendship in the spite of their calamitous chemistry that sees them constantly pitted against each other.
And this time the humor is meant to reveal rather than conceal. You watch The Big Lebowski and its beauty is in the complexity of what appears to be offhand, in the infinite regress to something truly Zen. It’s shaggy dogs all the way down, man. From the overlong yarn itself to the convoluted kidnapping plot, to Jeff Bridges with his tattered bathrobe and blonde locks like the floppy ears of a golden retriever.
You can of course do this little exercise with as many artists as you want, trying to arrive at an answer to the question I posed about when to use irony and when to abstain.
But the truth is that there is no exact answer, and, as usual, my questions are rhetorical, because art isn’t quite a science. It involves craftsmanship and analysis, sure, but it also involves something that cannot be intellectualized by even the most cerebral and reflective of artists. Even Kubrick—supposedly the coldest and most clinical of master auteurs—told Tom Cruise the following when Cruise asked him what he wanted: “I want the magic.”

 The Fight That Takes It Out Of You; Or, Why You might Want To Avoid Greatness
There’s an old saying attributed to the German writer Goethe: “Das Urbild ist das Bild ist die Spiegelung.” In English that means, “The original image is the image is the reflection.” Whatever’s going on in the universe is fractal in nature, visible in realms as diverse as biology and culture, flowers and cities. How far down (or up) it goes, to some ultimate substrate or some ultimate nothing, is a question for physicist, metaphysicians, and theologists, not tired semi-successful writers crafting blog entries in the middle of the night.
Similar to Goethe’s saying, not to mention a bit more succinct and pithy (and in English to boot), Joyce Carol Oates once said that “Life is a metaphor for boxing.”
Is it true? Is boxing the “Ur-Stoff,” from which other realms can be extrapolated or at least contextualized? I think so. Let’s go from pugilism to the arts—men punching each other to people painting—just to test Dame Oates’ theory.
 In boxing, there is the dreaded “fight that takes it out of you.” Everyone in the sport knows what this means. It’s the kind of fight where two men of equal resolve, will, and skill meet in their primes, clash, and put on a show for the ages. Usually it’s a bloody, exhaustive affair, as cathartic and stirring for the fans as it is for the fighters. It becomes the stuff of legend, or at least feature-length documentaries and retrospective interviews in which the two pugs meet again years later, shake hands, sit down in canvas-backed chairs in some TV studio, and reminisce with some jock-sniffer of a host seated between them.
These kinds of fights cement the legendary status of the fighters involved, and make great memories for the fans, but they also take their toll. These are the kinds of fights that make men old overnight. Like Philip Dick’s replicants, their shining ultrabright comes at a terrible price. Only boxing is even crueler than the Tyrell Corporation, accomplishing in thirty-six minutes what it would take a replicant’s self-destructive programming three years to achieve.
Am I being dramatic? I don’t think so. The truth of my words is there in the purple scar tissue above the eyes of many a pug, drooping and swollen like overripe plums. It’s in the slurred speech, the weird bowlegged gait that makes men walk as if they’re navigating minefields. I’m not going to say any names. It would be unseemly, bordering on indecent.
Nor am I going to dwell on the boxing half of the analogy any longer. It would be too depressing.
Moving on to the arts, though, and with it my main point, I think an artist can give so much to their work—a painter to one canvas, an actor to one performance, a musician to one album—that they’re never the same afterwards.
The difference, of course, between boxers and artists is that artists don’t have a literal opponent before them, a dance partner who is just as iron-willed and unbending, prepared to suffer brain damage or even death to prove his point.
Some artists view the creation of their work as a kind of battle, a war against the doubts and despair that every day sap our energy and make us not want to try anymore. And artists, just like fighters, have primes, those years where they are most confident in their abilities or at least most ornery in fighting off the doubts, the indifference, critical mockery and outright rejection.
One could maybe argue that a director regards his actors and crew as opponents in a certain sense, as Jack Nicholson once suggested of Stanley Kubrick. And then there is Hemingway’s likening of the blank page fed into the typewriter as “Facing the white bull.” But a metaphor for a fight will never be confused for an actual donnybrook. A blank page may be daunting to the writer just starting out his task (it always is to me), but it doesn’t literally punch back. And aside from on-set dustups between actors and directors, fists don’t literally fly in that act of creation. Actors, even the most agonizingly method of them, do not suffer renal failure and piss blood, requiring dialysis after their performances, no matter how much of themselves they give or how invested in their roles they are. The only possible exception might be Daniel Day Lewis, who I heard put so much energy into playing a paralyzed man in a wheelchair in My Left Foot that he literally broke some ribs.
What about De Niro, that other ultra-method madman? He’s probably the most apt guineapig in our little experiment, as he is a man in whom the two halves of the metaphor fuse to become a perfect instantiation. He not only played middleweight, perpetual motion machine, Jake “Bronx Bull” Lamotta, but went full method, learning the secrets of Fistiana firsthand from Lamotta himself, who, having trained De Niro, asserted Bobby could have gone pro at that point.
Did De Niro take some stick in the ring, actually get hit with shots while trying to “pass punches,” as the old-time stuntmen call it?
Maybe, but it hardly matters, as Bobby Milk gave so much of himself in that performance—breaking down and crying from within the quivering mass of his soul while banging his head against a prison wall, gaining massive amounts of weight—that I think he emerged from the experience in some way compromised, permanently tired. Even rest and recuperation after the performance, along with acknowledgment from his peers in the Academy, was not enough to restore him to the actor he was before he went a round or two for a pound or two with Scorsese.
Yes, he had some great performances afterwards, and continues to turn in respectable and sometimes even admirable jobs as an actor in between assignments clearly taken to meet his nut for his Tribeca restaurants and hotel properties.
But nothing seems to come close to that Oscar-winning performance, regarded not just as his best but perhaps the deepest and most committed, most sacrificial and vulnerable ever put on celluloid.
Bobby didn’t just lose something with that performance, either. He gained something which he’s never been able to shake, a tic that might seem minor to the casual fan but which his army of impersonators always incorporate into their mimicries.
Watch De Niro in Raging Bull as fat post-retirement Lamotta, with his bloated overhanging beer belly stretching the fabric of his shirt and hiding the buckle of his belt. Listen to him when he’s on the phone with his wife, Vicky, pleading for her to come up with bail money so he doesn’t have to stew in a Florida hoosegow on that corruption of a minor charge. Hear the wheeze, that strange, strangled breathing, as if a hard snorer had put his apnea mask on wrong.
De Niro never breathed like that prior to that performance, and he never ceased to do that huffing and puffing afterwards. It’s there, every time he speaks in an interview today, mixed in among his squirming and hemming and hawing (he obviously hates doing interviews.)
What gives? In her autobiography cowritten with Thomas Hauser, Vicky Lamotta demystifies the De Niro rasp. Jake, you see, had broken his nose in fights so many times that air could barely escape his nostrils. But, being pigheaded and stubborn to the max, he still continued to try to force air out through his nose, producing that weird sound that resembles Luca Brasi’s silent gag in the first second of his garroting in The Godfather.
De Niro, being a quick and careful study, picked up Jake’s little mannerism and never put it down. He even fooled Vicky (with whom he almost went to bed), calling her late one night and using the Jake voice so convincingly that she shouted, “Leave me alone, Jack!” into the phone’s receiver before realizing it was Bobby and not her unhinged and perpetually jealous ex-hubby.
Something similar, I think, happened to Johnny Depp, whose stream of consciousness mumble became much more pronounced after he bonded with Hunter Thompson, who kept a cigarette holder clenched in his jaws and spoke as if trying to navigate a belfry’s worth of bats spreading in entoptic tracers before his constantly tripping eyes.
So yes, Joyce Carol Oates, while perhaps being coy or hyperbolic in her assertion that life is a mere reflection of boxing, wasn’t quite wrong. And it’s not only fractal all the way down. One can work laterally to prove the same point.
Move away from the method actors and look at literature.
Charles Bukowski was fond of saying that Ferdinand Celine’s bleak postwar picaresque Journey to the End of the Night was the best novel written in the last two thousand years. He was also quick to point out, though, in the same breath, that the creation of such a book, which took its maker to the absolute limits of his inner darkness (hence the title) broke something in him, left him more tired, dissipated, and cynical than he had been when he started out on his journey. And Celine had started out already quite broken and cynical after his experiences in the Great War.
It all begs a question which it didn’t even occur to me to ask until now. Should we fear perfection rather than pursue it? Should we hold something back when we perform or create, rather than give it our all? Seasoned trainers in the fight game call this “Boxing within yourself,” the refusal to give either your opponent or the paying audience your very last ounce of sweat and final drop of blood. You stick with a gameplan, ignore the bait offered by the other man trying to lure you into a war, as well as the smattering of boos that break out when you use your feet to reset and fence capably and responsibly behind the jab.
This last question, about how much to give versus how much to hold back, is the only one I’ve raised thus far tonight that we’re going to leave laying where it is without even attempting to solve it. There’s another Buk quote, though, that’s relevant to the question of whether or not to give it one’s all when creating. “Hemingway tried too hard,” Buk observed. “You could feel the hard work in his writing.”
Try too hard for the knockout in boxing, and many times you start to “load up” on one shot, using the same hammering blow over and over rather than setting up the shot with a punch meant to misdirect and change the opponent’s point of focus. And if you don’t get the other boxer out of there with your blitzkrieg assault of haymakers and wide, looping blows, you’re going to be so tired when you finish that the opponent, responding to that withering fire with his own fusillade, will be able to knock you down (and maybe out) with a feather duster-soft one-two.
Perhaps there’s a lesson here for the arts, too. Don’t try too hard. Or, even more succinct and bleak, and chiseled as an epitaph on Buk’s headstone in Green Hills Cemetery, in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California: “Don’t try.”
Trust the process and let the knockout come.
Focus on the prosaic details like grammar, varied sentence length and flow, and let the Muse enter when she will, rather than making passioned imprecations to her on her Doric column-framed cloud. Don’t write standing up, as “Papa” Hemingway was rumored to have done.
I’ll have to think about it some more later on. Goodnight for now.
 
 


 

​Author Jorge Louis Borges once famously said words to the effect that “a novel is a piece of writing that has something wrong with it.” Borges preferred the short story, regarding the novel (especially the epic) as a stale, deathly form. And while many writers and readers would disagree with Borges (maybe most), even they would have to concede that there is a slump, an air of sluggishness, that starts to seep into all but the most superlative novel-length works around the second half of the story’s midpoint. Entire books have been dedicated to solving the problem posed by this structural sluggishness in the second act.
The short story obviously doesn’t have the same problem as the novel, though the concision of the form brings with it other problems, like precluding certain aims that a novel can better fulfill. Or maybe not. Have you ever read a short story that was so satisfying, so brilliant at encapsulating all of life’s complexity, that you finished it feeling like you had just read an entire novel? It’s a rare occurrence, but it does happen from time to time. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor is just such a story.
Some people find their way to the short story for more prosaic, less intellectual reasons than Borges. Raymond Carver may have been a master of the form (I think he was), but he only took it up because his day job at a sawmill didn’t leave him enough free time to work on a novel. Other writers—especially during the Golden Age of the Pulps and the later tsunami of “men’s mags”—wrote shorts because that was where the money was.
I certainly don’t claim to be a master of the short story, and neither do I write it because I have a philosophical or aesthetic beef with the novel. That said, I don’t really do it for the money, either, as my bank account can easily attest. And I have more than enough free time to permit me to write another novel, should things take me in that direction.
Still, I’ll cop to a great fascination with the short story, and more than a bit of frustration with my inability to break the mystery of the form down into a set of discreet rules or guidelines. If, as Borges also said, “art is fire plus algebra,” maybe I’m spending too much time with my calculator and not enough time rubbing two sticks together.
I mean, maybe I’m just overthinking it.
If one spends too much time pondering their failures and missteps, they’ll cease to move altogether. There’s a parable about a centipede shuffling happily along a green leaf, who encounters a red ant, its antennae dowsing. “How do you move all those legs?” the ant asks.
The centipede, after pondering the question a moment, discovers himself paralyzed. Presumably a shrew or a toad came along a bit later to devour the poor insect. Maybe the ant set him up, asked him that question just to throw him off his game, immobilizing the pathetic arthropod in the hopes that he (the centipede) and not the ant would get devoured?
Anyway, let me tell you about my own centipedal problem, which revolves around a dispute between two men long-since dead, modernist writer Anton Chekhov and English polemicist William Cobbett.
No, the men didn’t have a spat during their respective lifetimes (it would have been hard, as Cobbett died well before Chekhov’s birth), but there are bits of their aesthetic philosophies which seem to disagree with each other, or at least jar when I attempt to resolve them one to the other.
Briefly, Anton Chekhov, in personal correspondences, put forth the principle that every element in a story must be necessary, and that irrelevant elements that never come into play in early drafts should be removed in subsequent drafts. This has come to be known as “Chekhov’s Gun.” If the author mentions a gun over the mantlepiece in the first act, that gun needs to come into play at some point in the story. The cinematic equivalent would probably be an insert or closeup of the gun, which needs to be somehow incorporated into the film, fired and seen smoking preferably before the denouement.
Fine and dandy, but here we have William Cobbett coming forward (crawling out of the grave to argue with the Russian playwright), with his concept of the red herring. He popularized the term in association with a literal herring, mind you, employed to distract scenting hounds from chasing rabbits. One would cast about salted, pickled fish, which would give off a strong scent to mask the smell of the hares being hunted by dogs whose olfactory bulbs were no doubt driven crazy by the kippers.
But the principle of deliberate misdirection can easily be extended from the hunt to the stage (or the page or the screen). Such misdirection is also the lifeblood of the magician’s act, the ability to shift the audience’s collective attention, especially those “smart marks,” in the crowd who are keen-eyed and vigilant, hip to the tricks that the average magician might employ. The hand is quicker than the eye, however, as the saying goes, and unless the mark is especially churlish (or has wagered more than he can stand to lose), his reaction to being tricked is likely to be one of amusement, even minor joy.
Fans of mysteries love to try to solve them in advance, and while there is a certain sense of satisfaction to be had when one guesses right, it can’t be compared to the pleasure felt when one is wrong.
But do you see the problem, or rather, the contradiction that’s giving me this minor case of dyspepsia at 12:54 a.m. on a Wednesday night? Misdirection requires saying Look here, while using one’s hands to prepare another trick that the viewer hasn’t anticipated and must not see being setup in order to get the satisfaction that comes with the payoff. It’s a hell of a lot less impressive to watch me pull a white rabbit out of a silk top hat if you see me stuffing the rabbit down there beforehand.
Let’s perform a little experiment:
Say there are a husband and wife getting ready to have dinner. The husband is seated at the table, bitterly recriminating his wife for her terrible cooking skills, saying that he is miserable with her and wishes she were dead.
Quickly he glances above the mantelpiece at an old hunting rifle hanging from a pair of rusted tenpenny nails. We hear his thoughts, in voiceover, as was sometimes employed in the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents shows. It’s a somewhat antiquated device, like the screen going all blurry and the playing of the strings of a harp as we dissolve to a flashback, but it will serve for our purposes.
I seem to remember I left a round in there, Hubby thinks, since the last time I went hunting. Quickly he cuts his eyes from the shotgun back to wifey still slaving over the pot, stirring the food with a ladle and then lifting the wooden ladle to her lips to taste her soup. Not bad, she thinks (we’re also privy to her thoughts).
“Don’t forget the salt,” Hubby barks, eyes flitting between the gun on the mantlepiece and his wife in the final stages of preparing the meal.
“As you wish, dear.”
The wife scoops a couple ladlesful of steaming soup into a bowl for her husband, and adds a few dashes of salt to his meal. She’d like to give her own soup some kick, but alas, she suffers from hypertension and must forgo even the most meagre pinch of salt. She carries his food to the table, and he begins to slurp the broth. “Bah!” he complains. “It’s scalding!”
“Maybe you should let it cool?” Wifey says, congenially, before walking back over to the stove to make her own much blander bowl.
“Bah!” he says again, outdoing the hammiest interpreter of Ebenezer Scrooge for cantankerousness. “It’ll taste awful, either way. And at least if it’s scalding it’ll numb my tastebuds.” And soon, he thinks, eyes drawn again to the gun above the mantlepiece, you won’t be able to poison me with your lousy cooking anymore. Just you wait, you heifer, until--
Suddenly, Hubby’s interior monologue is truncated. He drops his spoon to the bowl, where its stainless steel handle rattles against the bowl’s ersatz China. He reaches his hands up to his throat, eyes bulging, making a choking sound.
“What’s wrong, dear?” Wifey asks, her tone still gentle, conciliatory, light as a bird’s coo.
Hubby points to his constricting throat, his eyes rolling into the back of his skull, and he topples head over heels, landing on the hardwood floor with a heavy thud.
“Hmm,” Wifey says, shrugging her narrow shoulders and helping herself to another spoonful of her own bowl of soup. “Mine tastes perfectly fine.”
Then our focus puller tweaks the lens’s optics just a bit to make the condiments sitting on the counter a bit more prominent to the viewer. “Then again,” Wifey says, glancing at the cutglass salt and pepper shakers, “I didn’t add salt to mine.”
...
Alright, so this story is not going to win an Edgar, and barely constitutes more than a cliche-ridden vignette. But the point is clear, or at least clear enough for me to put this blog post to bed.
The gun mentioned in the first act should not be used at all, at least not by the characters. It was only used by me, the author (or the director, or playwright) to get you to focus on it so that the reader could potentially find themselves surprised to discover that Wifey was the one with the weapon and genuine murderous intentions, despite her demure, submissive veneer. Hubby, for all his rudeness and crudity, was just kind of an asshole, not an actual killer (though his interior monologue suggests he was at least thinking about it).
If the shotgun truly did its job in this piece—not firing, but rather distracting you with its potential to fire—I even got away with explicitly telling you (through the husband’s interior monologue) that Wifey was literally poisoning him. Sure, in his musings, it was only an exaggerated way for the husband to gripe about her lack of cooking skills. The full irony is only comprehended at the end of the episode, when Hitchcock, porcine jowls a-waddling, gets in a joke at the dead hubby’s expense: “He said she was poisoning him. I don’t know why, then, he still proceeded to eat the soup.”
I understand that Chekov was a master of the short story. Anyone who doubts this, seek out the book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, which is a peerless work on the major prerevolutionary Russian short story writers. That said, though, tonight I gotta side with the Englishman waving around his barrelful of pickled herrings. The gun mentioned in the first act doesn’t have to be used at all.
Does believing this make me a fool?
It’s probably one of the things that makes me a fool, something which needs to be added to the list already as long as my nightshirt.
But all any writer can hope for is an epitaph similar to the one Hunter Thompson inadvertently proffered during an interview, shrugging his shoulders and scowling from beneath his green eyeshade: “Yeah, I’m a fool, but a pretty good read, too.”
 
 
 

​When we were thirteen or so, my buddy Patrick and I decided to go see three movies in one night. This didn’t seem very daunting to me, as I was already an expert at sitting around and consuming a lot of entertainment in dark rooms. Pat was going places, though. He was serious about baseball (his dad had been a pro ball player) and when he wasn’t playing ball, he was always engaged in some kind of structured activity.
Pat never went pro, by the way, but according to a quick internet search, he did eventually become a well-respected surgeon. I’m also happy to report that he is married to a beautiful woman and has two or three lovely kids. I, meanwhile, am still sitting in dark rooms, daydreaming, wasting time. My fortieth birthday is in a few days and I don’t feel a hell of a lot more mature than I did that night we went to the theater. My body has sure as hell aged, though.
But back to the story...
 Because we were too young to drive, my dad drove us to the theater and dropped us off there. It was one of those giant white stone elephants owned by Loews that used to be everywhere, and are becoming rarer and rarer these days. I suspect that soon regular multiplexes will suffer the same fate endured by drive-ins. And, much like the giant malls anchoring the ghosts of shopping plazas, they’ll end up razed to rubble or left vacant, haunted and crumbling temples from another time.
I saw a lot of movies in that theater, and while a small moviehouse is probably more conducive to nostalgia, I have good memories of that popcorn-smelling palace. I can still vividly recall its ocean of sky blue carpet stellated with little golden dots, and the glowing videogame cabinets lined up along the wall.
I played my first game of Mortal Kombat there, ripped my first beating heart from the ribcage of my conquered foe before an assemblage of praying warrior monks. Ah, memories.
Pat and I had decided that we would only buy tickets for the first movie, after which we would theater hop on our single ticket for the next two features. This wasn’t as bad as sneaking in, but we were middleclass kids who went to a Catholic school, and it gave our little evening that extra illicit frisson.
The first movie we saw that night was Road To Wellville, an odd, offbeat look at the life of health nut homeopath John Kellogg and his sanitorium in Battle Creek, Michigan. The movie was directed by Alan Parker, who had a demonstrable knack for large music-based productions (Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Fame). He also directed the darkly brilliant Angel Heart, adapted from William Hjortsberg’s incomparable supernatural PI novel. But at the time that hardly mattered to us. For we didn’t really think about the auteur behind the lens.  
And because Road to Wellville wasn’t that good, we didn’t even think much about the film as it played out on the screen. That said, there were a couple memorable moments in the movie. Like when the man in need of rest and relaxation (played by Matthew Broderick) hallucinates one of the nurses in her Florence Nightingale cap and gown as stark naked. As I remember it, she had a perfectly-toned, evenly tanned supple body, her breast and buttocks perched equally high on her shapely frame.
The internet existed back in those days, of course, but I don’t think either one of us had it, or used it much except for school research projects. Naturally, then, the sight of a naked woman doing nothing but being naked was still a wonder to behold. I miss those days.
There was only one other good thing about this crapfest of a movie that I can remember at this great remove. And that was when Kellogg’s son, rebelling against the regimen of fiber and cod liver oil, sits at the dinner table, banging his fork and knife on the tabletop. “Meat and potatoes!” he shouts, over and over again, stubborn and unwilling to submit to his tyrannical father’s dictates.
After that night, the chant became something of an inside joke between Pat and me. We would burst out with it spontaneously, or sometimes when it was warranted, as in the cafeteria at school. Any time the sour-faced ladies in their hairnets served us something not to our liking, out it came, the protest accompanied by the clack of our plastic trays.
Meat and potatoes! Meat and potatoes!
Eventually, mercifully, The Road to Wellville ended. We left the theater and went out into the hall, staring down the corridor that separated the theaters from the lobby. Through the plate glass window at the front of the cineplex we could see the last rays of the setting sun highlighting the gold woven into carpet. We let our eyes and minds adjust to the dreamless day world, blinking and walking around on legs rubbery and tingling with sleep needles.
Then it was on to Picture Two, Interview with a Vampire.
Again, I knew nothing about Neil Jordan at the time, but I would later grow to greatly admire his The Butcher Boy. I think he even wrote a novel or two, in addition to being a fine director. His greatest crossover hit, The Crying Game, about a man who falls in love with a transsexual, proved popular enough to merit a reference in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. (Spoiler alert: Finkel is Einhorn. Einhorn is Finkel).
Interview with a Vampire was much more our speed. Also, at that time I’d already read a Lestat novel or two, along with some Crichton and King (Cujo, I think). But that, and a sprinkling of Joseph Wambaugh, constituted my only flirtations with adult literature up to that point.
Interview was dark, both in tone and in literal color scheme. Its sepia and mahogany palette sometimes blanched nearer to black and white so that it felt like a silent Murnau movie, full of ever-lengthening shadows and ever-retreating light. There were naked women galore, as well as a more sophisticated sensuousness lost on our young brains, which processed the sex but not the death. We hardly needed titillation, though, to sustain our interest. The spell of the movie worked on us and the rest of the packed house.
We were taken in by the sumptuous decay of New Orleans, its gingerbread fretwork of old buildings crawling with ivy, riverboats floating dreamily on the Mississippi dark as molasses. We were intrigued by the way the vampire seduced Christian Slater, the journalist/audience surrogate, into hearing his story, even though he feared the vampire and found him repulsive.
There were also some genuinely moving scenes in the film, too, as when the child vampire, cursed to remain forever in her tiny body, finally rebelled against her state. Her father, Lestat, attempted to bribe her with a menagerie of expensive porcelain dolls in silk dresses. But it wasn’t enough, and in the end she cast aside the childish things in a haunting, shriek-filled tantrum that culminated with her banging discordantly on some piano keys.
I can’t remember what precipitated her death, only that the vampires held some kind of quorum in an ancient Gothic theater, then passed sentence on her and her mother. Woman and child were left in some pit, exposed to sunlight where they shrieked, sizzled, turned to cinders that then exploded into powdery drifts of the finest stone.
After Vampire we walked out into the hall again. Our legs were even heavier with sleep, the world on the other side of the glass cold and black, and presumably filled with vampires. I was smiling, still game, enchanted by the idea of not only seeing three movies in one evening, but maybe doing this every Friday night. Looking over at Pat, though, I saw that he was already a little weary of it, that he strained for the outside world, fresh night air, sports. Life itself, dammit.
Already a small chasm had grown up between us, but it hardly mattered. In a year or two I would be close to completely withdrawn into myself. Then that chasm wouldn’t just exist between me and my friend, but between me and the entire world.
And it would only grow larger as more time passed.
That, however, was still a ways into the future.
The last movie on the list was Pulp Fiction.
We weren’t ready for it.
 For Xillenials— that weird group between the overeducated, underemployed types Kevin Smith showcased in Clerks, and the kids who would grow up knowing nothing but the internet and 9-11--Pulp Fiction was a bit like our Star Wars. Something about it sunk in with us, scarred and impressed itself upon us in just the right way at just the right time.
The film started innocuously enough, with a couple sitting at a table in a diner having coffee. Then, out of nowhere, the woman stood up in her vinyl booth, brandishing a big iron, threatening everyone in the restaurant with a string of expletives.
Cue the frenetic Dick Dale surfer guitar.
Something about the cussing—not just the basic transgression, which was enough for us kids—let us know we were in for something different. It was the creativity of the foulness that made us sit up in our seats and take notice in a way we hadn’t until then.
Roger Ebert claims that when he first saw Pulp Fiction, he knew he was either seeing the best movie of the year or the worst one. But Pat and I knew from the jump that it was the best.
I won’t recount the whole plot, just say that we sat there, in awe, exchanging looks, unable to quite believe what we were seeing. People were onscreen talking, arguing, debating bits of pop culture trivia, making references to real world things like Big Macs and Quarter Pounders with Cheese. They weren’t staring into the camera, but the way they were referencing the real world somehow felt like a great and exciting new way to break the proscenium arch.
Watching John Travolta and jheri-curled Sam Jackson argue about the merits of foot massages was somehow more entertaining than watching a building blow up in a massive action extravaganza. Seeing a man subtly intimidate another man, eating his Big Kahuna Burger, drinking his soda through a straw as if sucking his soul, was better than a sex scene.
And here’s the thing: all of that other, more traditional spectacle was in there. There were car wrecks, shootouts, plenty of violence, and a sophisticated kind of sexual patter between Bruce Willis and his girlfriend that left Pat and I stunned. Girls were totally mysterious to us, and women entirely sacred and alien. If we ever talked about sex, it was immature, secondhand crass macho porn crap passed down from older brothers, designed to conceal our fear of the unknown. And here we were, riveted by a diminutive woman talking about how a potbelly on a female is pleasurable to the touch, but makes a man appear apelike.
Pulp Fiction had pulled back some kind of curtain, like Sunset Boulevard letting fans peek at the reality of movie stars, or The Godfather letting crowds see power exercised in all its genuine ugliness. Tarantino wasn’t patronizing us. He was one of us. Or at least Tarantino had been someone like us, who went to the video store (and even worked at one) and once read comic books. He had Kevin Smith’s encyclopedic mind for pop culture but arranged it in Pulp Fiction so even those who didn’t know the world secondhand could admire and believe it. The wildest scenes had the quality of crazy but real-life incidents, either witnessed or recalled, by a master raconteur.
Even as you saw it on the screen, you heard it being told (I guess that’s why he called it Pulp Fiction.)
Did I ever tell you, Tarantino seemed to say, about the time me and my buddy were trapped in a pawnshop with this leather gimp?
For the first time, Pat and I became aware that someone made movies, that the words coming out of the actors’ mouths had not been written by committee. Neither, though, had the words been written by a novelist and later adapted by a screenwriter. It had all been written by just one guy, and solely for the screen.
And that one guy who wrote all those words also just happened to be behind the camera the entire time.
Each generation discovers that dialogue is an art, a constant volley to keep a ball in play, in their own manner. Hundreds of years ago they had Shakespeare. Later generations had to content themselves with a Mamet or Woody Allen. Tarantino might be even further down the trough (the cinematic equivalent of Stephen King’s quote about being the “Big Mac and fries of literature” comes to mind.) But damn it was tasty, anyway, especially for our starved palates that had been deprived even the meagerest fare up until that night.
After that, Pat and I wanted to make movies. We talked about it quite a bit, and we may have even written a raggedy-ass script or two. But we never had the balls to pick up a camera (even a camcorder), to try and thereby risk failing.
It hardly mattered, though. My destiny was not to make movies, to collaborate with another two hundred or so professionals to bring my singular vision to the screen. My destiny was to sit alone in a room and pound the keys.
Pat, of course, was destined for happiness, which may be a hell of a lot better than making movies, or writing books, or painting.
I still have a soft spot for Pulp Fiction, and I dug Once upon a Time in Hollywood, but somewhere along the way I stopped following Tarantino. Still, he was for our generation a bit like Scorsese was for the previous one. Quentin’s fellow Gen Xers will bridle at that comparison (which, admittedly, can only be carried so far). But that’s mostly because he is their contemporary, and professional  jealousy comes into play there in a way it doesn’t with an eminence grise like Martin Scorsese.
Pat and I never went back to the theater after that, not to see three movies in a row, or, for that matter, even one movie. And maybe that’s for the best. Six hours and some change is a long time to spend in the dark, even for someone who’s as comfortable with darkness as I.

​War is the cowardly evasion of the problems of peace.” I can’t find the quote online in the original German, but it’s attributed to the German writer Thomas Mann. Most probably it was excerpted from his Gedanken im Kriege (Thoughts in Wars would be a direct translation). It’s a quote that’s come back to me time and again through the years.
I suppose one’s first reading of the quote would be to view it as antiwar, but I’m not quite sure that gets at the heart of what Mann was saying. War sucks, sure, but inherent in Mann’s words is the idea that peace is even harder. Peace comes with its own burdens, which, believe it or not, make war a kind of psychic relief from the complexity and nuance that some people find excruciating.
There’s some Bukowski story I read a million years ago that’s relevant here. Buk’s alter ego Chinaski is sitting in a bar (or maybe a bus terminal, I frankly don’t remember) and some hippy kids sidle up to him. One of the hippies, wearing a grimy army surplus jacket, asks Hank his opinion of war. To which Hank characteristically responds: “When you to the grocery store, that’s a war. When you get into a cab, that’s a war.” Melodramatic? Maybe, but I think he’s right that ultimately everything is a war. He even had a poetry collection titled War all the Time.
I can’t remember exactly what the hell I was thinking when I joined the Army. It was only a little more than a decade ago but it might as well be ancient history, lost to the mists of time. All I know is that at the time I walked into that recruiter’s office, I was feeling pretty desperate. I was a classic failure to launch, a wannabe writer in his mid-twenties living at home with his mother, gradually growing weirder and more pathetic by the day. For a couple years there, I worked as a pizza deliveryman, but I didn’t enjoy having my car pelted with rocks by kids in the public housing complexes. The deductible could only cover so much, and only so many times. Also, the idea of potentially losing my life over a Meat Lover’s Supreme and a two-liter of Mountain Dew seemed ignominious, even for a creature as pathetic as I.
Eventually I wisely quit that job. After that, I supported myself (to the extent I could) by taking whatever jobs I could land through a temp service. For a time there I had a decent gig doing background checks for a firm called General Information Services. I sat in my swivel chair, squinting under the fluorescence, sneaking looks at the legs of the women around me, crossed and sheathed in black or tan stockings. Alas, that gig didn’t last, and after an excruciating stint working at the Otis Spunkmeyer muffin factory, I decided I would rather risk dying than continue living this way.
I’d threatened to join the army a couple of times, but my mom had always dismissed my threats as hollow. One day, though, I drove the recruiter’s office where it was located in the center of a suburban shopping plaza with a brick and stucco facade. They must not have been getting much traffic, as I literally had to rouse the buck sergeant behind his desk from a deep sleep.
Later that night I went home and told my mother what I had done. She promptly called my father, which shows the gravity of the situation, as he hated her and she hated him. I don’t remember much about what they said (I was already locked in my mind, lost in my own zone at this point). I just recall her shouting, “Yeah, but I didn’t think he’d actually do it!”
I was in terrible shape physically, but somehow forced my soft and flabby body through the whole nine weeks of basic training at Fort Benning. I did not emerge from the experience “Born again hard,” as Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann observed of Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. But on the plus side, neither did I put a round into my DI’s chest and then fire one through the back of my skull, either, a la Pyle.
The military simplified everything. In the real world, I had felt constantly stressed about money. I had felt pathetic and poor and out of place, weak and neurotic and sexless, a loser in a society that only tolerated winners. Delivering pizzas, I felt like a bug with a slimy carapace scurrying up to the doorsteps of these stone McMansions filled with happy and prosperous people. I drove my mom’s crappy Aerostar minivan through the suburbs, surrounded by sleek, shining Benzes and big black SUVs (usually with impressive fiberglass speedboats tailed to trailer hitches).
In the army, though, all of my bills were paid, meals were provided, and hierarchy was based on rank alone. And the loss of outward identity (down to shearing off my hair) let me develop a stronger interior life. I no longer felt insecure. I was too faceless, anonymous to pretend to paranoia. Who the hell would bother looking at me here? How could anything be personal where the drill sergeants barked at literally everyone, berating them with profanity-laced insults?
Back in the real world, I had felt the constant ache of failure that went with not having a girlfriend. I’d definitely had no prospects for marriage, or the social or emotional skills to develop anything like a meaningful relationship. Every day after work, whether at Pizza Hut or Otis Spunkmeyer, I would smoke weed in my bedroom and masturbate to porn. I was wrapping myself deeper into a cocoon of seeming pleasure. But it was really just deadening everything inside me, including all ambition and the pain, which I should have recognized was unavoidable. It would have been healthier to face it and deal with the hurt and fear.
But in the Army I was only around other young men, most of them horndogged up most of the time, just as sexually immature and crass as me. That said, a few already had spouses, real responsibilities, and even kids.
Again, everything in the army was simpler, if not always easier.
But I’m speaking only of the regimentation of Army life, not war itself.
 Eventually I got orders for my first duty station (Darmstadt, Germany) and from there deployed to Iraq (though we started out in Kuwait).
The experience definitely changed me, made me more aware not just of my own mortality, but my humanity, as well as my heretofore undiscovered sense of shame. I was ashamed of what we were doing, and what I had done. The war had woken me up from the slightly unsettling dream that was my previous life, unpleasant but too undramatic to merit the title of nightmare.
Is that easier, though, than living on the homefront in supposed peace?
I think so.
It probably requires greater fortitude to, say, clean toilets at a ballpark after a big game than to man a minigun while hanging out of a Blackhawk helicopter. Staring down at villages of mud huts, relicts of ziggurats, and fields of crops shimmering under a blazing sun at least offers scenic vistas of an ancient land. It definitely beats staring into toilet bowls, even when you factor in that toilet bowls, unlike the fields in Mesopotamia, aren’t seeded with men in burnooses with AK47s.
Back when I was in the service, being a soldier still sort of conferred a certain kind of respect on the person serving. Being a soldier, I didn’t feel quite as alien or out of place in America anymore. I had passed through some membrane, performed some ritual required to psychically bond people across class and culture lines that was once an important aspect of becoming a citizen.
Of course you sensed the cynicism beneath the praise and respect with which we were showered. The whole patriotism industry feted you because it was what big war profiteers like Lockheed and their lobbies and their rent boy politicians wanted. And guys who had the audacity to cite love of country as their reason for joining made sure to get the best sign-on bonuses they could, just like everyone else. But since you were the beneficiary of all this cynicism and you got all this smoke blown up your ass, you didn’t really question it. And naturally you knew that in their hearts of hearts, the Lee Greenwoods with their jingoistic yokel acts and the businesses giving soldiers discounts thought that we were suckers. And they were right.
 It takes a very special kind of mark to try to fabricate meaning out of dying for no reason, on behalf of people who deep down really don’t give a shit. Then think about the damage war does to the people in these impoverished countries, the goatherds and farmers growing their bitter crops in the mud. Think about the pain you put your family through, even if you don’t die or get severely injured, just making them worry about you while you’re downrange.
But these are all thoughts I only have in hindsight, that, as most, were minor inklings, registering as mere cricks in the neck at the time.
People would stop you in the airport and thank you for your service, too. Vets from previous wars would shake your hand, treat you with respect. Bearded, hippyish dudes who’d been in Vietnam might saddle up to you for a conversation, or an older man in suspenders might pigeonhole you to talk about war. Combat, of course, was a much more intimate affair in their days. And nothing we did in Iraq could compare with what happened at, say, Khe San, and definitely not at the Battle of the Bulge or Betio.
But again, we were the recipients of love and praise, and whether or not it was misplaced (it was), it felt good and we didn’t question it.
It isn’t just the praise and ego stroke that made being in the Army an alluring and ultimately simplifying illusion, preferable to living in the real world. Nor was it just the wearing of a uniform and feeling the high that comes with surrendering one’s will to that kind of fascistic power.
It’s the way that being in the military breaks one’s life up into easily understood chapters. It gives one’s life a narrative aspect, a B.C. and an A.D. dividing line between the person one once was and the one they have become. These things happen in normal, nonmilitary life (I assume) in a more nuanced and complex way. Eventually you go from a boy to man, or a girl to a woman, without the delusions or pageantry.
I remember coming home on one of my first leaves and feeling a great sense of pressure constricting around my chest like a band. And I remember another band fastening itself around my skull as if I were trying to take a nap in a house with a slow but persistent gas leak.
I could feel that the people around me had been going about their lives—dating, working, struggling, in an unpraised but frankly admirable kind of silence. They bore the banality, the repetition, everything I had fled when I joined the army. They labored in a fog unrelieved by action, combat, awards, changes of locale imposed by whoever at Brigade level (or even higher) cut orders. To not be shuffled around the world, to wake up and face the same people every day—coworkers, spouse, children—seemed like a great burden.
On leave I would go to coffeeshops or to libraries or to the pharmacy, and I would just steal glances at the people working there. I’d marvel at their bravery, their ability to endure this nondescript, unbroken continuity of time lived in the same place, basically the same day, relived again and again.
Their identities and lives were organic, not something handed to them by someone else. Their time was not bisected and parceled, sliced and shuffled by some clerk at Operations deciding whether to send them to Fort Bliss or Fort Huachuca. Sure they had to work eight or even twelve hours a day, but when the day was done their time and mind was theirs. In the Army, even when we shammed and hid from work, our lives and bodies and souls belonged to the institution. We could mock it and make jokes, develop codes to express our disgust (FTA supposedly meant “Fun Times Always,” but everyone knew what it really meant). But we had exchanged something we could never get back, something that everyone else still had.
A lot of the civilians I stared at on leave seemed happy. And many of those people no doubt were happy. But I think they were brave, too.
A lot braver than me.
I think, ultimately, that Thomas Mann was right about war being a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. Assuming, that is, he actually said it.
 

​Kolchak: The Nightstalker is a much better than average TV show from the seventies about a reporter who works for a newswire service. The episodes typically follow a standard format: Karl Kolchak is driving around in his yellow Stanger when a report of a murder or robbery comes over his bootleg police band radio. He then cuts the wheel, heads to the scene of the crime, and shows up, either brandishing his recording device or snapping photos.
A surly detective or harness cop at the crime scene tells Kolchak to take a hike. But Karl’s doggedness allows him to either snatch up some clues or secure the interview that gives him an angle on the crime, usually one overlooked by the cops. As the investigation deepens, Karl begins to suspect that more than foul play is at work. Something supernatural is afoot. His boss at INS (which stands for International News Service here, not Immigration and Naturalization Services) asks him how that article’s coming along. Karl rushes headlong into a description of how he thinks a mummy or vampire or killer robot or Aztec god has been unleashed on Greater Chicago. Karl’s boss, Tony Vincenzo, at this point will grab his stomach or chest, looking as if his ulcers are leaking acid. Of course, he doesn’t go along with Karl’s theory, and asks Kolchak if he maybe needs to take a vacation or spend a couple months in the bughouse. After doing his Italian version of the old Fred Sanford chest clutch, Tony tells Karl to scrap the mummy/killer robot angle and get down to some real legwork.
But Karl remains persistent, and at this point in the episode he goes to an expert in whatever esoteric lore relates to the murderer. He usually interviews a prim man with a tight suit and aquiline nose, who scoffs at the idea that the monsters of antiquity are real. But said-person still supplies Kolchak (for a nominal fee) with some info about what tradition tells us about the chink in said-monster’s armor.
Kolchak starts cogitating, usually in his office, seated at his desk across from a couple of other INS staff. One’s a blue rinse biddy who plans the paper’s crossword, and usually provides comic relief as well as a bit of info. The other’s a waspy, priggish foil with a sandy-brown mustache, and a simpering manner that, in previous times, served as shorthand for possible homosexuality. After reading and maybe gathering a totem or two, Kolchak goes to face the monster in its lair. This involves pulling aside some rotted boards over the window of a condemned house or lifting a manhole cover and literally descending into the underworld (or at least the Windy City’s sewer system).
He has a confrontation with said-beast, and sometimes even snags a photo or two of the monster before vanquishing it. After dispatching the monster, he clutches his camera proudly, believing the evidence will prove he’s not in fact certifiable, but was right all along. Alas, either the pictures come out blurry, or the monster, in its confrontation with Kolchak, slaps the camera away and destroys the film. If that doesn’t happen, the detectives or harness cops who previously hindered Kolchak show up at the last minute and wreck or confiscate his evidence.
The episode usually ends with Kolchak seated at his desk at the INS office. He breaks the fourth wall and stares out at the audience as he records some final notes and musings on the now-closed case. In essence, he says, “You can believe it or not, but it happened.”
That’s it.
It might seem like I’m being a little dismissive of Kolchak, treating it as a paint-by-numbers affair. But the truth is that it’s an enjoyable and intelligent show, with some fine performances and some genuinely frightening moments. That has more to do with the details, though, than the broader picture and the premise which really can’t work for long (more on that later).
Everything good about the show starts with character actor Darren McGavin. He was immortalized in the classic film A Christmas Story, in which he plays a quintessential fifties dad who’s gruff but genuinely loves his wife and kids. Contra Christmas Story, in Kolchak McGavin is not a gruff paterfamilias, but rather a squirrely, single, somewhat undersized reporter whose main asset is his determination. His greatest liability is his mouth. He can come close to charming or buffaloing someone, but just when he’s on the verge of getting over, he makes a cutting remark or ill-timed joke. He’s loveable, irascible, and immediately recognizable in his seersucker suit, straw porkpie hat, and white sneakers (wearing tennis shoes during workhours was considered eccentric in the Seventies).
All of the supporting cast members are also more than up to the task. Old TV acting warhorse Simon Oakland is especially sympathetic as the burly, longsuffering news chief. He happily trades barbs with Kolchak, muting his affection for the reporter beneath a gruff exterior, but it’s plain he ultimately respects and trusts Karl.
As is the case with a lot of old great shows (like Miami Vice) soon-to-be-famous actors pop up in supporting roles, usually as villains. Eric Estrada, of Chips fame, plays a playboy in possession of a magical Aztec flute. It’s one of the more preposterous episodes, but he brings sufficient menace to the role to overcome the script’s defects. Tom Skerritt stands out as a Satan-worshipping senator who has traded his soul for political power. Unlike most actors guesting on the show, Skerritt undergirds his performance with a subdued gravitas that works better than the hammier displays that usually get turned in. He plays the evil Senator as a man who regrets his terrible decision, yet knows he cannot unseal the bargain he signed in blood with Old Scratch. And when he offers a similar bargain to Kolchak—maybe a Pulitzer instead of a corner desk beneath a clattering El train?— we see Kolchak’s face go through the whole range of emotions. The scene shows not only McGavin’s range, but how unplumbed the depths of this character remained. One has to wonder, that if Kolchak’s conscience and his past—his life, for God’s sake!—had been better mined by the writers, if the show might not have lasted longer.
David Chase, who would later go on to great acclaim writing The Sopranos, supplied a bunch of story ideas and teleplays for Kolchak. Robert Zemeckis, of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump fame, also did some work on an episode about a headless motorcyclist from a defunct biker gang.
The City of Chicago in the mid-seventies is also character in its own right. 
Some of Kolchak was shot on-location, other bits on Universal backlots. But the sweeping shots of Chicago’s Gold Coast and Magic Mile usually feature in the episodes, if only during credits sequences. Lake Michigan slapping against the coast’s white sands is majestic, looking strangely exotic for a Midwestern locale. From certain angles, and in a certain light, it could be confused with South Beach (if you cropped out the hideous Hancock Building and a couple other skyscrapers).
Kolchak was popular with audiences and critics, but actor Darren McGavin grew restless near the first season’s end, and asked to be released from his contract. Why?
Well, Kolchak had some problems, despite being a very good show, made even better by the nostalgia factor of these intervening decades (time sprinkles its fairy dust liberally upon our misremembered past).
Horror maestro Stephen King pointed out what he considered the show’s fatal flaw in his magisterial book-length treatise on horror, Danse Macabre. His gripe is that the show’s serial format strains the audience’s suspension of disbelief. It’s unfair to ask them to believe that Karl could encounter a new monster every week.
One encounter in a lifetime with a werewolf, a vampire, a killer robot, or a witch might be believable. How, though, in a mundane world, can we believe that a seasoned reporter for a small news service could keep encountering supernatural beings?
King’s beef was ultimately McGavin’s beef. The actor quit the show at the height of its success, initially citing restlessness and exhaustion with his workload on uncredited production duties. But when he put in his two weeks’ notice, he was more specific: he thought the show was devolving into a “monster of the week” thing.
The problem for me, though, isn’t so much the straining of audience credulity. It’s that none of these supernatural events seem to have a lasting effect on Kolchak or any of the people around him.
Karl, at the beginning of the series, is your typical grizzled beat reporter. We know little about his personal life (and learn little throughout the course of the series). But it’s safe to say that he does not believe in ghosts and goblins. He doesn’t even seem like the kind of guy inclined to admit their possible existence after having a brush with one. He’d be more likely to assume a Scooby-Doo-esque plot afoot, some guy with a grudge or an agenda wearing a rubber mask and trying to scare people. 
But in the first episode, Karl has a confrontation with what is undeniably a monster, and he is subsequently forced to believe. 
And in the next episode, he has another confrontation with another ghoul. 
To give the makers of the Kolchakverse the benefit of the doubt, let’s say there are certain stories Kolchak reports on that don’t have a supernatural element. Between monster cases, Karl writes up pieces about tax-dodging businessmen, lovers whose simmering quarrels boiled over into murder-suicides, jewel heists, etc., only these stories don’t appear on The Nightstalker. 
Fine, but even granting this, Karl is still encountering supernatural beings every other week instead of every week. At what point does Karl—busy and practical as he is—stop and ask himself what all this supernaturality means? When does he stop, however briefly, to ask how the impossible has not only become possible but routine?
He might start to question his sanity, or perhaps some alteration in the laws that govern the universe. He might consider that there had been some kind of leak in the membrane heretofore separating fantasyland from reality.
It’s not just Karl, though, who should eventually start asking these questions and being changed by these events. 
His boss, Tony Vincenzo, despite all his grimacing and ulcerated grumbles, sometimes makes minor concessions to Kolchak’s pet theories, crazy as they might seem. He wavers enough, in fact, that even he should eventually start to either question his perception or alter it to fit this new reality.
Kolchak, ultimately, would have had to become a magical realist show to survive. The mounting case files on vampires and werewolves would eventually have had some spillover into Greater Chicago, and then to the rest of the world. Even with the cops gainsaying Karl’s word and smashing his cameras on a biweekly basis, someone would eventually see what Kolchak saw. And be unable to dismiss it.
What then?
Well, then the seam torn in our reality by monsters would get ripped into a gaping hole. And we would be faced with a Chicago that would require some hard worldbuilding. David Chase would have to take a turn toward the Tolkienian.
For starters: 
Everyone would come to not only accept werewolves or vampires, but view them with the same exasperated disdain and contempt they had for muggers or rapists.
The episode would start with Kolchak in his yellow Mustang, as per usual. Only now, the police band would feature banter like: “We got two vamps trying to rob a blood bank on the South Side. Tell SWAT we need ‘em here pronto. And bring plenty of stakes and garlic.”
Karl would cover the case, then head back to INS to file his report. He’d sit down at his desk, and, with the El clattering on the tracks outside his window, crack his knuckles before attacking the Underwood. All of a sudden, Tony would burst through the pebbled glass door and start barking: “Karl, did you read that report yet about the hair samples on that open mauling case? And are you aware that they are lycanthropic in nature? Then why did you let the Tribune scoop us on that one!”
Would it work? It might.
On the other hand...
Some people would argue that this change to magical realism isn’t necessary. They’d also argue vehemently that Kolchak never should have been cancelled. They might even have the temerity to suggest that McGavin should have gotten over himself and sucked it up in service to the fans. Kolchak, they would say, worked just fine in its originally-premised form, notwithstanding what King wrote and what McGavin said.
Years ago I read this book about creating characters, which explained the difference between flat characters and round characters. In brief: flat characters exist mainly to propel the action. They react, especially to dangers, but they don’t reflect. They can’t. The nature of the format won’t allow it.
Indy in the Indiana Jones films is a flat character. He literally has an encounter with the Ark of the Covenant in the first film. Granted, he averts his eyes, but he can still feel the ghosts susurrating around him, and hear their forlorn and bedamned howls. And he sees the effects of the carnage after the Nazi esoterics get their faces melted off.
But rather than finding his hair turned white and seeking solace in a hermitage, Indy goes on being a badass and brandishing his whip. In a sequel he finds the Holy Grail, having another transcendent experience which somehow fails to allow him to transcend anything.
There’s an argument to be made in favor of the flat character, especially in adventure stories. And there’s also an argument to be made that some real people are, in essence, flat characters.
This isn’t an insult. Someone, in answering criticism lobbed at Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, pointed out there was a perfectly good reason the astronauts didn’t seem like deep people. Candidate selection for such jobs filters out those who don’t have a hardnosed, unflappable disposition. A poet sent into space on a tough mission might be tempted to stare out the ship’s window and wax about the Earth’s beauty, rather than focusing on the task at hand. A reflective Indy wouldn’t be able to run fast enough to escape the boulder hurtling toward him.
A Kolchak who pored over books for any reason except to find the monster’s weakness would, once he started reading, never cease. He’d end up cloistered away in some wainscoted library, a bibliophile or maybe even bibliomaniac, stroking the covers of vellum tomes like a lover’s cheek.
I know nothing about acting, but think that most actors find flat characters unsatisfying to play for any length of time. Once every few years in a feature film sounds doable. Every week for years on-end might become a slog through the mire that no amount of money could make easier to navigate. 
Kolchak becoming “round” might have been interesting, and it might have solved the problem posed by the show’s internal contradictions. It definitely would have allowed McGavin to take his character in a fresh direction. The idea might have even been enough to tempt him into returning for a second season. 
But ratings would have tanked. And people’s fond memories of the show would have been soured by what they perceived as pretentious attempts to elevated Karl to more than a monster hunter.
Maybe it was best left with its internal contradictions unresolved. As the sages of the ages say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

​Last year I read a little less than two-hundred books. That’s a lot, I think, even for me. And because the year’s over, now’s as good a time as any to list the ten best books I read in 2021, in order from the good to the great.
Both nonfiction and fiction are eligible. The only limiting criteria is that the works be in the English language. That caveat is hardly necessary, as I didn’t read enough German-language books last year for it to make much of a difference one way or the other. And my Spanish is nowhere good enough yet for me to have read anything besides primers, and Juan va al Supermercado is not cracking my top-ten.
And now, without further Apu:
10. The Glamour Factory: Inside’s Hollywood’s Big Studio System by Ronald L. David. “Exhaustive” and “entertaining” aren’t two adjectives I’m usually inclined to pair with each other, and yet this time the pairing’s warranted. This guy does such a good, thorough job of showing how the various Hollywood backlots in the Golden Age were their own ecosystems. These worlds-within-worlds had their own strange rhythms, warrened with screenwriter sweatshops and prop departments. Yes, there were cynical calculations constantly being made by the money men with the green eyeshades and the schmattas-turned-producers, but the magic was real, too. It wasn’t uncommon to see elephants convoying beneath a plaster Tower of Babel, or to see cowboys and Egyptian pharaohs in the cantina eating ham sandwiches together. There’s some dishing and scandal, but the proceedings aren’t as sleazy or schadenfreude-laden as those of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. Still, did you know Humphrey Bogart was bald, and only a very skilled wig craftsman with a very expensive hairpiece kept us all none-the-wiser?
9. The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Dr. Katie Mack. How the hell do you write a book about the end of our universe, the obliteration of everything we’ve ever known, and not have it be a bummer? Dr. Mack has done it here. She explains cool-but-terrifying concepts like the Big Crunch, an unpleasant corollary to the Big Bang that got us all here (according to the background radiation signature, anyway). It’s not all grim and apocalyptic though, as Dr. Mack posits an astrophysicist’s version of the Katechon using calculations I can’t begin to understand. In a nutshell, she says that a “leak” in gravity means that there could be many adjacent universes for us to escape to when things go to shit here. It’s a fascinating, engaging book that’s as wondrous as it is terrifying. And most important for the knuckleheaded layman, it’s accessible without being patronizing, which can sometimes be a problem when the oversimplifications become too simple or burdened with dad jokes.
8. Weird Tales: The Unique Magazine, Spring 1988 George Wolfe, Gene Barr, Others. Did I say I couldn’t include anthologies? Regardless, this one deserves to be on the list. The quality of these stories is uniformly strong, and their content and style’s diverse enough so that it doesn’t feel like slogging through another book of Lovecraft pastiches. A standout tale is what for me is the definitive F. Paul Wilson story. The piece deals with an ancient, chairbound lady who uses a young maid’s body as a vessel so she can have sex with a confused, then mortified handyman; imagine Avatar with a pervy geriatric broad with a headful of blue rinse Youth Dew and you’re in the ballpark. The black and white illustrations are sumptuous, lurid, and the thing is a true pulptastic objet d’art in its own right. I wish I were better at hanging onto things, as this would have been a cool addition to my nonexistent collection. Alas, perhaps it’s better to lend and lose than to horde and let said-collection molder and gather dust, untouched.
7. Nine Inches by Tom Perrotta. I’m a pretty omnivorous reader, though I tend to enjoy straightforward genre forays more than the intentionally literary. I’ll read John Cheever or Raymond Carver and can even admire it. But I’d rather forget the style and focus on getting lost in the content, preferably supernatural or otherwise-speculative. That said, I’ve always had a soft spot for Tom Perrotta, and his gimlet-eyed view of seemingly normal people in the suburbs. He can be both scathing and compassionate, sometimes within the space of a single sentence. His stories about youths struggling with their sexuality in high school evoke that strange, pained romantic ache that still occasionally stirs when I think about my own past. The world of normal people, struggling with mortgages and driving their SUVs, is as alien to me as it is familiar to him. I see these people at the grocery store exchanging pleasantries, or queuing up dutifully at Starbucks, but I don’t know what that world looks like from the inside. Perrotta lets us not just peek but gaze into this seemingly well-ordered universe, where people are experiencing just as many crises as the most desperate, albeit more quietly. “Hanging on in quiet desperation,” is the English way, and Americans prefer the meteoric ascent of Horatio Alger (or even Tony Montana) rather than dealing with the nuances of class. As Paul Fussell noted, we’re even required to pretend class doesn’t exist in most contexts, unless you want to look like a real sorehead. That makes Perrotta, with his keen eye for social hierarchies and no shyness about peeling back the layers, a massive outlier in modern American letters. No, he’s not the only one writing about class but he’s the only modern scribe I’ve found who writes about it without making the experience excruciating. And when you consider that what should be tedious closet dramas are painfully funny tableaux in his hands, that makes him a genre of one. Which is the highest compliment you can pay a writer.
Perrotta also describes action much better than most literary writers. See Exhibit A: a story about an Asian overachieving softballer with a “Tiger Dad,” who hops out of the grandstands when his daughter gets beaned with a fastball. Like Mike Judge, Perrotta comes off more like an ex-athlete than an artiste and something about his roughness is refreshing where we expect the stultifying.
6.  Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem by Carol Delaney. Here’s another reminder that those chapters of history about which we think we know the most are still occluded with mysteries, unexplored truths, and as-yet unchallenged lies. For some, Columbus is the embodiment of the adventuresome spirit that has animated Western exploration for centuries. For others, he’s a genocidal sociopath whose complete disregard for the Natives already inhabiting the Americas makes him a wrecker of all that was beautiful in this precolonial continent. In progressive theology, he functions a bit like Lucifer in the Bible, the original angel cast down for his great hubris who has damned all associated with him. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle. The book is filled with fascinating details, like how Columbus barely avoided being killed in mutiny, or how his dead reckoning navigational skills rival our most sophisticated instruments today. Most crucial of all, the fulcrum upon which this revisionist thesis turns, is that his brother was actually the one who started the brutal killings of the indigenous people. Columbus, sadly, was unaware of this, rotting in prison for failing in the task for which he would later be lauded, and then again condemned, finally subjected to iconoclasm. Madame Delaney circumnavigates the centuries with a brave and intrepid sort of aplomb, without malice or agenda, a kind-hearted conquistador, if such a contradictory thing can exist.  
5. Writing your Way to Recovery: How Stories Can Save our Lives by James M. Brown. “Art isn’t a support system for life,” Stephen King once observed. “It’s the other way around.”  No one struggles fundamentally with survival, the question of “To live or die,” quite like the addict. And yet, if this book had only been a tool, a workbook to be completed as part of a therapy regimen, it wouldn’t be on this list. It’s here because the balance between aesthetic considerations and spiritual advice is so perfect. Ultimately its greatness lies in the book’s focus on developing and honing craft as much as on breaking free of the hold of drugs. Brown has the clearest voice and most enviably clean style of any writer currently working. It always pisses me off, because I’m one of those magician’s understudies always trying to find out how the trick is done. But, like Hemingway or Sherwood Anderson, his seemingly simple style can’t really be broken down into its constituent parts by examining it word for word. Take it from me; I’ve tried. It almost drives a man to do drugs.
4. A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. I somehow managed to get through not just my undergrad years, but through a master’s program. And yet I spent most of my college days seated in a classroom feeling my time being wasted in excruciating, brain-numbing, and pointless ways. Occasionally I found a brilliant professor who was passionate about their subject. And then, for that short time, the classroom became everything we associate with college in our hazy, ivy-clad, tweed and patched corduroy fantasies of what it should be. A Swim in the Pond in the Rain isn’t so much a book as a master course with a brilliant, shatterpated professor whose enthusiasm for Russian literature is contagious. He makes you care about his obsessions, and does it so ably that by the end of the book, you find yourself sharing his love. This is even more remarkable when one considers that none of my favorite Russian writers (Ivan Bunin, Dostoyevsky, etc.) have pieces in this collection. A lot of lesser-known and seemingly uneventful slice-of-life stories by Turgenev or Tolstoy appear here, tales I would have found interminable slogs without this genius exegesis. Hell, about the only story I dug on its own terms, without Saunders’ scholarly gloss, was Gogol’s old surreal yarn about the sentient, walking, talking nose. Someone (I forgot who) once said that the only sin an artist could commit was to be boring. Perhaps the greatest act a teacher can perform is to take what we might otherwise regard as boring and make it not just tolerable, but actually exciting. I’ve never had this much fun reading about peasants musing about birds while strolling through the woods, or seeing kulaks suffering silently at small train stations in remote villages.
And aside from the stories, Saunders’ observations about aesthetics and musings on his own life are also worth their weight in gold, or at least worth quoting and remembering.  
3. Writer of the Purple Rage by Joe R. Lansdale. There’s a big difference between humorous writing and funny writing. “Humorous” involves an intellectual reaction, the mind responding to something and categorizing it. Funny is what we call something when it elicits laughter, an involuntary reaction that’s hard to get even from a movie or standup comedian. And in the theater or at the club, the performers have the advantage of plentiful audio and visual cues. It’s much, much harder to write something that’s funny enough to make you laugh. This collection—with its stories about rednecks lighting themselves on fire, battling alligators, and accidentally chopping up groundhogs—is simultaneously funny and horrifying. I may have read one or two better books this year, but nothing else gave me this kind of pleasure. How many books can you classify as painkillers, works that really make life with all of its myriad boredoms, disappointments, and agonies somehow more bearable? Also, like his forebear in short mass market tales of terror, Richard Matheson, Lansdale is ten parts talent to zero parts pretension. He’s so entertaining (and occasionally gross) that you forget he’s brilliant, and has a serious soul to go with the wicked sense of humor.
2. About the Author by John Colapinto. There’s an interview with Mr. Colapinto in the back of my copy of this book in which he says, somewhat shamefacedly, this book took him fourteen years to write. I don’t know why he’s embarrassed. If it had taken him forty years to write something this good, this scandalous and suspenseful, it would have been a life well-spent. This is an uncomfortably honest book about jealousy, insecurity, and the horrible things humans are willing to do in order to be respected, and even loved. Every horrible act committed by this book’s protagonist makes us love him more, and root him on that much more vehemently. What kind of genius does it take to make us cheer on a plagiarist who steals his dead roommate’s manuscript and claims it as his own work? He doesn’t even alienate our sympathies when he goes on to woo said-dead roomie’s girlfriend.
About the Author is sick, beautiful, and ingenious. That rare, perfect book, without a wasted word. You can race through it in twenty-four hours but would do well to slowly savor it. Regardless, you’ll probably want to read it again at some point. I know I already do.
1. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. My buddy had been nagging me for a long time to read this, but I’d held off for a while. It’s over a thousand pages, and, like much of the American public, my interest in Westerns waxes and wanes in cycles I don’t quite understand. I was deep in the “wax” phase when I finally capitulated to my buddy’s demand. I started reading, expecting a sappy, romantic book about the closing down of the frontier, something like the literary equivalent of a Hallmark movie on the sunkissed range. Instead I got probably the most epic and compelling tale of human endurance I’ve read since James Jones’ The Thin Red Line. McMurtry’s ability to put the reader in the heads and souls of all of these men and women is remarkable. He goes from poignant, minutiae-laden tiny moments in bedrooms or saloons—showing us a prostitute’s thoughts or a pianist’s desires— out onto the wild expanse of the plains. It really gives the reader the sense that this is what people mean when they talk about a “God’s Eye View” of things: these sweeping, breathtaking vistas, cattle drives, and battles on the one hand, and the rare tender moments where people lay their souls bare, if only silently to the stars.  Every twenty or thirty pages or so, following these characters about who I came to care and in whom I came to believe, I would just shake my head. Then I would curse myself for a fool for putting off reading the book so long. My buddy was right. This thing is a fucking miracle, and it restored my waning faith in what literature can do when the writer really gives a damn and tries to their utmost. An epic that earns the oft-used but nigh-never warranted mantle.
Lonesome Dove is not just in my top ten for the year. It’s in my Top Ten for All Time.
And that’s all she wrote. See you jamokes in 2023, if we’re both still here, and the world’s still here with us.  

Rory Miller is an interesting character, a self-defense expert who has written some thoughtful books on violence: how to avoid it, deescalate it, or—if it is unavoidable—how to emerge as uninjured and safe from litigation as humanly possible.
He’s no “stolen valor” case, standing in his author photos in his blackbelt and karate gi in front of some strip mall dojo trying to impress you with his pose of badassery. He’s got decades in corrections, in everything from intake to extractions (donning protective gear and shields and storming cells). Somewhere in there he found the time to serve in the National Guard as a medic, in combat, in addition to training Iraqi corrections forces. I hope I don’t offend him when I say this, but in active duty we called the Guard “weekend warriors,” because there were such large gaps in their training cycles and service times.
But that’s what made their jobs so much more dangerous when they were in-theater. Regular Army soldiers drill, drill, drill. Guardsmen work, live, get called up, drill a little bit, and then get thrown into the thick of the shit.
But that’s another topic for a different day.
Returning to Mr. Miller, notice I didn’t call him a “violence expert.” Neither (I think) would he ever apply that term to himself. Why not? Well, because, due to the nature of violence, a “violence expert” would be a contradiction in terms. One cannot be an expert in something so chaotic, so full of passion and confusion. Something so mutable.
Weird shit happens in combat, both the staged variety (contact sports) and in the real thing. I saw a boxing match once in which a boxer was hit in the jaw, lost his mouthpiece, hot potatoed the piece from gloved hand to gloved hand, and actually caught it. One of the two commentators, Andre Ward, said he’d never seen anything like it. And Ward had been involved in boxing since childhood and retired undefeated, having not lost since he was twelve years old in the junior Olympics. In that time he had seen pretty much everything a boxer might see, every style and slick feint, every toe-stepping, elbowing, eye-gouging dirty trick in the book.
But pretty much everything is not everything.
It’s hard, perhaps impossible to think in the midst of violence, aside from in the most limbic and primal sense of muscle memory. As superlative boxer “Sugar” Ray Robinson once said, “You think and you’re dead.”
It’s not just that violence is so immune to analysis and understanding, though, nor that it clouds the faculties of even the most analytic or philosophical.
It’s ultimately that the learning curve is too steep for one to gain knowledge without sacrificing too much (like limb and eventually life) in exchange for the experience which might lead to technical mastery.
You don’t need me (or Malcolm Gladwell) to tell you that if you want to get better at something, you need to do it as often as possible. You want to learn to play the guitar, you start plucking the strings. For awhile you wince on the disparity between the sounds you produce and what you hear in Stevie Ray Vaugh solos. Meanwhile, your neighbor in 3B makes it even harder to learn, pounding your floor-his-ceiling with a broom handle. He adds even more dissonance to the general cacophony by making various threats against your dog as well as several unprovable insinuations about your mother. You are suddenly faced with a choice: either continue through your wincing and the neighbor’s brooming until those harsh sounds become songs, or take that once-cherry axe down to the pawnshop and try your callused hands at something else.
How do you train with violence, or practice it in a safe way? Sure, you can spar with a friend, practice on a dummy, or read a manual. But just as the map is not the territory, sparring a friend with headgear is not the same thing as streetfighting a guy on PCP trying to disfigure you with the jagged glass shards of what was once a beer bottle.
If every time you plucked a guitar string, you risked losing a finger (even if the risk was infinitesimal), you might be tempted to give up the guitar and try tickling the ivory; there, at least, you’d only have to worry about the heavy wooden fallboard clapping shut on your fingers.
Combat sports are not combat, but even there the gulf between theory (sparring) and praxis (fighting under hot lights in front of a screaming crowd) is wide indeed. Boxing even has its own version of the map-contra-territory maxim. “Everyone has a plan,” Mike Tyson once observed, “until they get punched in the nose.”
People who’ve dealt with violence often understand as much. As do astute artists who write about violence or depict it in films. Good movies and literature are rife with examples of this. Think of Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Man. He’s an implacable black-eyed killer, whose odd denim suit and weird pageboy haircut only add to the unsettling surreality of the man. And that’s before you factor in his choice of weapon, the captive bolt stunner that hisses like some impossible-to-taxonomize snake. He uses it to blow holes in doors, human heads, and anything else that either gets in his way or earns his ire.
He does quite a bit of killing in No Country, and proves resourceful enough to do everything from escaping police custody to tracking a man across the open range. Yet it all comes crashing down for him in the end—when he gets t-boned by a car at a four-way intersection. And it’s not even a very sexy car that wrecks his universe and turns him into a bloody, staggering mess. It’s just some old wood-paneled station wagon.
The caprice of fate, its randomness, has caught Chigurh with a car just as it previously caught his potential victims with that coin he liked to flip.
Another great example of this is in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I resisted reading the book for years. Mostly because every time I caught scenes of the movie on TV, it looked like the standard romanticized view of the West you see in Hallmark productions, about love blossoming between ranch hands and widows walking hand in hand against a backdrop of chestnut criollo running off into painterly sunsets.
But the book is a hell of a lot different from the movie.
There’s a scene, near the end of the book, when the cattle herders have almost completed their arduous trek from Texas to Montana. Montana’s God’s country, with all the wonder and fury that implies.
It’s rough, but the men, well-seasoned in previous range wars and cattle raids, are up to the challenge. One of the saltiest and smartest of the lot is Deets.
Deets is a black cowboy with a savvy for navigating land and reading weather patterns and other omens. He’s so good that even the most bigoted, racist cowpoke has to tip his hat to the man and acknowledge not just his handiness, but his supremacy in a few areas. And yet Deets is finally killed by a young Indian boy, not even a brave, just a runty tintype who’s trembling with fear when he does the deed.
The West was pretty much won at this point (from the White perspective). Indians were mostly drowning their sorrows over their shameful conquest on the res, sacrificing dignity by appearing in various medicine shows, or collaborating with whites as trackers and guides. And yet this boy spears the seasoned old cowboy, a veteran of various range wars and cattle disputes, as much due to confusion and fear as anything else.
Sure, Deets had let his guard down by indulging in an ill-advised show of compassion, rescuing a swaddled baby, abandoned in his papoose by a squaw who took off at the first sight of the palefaces and their buffalo-maned black guide.
In the scene (perhaps the most moving in a truly affecting epic tale), Deets is holding the baby out to the young, quaking wannabe brave, who rewards the black man’s noble gesture by skewering him clean-through with his flint-tipped spear.
There’s a poignancy to the miscommunication, but also the sowing of the seed of a smoldering rage that explains how people can go from having good intentions to engaging in war crimes. Human nature’s always mutable, even when it seems fixed. And nothing can make it come unstuck faster than violence.
What the hell kind of “expert” (in violence or anything else) could have predicted such a random, ignominious death for the skilled and battle-tested specimen that was Deets?
You can mitigate the risks, but ultimately violence is a well you don’t want to go to unless you absolutely have to.
I’ll shut up now and just let Old Bull Lee have the last word: No one controls life, but anyone with a frying pan controls death. 
​

 
    FIDDLING PAST THE GRAVEYARD: A GREAT HORROR MOVIE THAT                                  WILL PROBABLY NEVER GET MADE



​The fourth “Dead” movie in George A Romero’s “Dead” series (is it a sextology at this point?), Land of the Dead, is probably the last one worth seeing. It’s not as good as the groundbreaking Night and can’t hold a candle to the scathing, blood-soaked satiric masterpiece that is Dawn. It occupies a place similar to that of the third film in the series, Day of the Dead, which, while nowhere near as revered as the first two Dead movies, is at least a respectable entry in the canon. Day even has some defenders who claim it’s the best in the series. This group, while small, is a vocal and probably growing contingent in the world of Dead fandom.
Land of the Dead’s action centers around Pittsburgh’s “Golden Triangle,” the downtown area which still shows enough of its granite-parapeted legacy from the Carnegie-Melon endowment days to give the skyline a slightly medieval cast. The Golden Triangle is surrounded by barbed wire and all manner of fortifications, defended by well-armed guards who dispatch any zombies that wander too close to the settlement’s perimeter. Occasionally some of the more adventurous (or bloodthirsty) humans conduct convoy operations outside the wire, using an uparmored behemoth called Dead Reckoning to offset the numerical disadvantage they suffer in the face of the shuffling zombie hordes.
The parallels with America’s quagmire in Iraq are hard, perhaps impossible to ignore, even after giving that most meager summary of the movie’s plot.
By far the most interesting part of the movie is the high-rise at the center of the Golden Triangle. Known as Fiddler’s Green, it’s a sort of fortified retirement community where the upper echelons of post-zombie apocalypse Pittsburgh congregate. The nature of life there is only obliquely hinted at in a series of advertisements touting the colony’s numerous amenities available to anyone lucky enough to be selected to live there.
Fans of George Romero’s zombie films have noted that their most interesting aspect is how they focus on the humans turning against each other even as the zombies try to claw their way within reach of their warm-blooded quarry. Something about the abiding enmity between groups of humans (even in the face of supernatural horror) strikes a nerve with audiences, even if they can’t quite say why. It also probably puts the lie to President Reagan’s old hackneyed saw that, were alien invaders to descend to Earth, we would all be united under the banner of homo sap to fight for our common good. It’s much more likely that if aliens were to land, mercenary humans would hide in alleys and film the bulb-headed greys dematerializing several people with their death rays. Then they’d upload the footage online. Either that or they’d wait for the flying saucers to disappear over the horizon before running out into the open to loot anything not reduced by plasma canons to scorching cinders. EMP blasts would take care of any pesky security and automatic lock systems guarding the various big box stores and malls spread like a blight upon the landscape. Pretty soon shopping carts filled with appliances and videogame systems would be seen rolling over streets covered thickly with charred corpses.
Why didn’t Romero focus more of Land of the Dead’s action in Fiddler’s Green? Sure, the broad satire of American misadventure abroad is more than enough to sustain the interest of the cerebral gore fan. But it seems that the story, the tension, would lie as much between the residents of Fiddler’s Green and the humans below, rather than between the raiders and the zombie hordes.
To give Romero credit, some of this tension is explored in the film, via the relationship between Cholo DeMora, played with manic viciousness by John Leguizamo, and Paul Kaufman, played by a relatively sedate, even bureaucratic Dennis Hopper. Cholo is one of the more able raiders who goes outside the wire in the uparmored vehicle. Kaufmann is the plutocratic ruler of Pittsburgh who, despite perceiving Cholo’s usefulness, still balks at admitting him into the stratosphere where the postapocalyptic Brahmin frolic and wile away their days.
But we never really get more than a peek behind the curtain at Fiddler’s Green, which is all the more the pity. And this is because (it occurs to me now) the real point of conflict in Romero’s films, especially in Dawn of the Dead  (the best in my opinion) is between the humans and their own consciences; their doubles as it were.
For a Fiddler’s Green movie to truly work, we wouldn’t even need to see conflict between the residents in the tower and the renegading humans below; at least until the film’s denouement (a la the showdown in Dawn between the roving biker gang and the four humans holed up in the Monroeville Mall).
Recall that in Dawn, after the zombies are locked out of the mall, the people inside set about gorging themselves. They gorge themselves both literally on food, and in acts of sensory overload (with videogames, ice hockey, and all manner of diversions), enjoying the good life to the extent they can.
And yet the horror waiting just on the other side of the mall doors, as well as the reality that most of humanity is dead, plagues them. It’s the wretched excess, the pleasure palace turning into a prison, which is the most fascinating part of the film, and which honestly pushes it from the realm of horror into the genuinely speculative.
Someone (I forget who) pointed out that the Dead films function for horror fans the way Dune does for SF fans, or The Lord of the Rings does for fantasy fans. Romero didn’t just create a story, but a universe. There’s a sense that the characters in Dawn inhabit a sort of open-ended landscape, a “sandbox” as the gamers call it, in which three-sixty exploration could take place. You could make a tabletop game from the Dawn film, or for that matter a pen and paper RPG (maybe someone already has).
It’d be unfair to ask Romero to capture lightning in a bottle again with his fourth film in the series; or to ask a man already in his late sixties (?), well out of his creative prime, to rise to such a challenge. Romero was playing with other peoples’ money after all, more than he’d ever had at his disposal before. To make an essentially experimental horror movie, in which almost all of the horror is implied, would be a gamble on a par with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Incidentally when the initial returns came in for 2001, it looked as if it would in fact destroy Kubrick’s career.
But it would also be churlish to begrudge us fans the chance to imagine a movie that took place entirely in Fiddler’s Green. How might the action (and drama) progress in this kind of mockery of Elysium or Cockaigne where all pleasures eventually became poisonous, except maybe for the most hedonistic and soulless of residents?
I’d hazard it would be a bit like a postmodern version of Roger Corman’s adaptation of Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. The wealthy and more fortunate would try to console themselves in their hall of mirrors (or their skyscraper of mirrored glass). They would suppress any pangs of conscience, or fears about mutiny from below with daylong orgies and mountains of whatever drugs might be available. Overdoses would be common, as would suicides (there’s actually a suicide inside Fiddler’s Green in Land of the Dead). Perhaps, as in our world, some of the disaffected offspring of the privileged would try to find common cause with the rabble outside the walls. The only question would be if they would sympathize with the raiders or with the zombies themselves.
My guess is that the sympathy of the disaffected children of privilege would leapfrog the raiders and Golden Triangle guards, and lie with the starving hordes of the undead. The raiders, after all, are martial, militant, reminiscent of police or paramilitary forces used by rightwing dictators to defend the status quo. The zombies are true outsiders, “othered” by a system that literally excludes them both geographically and even from the category of human. They aren’t just refugees exiled from the land of plenty, but creatures condemned to the outer darkness of living death. In the same way that extreme ecoterrorists are willing to use violence against fellow humans to make their point, there might be rich kids willing to allow themselves to be devoured by the zombies in Saturnalian acts of protest. To paraphrase antiracist activist professor Noel Ignatiev, treason to the warm-blooded is loyalty to the as-yet unrealized brotherhood of the living and the dead.
Of course, some of the rabble would have to be granted admittance to Fiddler’s Green, if only provisionally and as day laborers. But there would also have to be an intermediary class, a sort of praetorian guard, or at least a force of Pinkertons, perhaps even Stasi-esque agents. These agents would have a bit more polish than the raiders, would have the taste to abstain from smoking or putting their feet up on the conference table when jawboning with the Committee inside Fiddler’s Green. It would be their job to monitor sympathies, loyalties, and general morale among even the elite within the Green (hey, there’s your title: Within the Green). The parallels with our misadventures abroad could even be continued as we followed life in this figurative Green Zone. Maybe the odd zombie might somehow inexplicably shuffle its way into the complex (snuck in by one of the rebellious young scions who thought they might make a performance art-like statement by facilitating a literal “eating of the rich”).
The fact that all of this springs readily to mind shows that the potential does indeed exist for a movie or series to take place entirely within the Green. The roiling nightmare beyond its palatial façade would be suggested for the most part at first. But then the patina of normalcy within would slowly peel away to reveal the hideous truth that one doesn’t need to get bit by the undead to become a zombie...It would be a gory, guignol reiteration of Leo Tolstoy’s observation well over a century ago: “It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
 
I just checked Roger Ebert’s (R.I.P.) review of the movie and see that he was ahead of the curve (or at least this blogger). He recognized the untapped potential of a movie centering solely on the Versailles-like opulence which might not prove strong enough cynosure to distract the eye from the rivers of blood flowing just outside the window:
“It's probably not practical from a box office point of view, but I would love to see a movie set entirely inside a thriving Fiddler's Green. There would be zombies outside but we'd never see them or deal with them. We would simply regard the Good Life as it is lived by those who have walled the zombies out. Do they relax? Have they peace of mind? Do the miseries of others weigh upon them? The parallels with the real world are tantalizing.”
That prefatory bit about the [im]practical[ity] from a box office perspective explains why Romero would have balked at the idea of centering Land on the doings inside Fiddler’s Green, assuming it even occurred to him (and I think it did). It would require quite a bit of imagination and balls to pull it off. Balls and imagination Romero had to spare in the seventies, but which his fights with the studios had left depleted already in the eighties, to say nothing of the early aughts, when he finally made Land. And apparently I also lack the grey matter and testicular fortitude to try my hand at Within the Green, because I have yet to have a go at it, except in these idle musings.
 

​There’s a scene in Charles Bukowski’s great coming-of-age novel, Ham on Rye, in which the protagonist Henry Chinaski discovers the magic of books. I can’t quite remember if he discovers, a la Bradbury, how to stay drunk on the words before or after he discovers the joys of being literally drunk, but it happens sometime in mid-pubescence, while Hank is going through hell.
He breezes through Faulkner and Hemingway, finding himself a bit stumped by the former but counting himself an acolyte of the latter (at first at least; Bukowski always went back and forth with Hemingway). He encounters the works of John Dos Passos, and pronounces them not great, but good enough, which is about right. At one point he gets his hopes up after finding a book with the title Bow Down to Wood and Stone, but he soon realizes that the content cannot live up to the title.
Then he discovers D.H. Lawrence. It’s a story about a pianist who’s slowly losing his mind. How false it all seemed at first, Hank muses. But as he reads on, he realizes that the tale is a very worthy one indeed.
I think we’ve all had a similar experience. There’s a book or a writer whose work we may look at askance, as perhaps a bit precious or pretentious, or just boring, and yet we start the work, however reluctantly, only to discover that it is in fact damn good.
My moment came when I encountered the book Stoner, by John Williams. I never would have sought it out on my own, but for some reason my father sent it to me sometime during my last year in the Army.
At that time I was stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, running out the clock on my contract with Uncle Sam, whose lease on my weary soul was about to expire. I was also trying to become a writer, and if Stephen King’s old quip about cashing a check for a story makes one talented, I guess I was also talented. Or at least talented enough to pay for a cab ride or stuff a sizeable tip into a stripper’s G-string. During that last fateful year of my time in the Army, first year of my literary career (if you can call it that), I had developed a bit of a strip club habit that threatened to spiral out of control into a full-blown addiction. But that’s a story for another day, or frankly one that doesn’t even need telling.
Each Friday after final formation, I’d fall out, hail a cab, and go to a hotel, where I would proceed to write a short story. I’d polish up the short story on Saturday, maybe send it out Saturday night, and then head back to base and my barracks to get ready for the next week as a regular Joe in an air defense artillery battalion.
Of course during those weekends at the La Quinta hotel, I’d have to pause to eat (usually at the Village Inn) and sleep, and I’d also do some reading in my downtime. Mostly I read Philip Dick, Joe Haldeman, or maybe some Gary Philips if I was in the mood for something pulpy rather than a mind-bending bout of SF.
Out of respect to my father though, and with some trepidation, I started Stoner.
How false it all seemed, the most cliched and depressing grist for a literary writer too respectable to tell a story with plot, action, and all of those other base elements that go into making something actually entertaining. Yes, Stoner was that dread and musty artifact of that most rarified of the literary classes: a campus novel.
What’s the old Haldeman quote? “Bad books on writing tell you to ‘WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW’, a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”
William Stoner is a young man who goes to college at the University of Missouri in order to study agriculture. At some point during his undergrad years he discovers Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. Reading about bare tree branches trembling in the cold gives young Stoner a sort of epiphany, and he decides to get his MA in English instead of returning back to the family farm to make stuff grow.
At this point I thought I had an idea how the novel would unfold. Stoner’s changing of his major would be a source of tension between him and his salty old yeoman planter of a father. He’d meet a young coed who’d eventually become a henpecking wife whose scolding or cold indifference would send him running into the arms of another young coed when he himself was no longer so young, and so on and yada-yada.
Here’s the thing, though. Most of that didn’t happen. Instead the focus of the book tightened to become about Stoner’s quiet faith in the ostensibly humble life he had chosen for himself. There are interdepartmental intrigues with dishonest and conniving profs, and students whose ambition and mendacity are far more well-honed than their creative faculties or passion for poetry. There are major historical events that sweep through the larger world, but merely cast their shadows over the university, resulting in manpower shortages on the homefront that makes Stoner’s path through the professional ranks perhaps a bit easier than it otherwise might have been. But Stoner doesn’t politic well and so a sinecure or even a well-earned cushy seat remains well out of reach.
And, yes, there is tension between Stoner and his wife, especially as concerns the rearing of their daughter, but the novel remains centered on the vault of the man’s unbroken mind, where his faith in the words is never destroyed.
The book makes its case for the moral rectitude of Stoner’s position without a bunch of loud or obvious melodramatic scenes. Most of what Stoner thinks remains just that, thoughts unuttered but nurtured until his convictions become nigh-religious. His refusal to be swept up in the massive, epoch-changing events of his time (the Great War, the Great Depression, the Bombing of Pearl Harbour) causes the seemingly minor events of his life to assume a grandeur such minor victories deserve, but which we rarely if ever afford them.
“War,” as Thomas Mann once observed, “is the coward’s evasion of the problems of peace.” I might not have believed that before I joined the Army and went to Iraq, but I certainly believed it afterwards. War, as bad as it is, divides one’s life into easily separable “before” and “after” periods, unburdening it of the complexities that unbroken continuity brings to life as most people live it: the unrelieved pressures of work, home, work, the cultivating of relationships, the repairing of them when they’re damaged, the acceptance of their state as irreparable when we recognize that they can’t be mended. All of this is hard to deal with, complicated, messy. War is undoubtedly messy (debriding a wound takes forever) but it’s simple and straightforward and it is something that by its very intense nature confers a meaning on a life, even if that meaning is cliched, and frankly at root a lie.
Stoner, as Steven Almond pointed out in his fine study of the work, is about genuine bravery as it is quietly exercised, rather than as it is commonly construed and loudly proclaimed.
There’s something about the pacing and quality of Stoner that made it immensely readable. It was by no means a page-turner in the traditional sense, and yet the way the author controlled the unfolding of time, dilating a moment between Stoner and a student here, contracting a season or the duration of a World War there, made it feel as if the reader were being given a peek into the mechanism of time as it is actually viewed from the outside, by a deistic god or whatever great timekeeper exists beyond the Veil of Maya. Imagine an elder being (less eldritch than one of those in Lovecraft’s bestiary) letting us view a human through the lens of deep time and you’re in the neighborhood of the strange and frankly miraculous feeling the book evokes. As someone once said of the Stanley Kubrick film, Barry Lyndon, it captures the shape of a life, not with a plodding dogged Dickensian determination. It’s not in the tradition of epics that take us from someone’s childhood to old age, but rather uses the fine-honed eye of a miniaturist or a jeweler who knows exactly where to look and what to overlook. Not only is it an engrossing, quick read; it is actually a fairly short novel, which makes the wealth of its content all the more remarkable.
Reading Stoner I felt like the boy in Michael Ende’s The Never-Ending Story (or maybe it was just the movie version), who kept shaking his head as he read deeper into the tale of Atreyu and discovered that the young and intrepid hero was aware of the boy reading of his adventures. That’s impossible.
It should have been impossible: a book about a guy who starts agricultural school, who switches his major upon reading the Bard, and then proceeds to spend his life teaching, waging some kind of internal and silent battle against the forces of the world which seem to take scant notice of him and his humble doings.
I think I read the whole book that weekend at the hotel, never once understanding exactly what trick or strange twist of magic made it so readable when I had expected to chuck it down after a few pages, politely evading any questions my father might ask about its contents, should our twice-monthly phone conversations stray toward the book he’d gifted me.
I doubt I got any writing done that weekend at the hotel, but I know that, had I written rather than reading Stoner, it would have been a much poorer use of my time.