• Home
  • Stories
    • A Story About My Time in Iraq
    • Specialist Ski Goes to the Board
    • Erotica: The Lawyer's Yoni
  • Bio
  • Blog

       Random Ruminations archived on an ill-trafficked blog

Kolchak and the Monster of the Week                                                   Quandary

1/31/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
​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.”
0 Comments

The Ten Best Books I read in 2021

1/5/2022

1 Comment

 
Picture
​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.  
1 Comment

No Experts for Violence: Or, Why Chigurh the                                                                                                               Coin-Flipper got hit by the car

12/24/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
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. 
​
0 Comments

August 13th, 2021

8/13/2021

0 Comments

 

Picture
 
    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.
 

0 Comments

June 17th, 2021

6/17/2021

0 Comments

 

     
​          “How False it all seemed”: The Book you expected to     

                                           suck, which didn’t

Picture
​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.   
0 Comments

May 12th, 2021

5/12/2021

0 Comments

 

Breaking Ice with Axes, putting out Fires with Gasoline
​

Picture
​Franz Kafka said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Along similar lines, David Bowie, in Ashes to Ashes, cries out for an axe to break the ice.  I personally have nothing against axes. Besides which, who am I to argue with Joseph K. or the Thin White Duke?
It’s hard to say exactly what either man meant with his words, and since they’re dead it’s not like I can ask them now. Here’s what it makes me think about, though:
Most of our days consist of repeated actions. For most people, this means getting up, going to work, coming home. The luckiest among us genuinely enjoy our work, but relief for most of us comes during the weekend. Some people get drunk; others go out dancing. Still others just sit around the house and relax. These activities certainly relieve pressure, help to “thaw” one from the freeze induced by doing the same thing over and over again, day in and day out.
But here’s the thing: if your method of “thawing” (we’ll just stick with that term) is the same day in and day out, eventually that becomes another form of freezing. Big-brained thinkers call this the “hedonic treadmill,” an example of the concept of hedonic limit.
Briefly, here’s how hedonic limit works. Say you get on the treadmill to go for a little jog. You set the machine for 3.5 miles per hour. And because you start out walking on the treadmill at a slow pace, you feel this increase in pace as a jolt to your system. Maybe you enjoy the speeding up of your heartrate, or how opening your stride and placing your feet on the treadmill matches the time signature of the music on your i-pod as you run. Maybe you’re hungover and the whole thing is agony, and the first beads of sweat that break on your forehead smell like hundred-proof liquor. Regardless, you feel the change in speed from barely moving to going 3.5 miles per hour. After a while, however, whether in the groove or still hungover, that jog at 3.5 miles per hour starts to feel like walking, or even as if you were at a standstill. Unless you’re really hungover, in which case any exercise remains a nigh-unbearable agony.
In order to get the same feeling you got speeding up from zero to 3.5 mph, you now have to go faster than 3.5. The excitement came from the sensation of speeding up, not necessarily going at a speed that you can objectively perceive as faster than your starting rate. You only realize you’re going faster than you started out when you glance at the treadmill’s readout. Your body has adjusted to this speed, though, and comes to regard it as almost a form of rest.
You have been introduced to the concept of hedonic limit via the example of hedonic treadmill, while jogging on the literal treadmill.
This concept explains why even if you’re one of those privileged few who does not have to work, you will feel the same freeze as those whose life is mostly a long, monotonous slog. Because whatever pleasures you indulge in, you will become acclimated to them, and in order to receive the same stimulation that you once got, you will have to up the ante.
The story of the dissolute rich man who squanders his wealth and soul in search of some ultimate high is familiar enough to all of us now to have withered into a hackneyed trope. Right now I’m reading a police procedural called Heat from Another Sun, about a Houston-based billionaire whose penchant for reels of graphic war footage eventually lead him to commission a snuff film. That man is running way too damn fast on his treadmill.
Both numbness that comes from doing the same thing over and over again, or the numbness that comes from trying to break the ice by trying to shock the nervous system can be circumvented with the creative act. Any creative act.
Take either the books that Kafka wrote or the songs Bowie composed. What you have is a way to navigate the numbness stemming from dutiful obedience to the day’s laws, or the insensibility produced when we try too hard to satisfy self-destructive, Dionysian urges we indulge in at night trying to escape.
The creative act introduces spontaneity, a break from the predictable, by its very nature.
Consider: The English language features more than a million words total, but this includes rarely used chestnuts like “tatterdemalion” or “melioristic.” Your average person whose only reading consists of tabloids will still have access to roughly 20,000-30,000 words, and because they also have access to the internet this automatically gets bumped up to something like 170,000 words.
I was never good at math, but if you know even a little bit about exponents you can see that your chances for variation- new sentences with which to surprise yourself, turns-of-phrase to admire or that embarrass you with their clunkyness (failure breaks as much ice as success)- offer a kind of limitless field of play.
Your piano only has twelve notes, and you’re even a bit more limited if you keep things confined to the pentatonic scale (the black keys). But the law of exponents still means that when you play the piano the ability to mix and match notes gives you a musical icebreaker nonpareil that can offer unlimited relief from the routine.
Despite the fact that there are far more words than musical notes, music is a far superior form of expression to writing. I think Kurt Vonnegut said as much, more pithily than I can currently recall, or even paraphrase (I’m pretty tired right now).
I always imagine the mind and spirit like the skin. Touch one spot on the skin and it can feel good, produce a rush of blood and stippling of goosebumps as you provoke the nerve endings in an unpredictable manner. Continually rub the same spot and the nerve endings become inured, then aggravated by the repetition. Move to another spot and the sensation of pleasure begins anew.
A creative outlet introduces a fount of inexhaustible spontaneity in a well-regulated world. Conversely and just as therapeutic is that, if your life is chaotic, the creative act introduces an order, a set of rules (grammatical or musical) that’s just as salvific.
Is this outlet enough? Obviously not for some people, because plenty of writers and musicians have become drug addicts or committed suicide, or both. But joy is sometimes a dangerous thing, as its intoxication can call out for a potentiator, something to enhance the already exquisite rush.
But Bowie, who once had a mother of a cocaine addiction, eventually got clean, and said that after trying everything from satanism to pottery it was music that got finally got him there, rescuing him from the abyss.
Good enough for Bowie (or Kafka), good enough for me.
0 Comments

April 17th, 2021

4/17/2021

0 Comments

 

Escapism? Fleeing Reality to Survive

Picture
​Many moons ago I had this buddy.
This buddy wrote a book featuring an angsty, Holden Caufield-esque protagonist who railed against all sorts of things, from great injustices to minor nuisances. One of the things that pissed this character off was J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings cycle. He said something like, He writes impossibly escapist bullshit in which good is too good and evil is too evil.
Escapist fantasy has been pissing off writers for a long time now. I recently ran across this old chestnut by Robert Bloch, firing off a missive to the editor of Weird Tales, telling him he’d had enough of Robert E. Howard and his damnable Conan:
“‘I am awfully tired of poor old Conan the Cluck, who for the past fifteen issues has every month slain a new wizard, tackled a new monster, come to a violent sudden end that was averted (incredibly enough!) in just the nick of time, and won a new girlfriend, each of whose penchant for nudism won her a place of honor, either on the cover or on the inner illustration... I cry: ‘Enough of this brute and his iron-thewed sword-thrusts-may he be sent to Valhalla to cut out paper dolls.’”
It's a nice takedown, curmudgeonly enough for the reader to perhaps experience a bit of surprise when they learn the author of said-letter was actually about a decade younger than the man-child he was attacking.
Is it such a bad thing to want to escape when you write, though? And is this evasion of the pain and pathos of “serious fiction” somehow a shirking of the writer’s innate duty?
Writing itself is probably a shirking of one’s duty, especially if that duty is to earn a living and be a productive member of society.
And I have a hard time begrudging anyone their flight from pain, even if the retreat that helps them in the short term hurts them in the long run.
Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan, obviously had demons, and was tortured enough by the death of his mother to take his own life shortly after she expired. But I don’t think tying a bedspread around his chest with a clothespin and pretending it was cape hurt him all that much. And Conan the Cimmerian won Howard a minor fame during his lifetime, and also paid his bills, which is the sine qua non of adulthood.
There’s a movie about Howard’s abortive relationship with small-town schoolteacher Novalyne Price (played by Renee Zellweger) that addresses his arrested development and flight from the adult world.
The movie’s only a cut or two above the standard made-for-TV fare. Most of it shows us Novalyne and Howard strolling side-by-side (rarely hand-in-hand) discussing themes both weighty and inconsequential as the sere brown expanse of Cross Plains, Texas passes behind them.
The movie (based on the book by Price, One who walked Alone) suggests that Novalyne was unsuccessful in her attempts to wean Howard away from his Oedipal dependence on Mama. Neither could she steer him away from his one-man cosplay adventures through town, or trick him into donning a more appropriate costume, like, say a groom’s black tie.
Not all of the futile efforts were expended by Novalyne, however. Howard tried in vain to wean Ms. Price away from her gig as schoolteacher, toward the Dark Side where she might try her hand at the disreputable but more spiritually rewarding job of writer.
Alas, Ms. Price wrote nothing after giving the world her account of her brief, less-than-torrid encounter with the quixotic, small-town scribe. And she has since died.
I’m frankly not sure here, though, whether Howard needed to be weaned away from Conan, even if it might have saved his life (and I doubt it would have).
Besides which I don’t think that escapism is truly possible, or that a writer can shirk their duty to the truth (assuming they have one) even if they try.
And not everyone who retreats into fantasy eventually puts a bullet in their head.
And who knows? Maybe Bloch was just pissed that Conan kept getting the covers over at Weird Tales.
 
0 Comments

Leo Tolstoy versus Joe Don Baker: A Short        Reflection on Good and Evil

4/13/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Everyone is familiar with the writer Leo Tolstoy, and it would be a waste of time to attempt to summarize his achievements in world literature (although there are some who regard him as turgid, a bit of bore). I bring him up now only because a quote attributed to him is relevant to these late night musings, a subject I’ve been turning over in my mind.
The quote goes something like this: “Good versus evil is interesting, but good versus good is more interesting.” That’s a paraphrase (Russian no doubt loses something when tortured to produce English).
Great literature (and movies and wrestling matches) can be made on the storyline of good versus evil. Fairytales don’t require moral ambivalence, or a villain with an origin story to explain what they do. Some queen is evil and therefore decides to put a curse upon the land, and someone who is innately good takes it upon themselves to thwart said-queen.
What about tales of good versus good, though? These may be more interesting than tales of good versus evil because they force the reader (or viewer) to not just cheer someone on, but to decide whom to support in battle. Making things even more complicated is that one’s loyalties can change based on how the two combatants conduct themselves in their war.
Parallel to what Leo Tolstoy said are some words by character actor Joe Don Baker. For those not familiar with him, Joe Don played the lawman in the original Walking Tall, a film about a sheriff (an ex-wrestler, incidentally) who stood up against a townful of bad guys. Joe Don has also played his share of baddies, though, including a sadistic hitman in the fast-paced, underrated crime gem Charley Varrick.
Joe Don’s range as an actor is as wide as the moral spectrum (or his waistline, for that matter). He can scowl and smolder. He can squint and grimace with his flouncy jowls until he resembles the unholy offspring of Winston Churchill and a largemouth bass. He can convincingly play a hayseed sheriff who leers, spits baccy and asks a city boy, You ain’t from around here, are ya? And he can be just as convincing as a wide-eyed everyman who’d be overwhelmed by the wickedness of the world except that he needs his composure, wits, and toughness to put a dent in said-evil.
Someone once asked Joe Don in an interview if he liked playing bad guys more than good guys. His response (perhaps worthy to stand alongside Tolstoy’s) went something like this: “Does any bad guy ever see himself as bad?”
The bad guy is driven by a knack for rationalization. And who knows, maybe their reasoning is in fact solid.
Let’s perform a thought experiment to see if sometimes it’s impossible to tell good from evil.
Say there is a billionaire who owns warehouses across the planet where goods are packaged, sold, shipped, and transshipped for global markets. He is the richest man on Earth. Let us call him Joffrey Tidewater (it’ll work, as it sounds slightly exotic but also slightly villainous). Joffrey treats his workers like crap. He is a megalomaniac perfectionist, obsessed with Taylorism and all of the other pet theories of early twentieth century efficiency crafted by the great robber barons who preceded him. Only unlike those forebears, Joffrey Tidewater has no social conscience. Rather than endow museum galleries with edifying art or university libraries with tomes, he sinks his money into space exploration efforts that smack more of vanity than a pioneering spirit.
In this telling, Joffrey Tidewater will strike the viewer or reader as a real asshole. If the teller of our tale takes us back to Joffrey’s childhood, to reveal Joffrey lived in a tarpaper shack, malnourished and shivering from the cold, then maybe we’ll factor that into our overall assessment of him. Sure, he’s an asshole, we’ll reason, but now he’s an asshole whose assholery has been contextualized.
But let’s make things more difficult, more interesting for the reader (or less elemental, if you prefer the fairytale version of things where evil is evil and good is good and that is that).
Let’s say Joffrey started out as an idealistic, if somewhat nutty and libertarian-leaning businessman, beginning his mail-order business from a basement. By day he worked as a custodian in a building and at night he returned to his cot in that building’s basement where he lighted incense in a sandalwood holder lain before a red resin bust of Ayn Rand. In his free time, he sought escape in musty Golden Age science fiction paperbacks. He’d curl up with these dusty pulps, thumbing their yellow pages while leaning against a warm boiler flush against an exposed brick wall. He’d listen to the hum of the boiler and pretend it was a fusion engine on an interstellar ark traveling between galaxies. He’d read guileless fantasies of a future that never was, where men with fishbowl helmets and zap guns defended utopian colonies (and damsels corseted in bullet bras) from evil green lizardmen.
One day Tidewater’s business takes off, and he begins to reinvest in it, and to expand, and to dream big. He moves out of the basement and now owns his own cedar lodge perched atop a snowy escarpment overlooking some ski slopes. His business has grown large enough now that it’s time to go public. He decides to go the Trader Joe’s route and be a compassionate employer. He’ll offer his workers flexible hours, adequate medical and dental care. He’ll throw in other perks like scholarships and childcare meant to guarantee loyalty and professionalism from the lowest stock boy (a job Tidewater once held as a kid) on up to the public relations staff.
He’s drafting up a moving speech he intends to make about the responsibilities of the rulers to the ruled. He has Carnegie in mind, reasoning that even the robber barons built monumental libraries and public works. While drafting the memo, however, a whirlpool-like tunnel appears before him, a yawning green oculus of light in which radiant funnels circle each other, like coiled strands in a radioactive Fibonacci spiral.
A green man steps out of the incandescent portal. He’s bulb-headed and holds a laser pistol gripped tight to the suctioned radular cups lining the insides of his spatulate fingers. The green man makes it sweet and simple. “You, Tidewater, have an obligation to your species which is greater than your obligation to your employees. We have used our Tachyon Time Jumper to discover that it is imperative you forego this seemingly compassionate plan, and that instead you save as much money as you can. You will then use this capital to build a fleet of spacecraft, ostensibly to be used by the vainer and richer homo sapiens among you keen to travel to Low Earth Orbit as tourists. However, your private space exploration firm, if begun in earnest now, will eventually be responsible for creating a star armada that will one day defend not just homo saps, but all of the sentient beings in the universe. True compassion requires sacrifice. This is yours. Your gift to the universe in the long term must come at the expense of the comfort of your race in the short term. That is all.”
The green man disappears back through his portal. Tidewater sits at his desk, stunned into silence, trying to rearrange the papers that scattered to the four winds when the alien emerged via his Tachyon Time Jumper (wasn’t that what he called it?).
Joffrey Tidewater wants to dismiss what happened as a dream, an apparition, a bit of undigested soy left over from a hearty vegan lunch consumed earlier this afternoon. But there’s that smell, a cloacal musk that’s hard to escape. It emanates from the stream of slime the green man left lingering on the floor. The mucilaginous drip ends at the far wall where he first saw the portal, and the space still faintly glows as if someone had smashed a photophore-rich fish against the plaster.
It was real. It happened.
Then the phone rings, startling Tidewater so that he jumps in his ribbed leather office chair. He reaches for the phone, picks it up off the cradle. “Hello?”
“You said you had a big announcement?”
Tidewater is on the edge of being a billionaire, and the reporter on the other end of the line wants to hear what he has to say.
“Yes.” Tidewater spins in his thronelike seat (which feels even more kingly, now that he understands the power and burden that lie with him). “I previously stated that we were considering modeling our employee benefits’ package on the popular Trader Joe’s grocery chain. Unfortunately, that announcement was based on previous, and ultimately inaccurate calculations. Associates at Tidewater will be paid minimum wage, and are entreated to perform calisthenic exercises before and after work to limit risk of injury while on-shift. Dental hygiene is also not a matter for the company to involve itself in. Although I should add that employees will receive discounts on any Colgate-brand products purchased through the company’s store, or shipped online via Tidewater Unlimited. That is all.”
He hangs up the phone, a chill working its way through his body, followed by a bout of nausea that sends him heading for the toilet to test out the bowl’s motion sensor-activated Smart FlushTM feature. He pukes, discovering the smart toilet works (available $69.99 from Tidewater Unlimited Online).
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that he’s evil.
Or is he?
Hell, I don’t know.
Ask Tolstoy. Or Joe Don.
0 Comments

An Alcoholic Superhero and a Russian walk into a Bar...

3/25/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Awhile back a writer buddy of mine mentioned he had a book in his to-read pile with the title of Nobody wants to read your Shit. He never got around to reading it, telling me, “I’ve had enough tough love,” or words to that effect.
I personally never tire of finding new ways to remind myself that I suck, and so I decided to give the book a whirl.
The book is as direct as the title suggests. The author is a successful writer who started out working on Madison Avenue and later had success writing The Legend of Bagger Vance, a story about a numinous negro who helps white protagonists work on their golf handicaps.
One of the author’s insights is that the mechanics of storytelling may have some universal features across all times and cultures, but there are certain idiomatic quirks from country to country it still helps to be aware of.
For instance: in American stories, the main character must be the ultimate agent of their destiny.
 People in other cultures (he cites the Russians) are more comfortable viewing the protagonist as the plaything of forces stronger than himself, whose self-realization (or progress over the character arc) comes when they realize they have no control over anything. But your American character, whether he or she fails or succeeds, should do so by his or her own hand, if you hope to have a readership larger than six embittered, beard-stroking baristas.
One could speculate on the reasons that this is so, assuming one accepts the premise (and I guess I more or less do).
America is a relatively young country that has never lost a war on its own soil. Or, in the delightful phrasing of poet Charles Bukowski, “The problem with these people is that their cities have never been bombed and no one has ever told their mothers to shut up.” It’s easier to believe in the ability of one person to challenge the world and win when it’s so deeply engrained in our collective cultural DNA. Whether it’s true or not is beside the point; we respond to films like Rocky, giving our cynicism a little caesura for a couple hours no matter how deeply rooted we think it is.
The quintessential American is Horatio Alger, writing about young, impoverished boys pulling themselves up by their bootstraps to rise to positions of wealth and prominence. The quintessential Russian tale is Nikolai Gogol’s lowly clerk in The Overcoat, who scrapes and saves for a new garment and still ends up freezing to death. I think Dostoevsky or Tolstoy even said words to the effect that We all came out from beneath Gogol’s overcoat.
Are there exceptions to this rule, though? Distinctly American tales in which the main character is someone to whom things happen rather than one who does things? Men and women, who, in grammatical terms, are indirect objects rather than subjects?
I think so. For the sake of argument, take Goodfellas, starring Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, the mafia associate made famous for his betrayal of various Luchese Family bigwigs.
I won’t recap the movie’s plot, nor its brilliance, nor its cultural permanence in cinema. It would be as absurd as me trying to describe the music of the Beatles to someone. Either you’re familiar with the work or you’ve been living feral and in the woods, too busy foraging for food and evading predators to bother with pop culture.
Goodfellas’ relevance to my ramblings is that the central character of the film is a man seemingly without qualities. He is adrift in a sea of larger-than-life personalities, men willing to use violence over the slightest perceived insult, men who are basically supernovas of unbridled passion exploding in every direction. They have massive appetites for sex, money, and literally food in the cases of some of the more rotund and fleshy gindaloons.  And because they have the muscle to break anyone who might thwart them and the resources to keep the party going, there are basically no checks on their behavior.
Watching the waspish establishment types trying to corral hotblooded Irishmen and Italians like Tommy and Jimmy as they go on their crime sprees is like watching an overworked superego trying to reason with an irrepressible id.
But Henry is mostly a cipher, a dud. Despite being the main character, and being a naturally motormouthed raconteur (most of the film consists of his voiceover narration), he does very little. Even the violence done by the mob on a daily basis is something he mostly watches, usually with a mixture of dread and horror in his eyes. He’s most a spectator in the film’s key scene, in which his crew murder made man Billy Batts. It’s this act that divides the mafia (and America) into two separate eras, one where rules and tradition are mostly adhered to, and another in which they are jettisoned and disillusionment sets in. His involvement in the infamous killing consists mostly of cleaning the “skunk” smell of the man’s corpse from the back of his car’s trunk. Later, when the body needs to be dug up and moved to another location, he spends most of his time puking his lungs out while Tommy and Jimmy do the digging.
His one major act in the film is to rat on his friends. And because this act essentially strips him of whatever identity he had, it only compounds his cipherhood rather than giving him agency. Henry ratting immediately unpersons him in the eyes of his friends and even to some extent in his own eyes. He notes as much in the film’s final scene after getting resettled by Witness Protection, as the camera pans over drab suburban tract houses plotted to the featureless flat horizon. I get to live the rest of my life as a schnook, a nobody. The blandishments that came to Henry as criminal- the closetful of Italian suits, the wingtip shoes, the sugar bowl full of cocaine- were the only things that gave him any sense of self. And now they’re gone.
Interviews I’ve seen about the real Henry Hill only confirm the impression of a man who wasn’t there. His own sister in one interview expressed her lack of shock that her brother would rat people out. “Henry was always a rat.”
And yet it’s because he’s not much of a “doer” that Henry Hill makes such a good observer. Even in the grips of a cocaine-induced nervous breakdown, he remains a reliable narrator.
That, I suppose, begs the question: is the man/woman of action not the best person to relate events? Is doing in and of itself something that precludes one from seeing, or at least relating?
I’d be tempted to say “Yes,” or at least entertain the idea, if there weren’t so many ready examples to the contrary staring us plainly in the face.
Take the droog Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Like Scorsese’s Henry Hill, Kubrick’s Little Alex loves to talk. His voiceover is delivered in the Nadsat argot invented by author Anthony Burgess, rather than the Queens’-Brooklynese of Henry Hill (who related his exploits to crime scribe Anthony Pileggi).
But Alex, unlike Henry, is the agent of his own demise and (ostensible) redemption, despite being the plaything of institutional sadists first in prison and then in the medical profession. He finds the time to do everything from raping women to bludgeoning his friends for disobedience, all while keeping his running commentary going.
All this is beside the point, though, as Alex is British, not American.
That said, it’s worth considering that the person who doesn’t do but merely sees does have roots as an American archetype. Take Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. He mostly lives at a remove from the wealthy and beautiful people around whom he orbits, attracted and repulsed by them so that he inhabits a kind of moral Lagrange point ideal for seeing without acting.
Nick cannot join the club because he is not rich, anymore than Henry Hill can join the Mafia due to his Irish ancestry on his father’s side.
Maybe that’s the key insight to take away from these only tenuously connected musings. Some central characters are observers rather than actors because they frankly have no choice. It isn’t that this type is not as American as apple pie; it’s that the recoiling at this state of affairs is the outgrowth of a specifically American disposition. The Russian would likely just accept it as the natural state of things whereas the American sensibility lashes out against it.
Deductive logic would tell us that as America collapses on itself, our films should become more mature and self-reflective, or at least nihilistic. That hasn’t happened, though, as the Dream Factory seems to churn out more and more movies about superheroes saving the world. This attitude certainly made sense in the postwar years of heady optimism, where America was flush with pride after defeating the Axis powers in the Second World War and standards of living were rising across the board. What it portends now, aside from a deep sense of denial, is anyone’s guess.
Perhaps I should just leave you with the bardic sagacity of comedian Dave Attell: “When you’re a kid, you think your father is Superman. As you get older, you finally realize that he’s just an alcoholic who walks around the house in a cape.”
0 Comments

December 02nd, 2020

12/2/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture


 “It becomes its own Thing”: Lisa Simpson on Aesthetics

Occasionally I’ll get bored enough to watch a DVD commentary. Either that or I’m just too lazy to take one DVD out, march upstairs to my library (shelf, really) and find another one. People talking over a movie isn’t all that appealing to me (aside from the Mystery Science Theater riffs). That said, I did hear something that stuck with me awhile back when listening to a commentary track for a Simpsons DVD.
It was said by Yeardley Smith, the woman who plays Lisa Simpson. Like most professional voice actors, she also has a distinctive speaking voice. Adenoidal might be the best way to describe it, high-pitched but more adorable than grating, well this side of Minnie Mouse. Betty Boop might be a more apt comparison, although there isn’t that weird neotenous sexpot thing happening with Yeardley that bombshell Betty had going.
In the commentary in question, Yeardley and some other Simpsons staff were watching an episode, maybe The Old Man and the Lisa (a bona fide classic). Someone asked her, “So when you watch an episode, do you see Lisa and think of her as you?”
“No,” Ms. Smith replied. “Because it becomes its own thing.”
I think what she meant was that her own voice, her contribution, was subsumed in the overall effort, interweaved with the craftsmanship of the animators, other voice actors, and the musical cues and stings provided by the underrated film and TV composer Alf Clausen.
The work of art itself, when properly done, provides relief from the burden of ego and self-consciousness, and all the other petty vagaries that come with being a human being. Art is something made by people, but when done well, sincerely and with great effort and care, we find ourselves seeing the work alone and not the creator behind it. That is ultimately the beauty of art, relief from the burden of being in the struggle that comes with being a person “flattened by trivialities,” as Charles Bukowski once put it. When we interact with each other our guards are up, as if we are in a competition, and at the most basic level we are. For resources, for praise, for jobs, and, at the most primal level, for mates.
Art allows us to filter out the extraneous and ugly things about human need and desire that mar communication (even when the work of art in question is focused on human ugliness). It allows us to establish a link with another human that is unburdened by the weight of all this normally heavy baggage. Inferior works of art remind us of all the things we can’t stand about other people and ourselves. How many bad movies have you seen in which you could sense the mercenary nature of everyone involved, the shallowness of the actors and vapidity of the director and screenwriter, buffered by and beholden to nothing greater than momentary trends?
Hell may be other people, as Sartre said, but I think Bradbury was right when he suggested we could stay perma-drunk (without the hangover) on the words (and the songs and the films) of others.
I think we all struggle with some fears of inferiority, fears that we’re talentless (no matter our level of success or the praise heaped on us or our works that are supposed to serve as concrete benchmarks of our accomplishments). And when we encounter something good created by someone else, the admiration carries a slight undercurrent of jealousy, the threat that our fear of being frauds is going to be exposed in the presence of the real thing. It’s best to just be honest about this. “It was good and I was jealous,” is how Bukowski put it in Ham on Rye when he wrote about his first time reading a story written by his best friend, a fellow aspiring scribe. It’s a sentence not many would be honest enough to write, and a feeling not everyone would even be eager to cop to. To be fair, maybe some of us are actually above such pettiness. Not me, at any rate.
Here’s the thing, though: while encountering something good might bring these residual and myriad petty feelings to the surface, when I encounter something great I forget that it was created by a person. My disbelief is suspended and my ego goes with it. Greatness is so rare that when I encounter it, I’m relieved to find that it still exists, no matter the source (well, maybe if my younger brother wrote a great book, I might have to kick his ass).
But here’s the other thing: that same egoless spirit in which I received the work was probably the one in which it was conceived. This is the reason, I think, that someone like Norman Mailer could never really craft a great novel (no matter what prize committees or critics say): he was too consciously trying to aspire to greatness to subordinate him and his talent to let something shine through him rather than trying to shine in and of himself.
In his book How to write Science Fiction and Fantasy, Orson Scott Card points out that the main difference between poetry and fiction is that fiction impresses at the subconscious level, while poetry has its most striking effect in a much more manifest manner.
You read a great poem and think That’s great. You read a great book and think, I believed that. Or,  I was transported by that. Your admiration for the author only begins once the book is closed. The experience and not the creator is the focus. Felt everywhere and seen nowhere, as I think Zola or Flaubert said.
And if you write a great book or a great poem, what do you feel then?
Hell, don’t ask me. I have no idea. When I read something I wrote, and I don’t wince and feel a sense of shame, that’s victory enough for me.
Maybe one day I can get to the place where Tolstoy was on his deathbed when his daughter (I think) pulled a book down from the shelves in his paneled library and proceeded to read a passage to him.
“That’s beautiful,” Tolstoy supposedly said after she finished. “Who wrote that?”
“You did,” his daughter replied. But he had written it so long ago that only now, on his deathbed, could see his work with fresh eyes, a Christian death absolving him not only of his sins in this world but the usual and pesky interposition of his (overly)critical faculty.
Half the battle is won or lost in getting to that point where your characters, previously puppets, start to caper around like voodoo dolls, animated by something besides your fingers on the keyboard or the ego lodged in some secret chamber of your mind.
Some writers claim it’s an artistic defect in control to let the characters dance too far free of the leash, while others claim that when the creation slips its tether, that’s where the fun starts.
Maybe that’s the key. Forget about creating something great. Have fun, instead, amuse yourself first and then go from there.
 

0 Comments
<<Previous
Forward>>

    Archives

    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    August 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Stories
    • A Story About My Time in Iraq
    • Specialist Ski Goes to the Board
    • Erotica: The Lawyer's Yoni
  • Bio
  • Blog