Tag: writing

Knowing When to Walk Away

The Forge and Anvil is closing down:

I strongly feel I have to turn away from the religio-political non-fiction writing I’ve been doing for more than a decade. I greatly admire people like Razorfist or Jon Del Arroz, who’ve managed to both work in the creative sphere, but simultaneously provide commentary on the issues. Yet again, I simply do not have the time to do all that. Writing is not my job. And I have a family I’m taking care of.

I very much desire to focus all of my creative talent on the Bovodar stories. (Notice how you still haven’t seen the sequel to Bovodar and the Bears? It’s because I’ve been doing Forge and Anvil. Episode 1 of a two-part sequel is complete, though unedited. It’s called “Bovodar and the Dragons.”) I listen to podcasts about properties like Lord of the Rings or Babylon 5, I watch Deep Space 9 reviews by Razorfist, or I’ll watch something about the Farscape saga, and I say to myself: “I should be doing that. Why am I so behind?”

At this point in my life, I was supposed to have a symphony of books out there. A trilogy of Hobbit-styled books, some adult novels expanding upon my created universe, a “Silmarillion” that described the ancient genesis of the world I’ve been building. Perhaps have a videogame by now. Comics. A cartoon or two? Etc. But I don’t. I’m like George R.R. Martin, who stubbornly refuses to finish A Song of Ice and Fire. I’ve got an entire “Dune trilogy” in my mind that no one but me knows about. And it’s not put out there because I’ve only one life, and I’m only one man. Bilocation is not something I can do.

So I will turn back to what started this whole journey. The fiction. The very fiction I set out to do from the outset. The non-fiction was an interruption and a tangent, but the fiction will have to resume.

I think he’s doing the right thing, and probably at the right time too. Always know when to walk away. I stopped writing syndicated game reviews after seven years, stopped writing political columns after 12 years, and walked away from recording and publishing contracts after two albums. In each case, it was the right decision to do so and I’ve never regretted it.

Even though I walked away from Alpha Game at precisely the moment that the SSH was beginning to break out into the mainstream, it was the right time to shut it down there. I’d explored the subject to the depths of my interest and it was best to leave it to others to delve into the various ancillary elements and applications that interested them.

Don’t ever phone it in. Once you get to the point that you’re just phoning it in, it’s imperative to find something else on which you can focus more enthusiastically.

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It’s Not MY Fault!

Rape Rape attempts to avoid taking the blame for the disastrous end of Game of Thrones.

The legendary HBO saga ended back in summer 2019, and there’s no doubt most fans were disappointed by the dud of an ending we got.

Well, Martin wants people to know he was pushed “out of the loop” as the show progressed by showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff.

“By season 5 and 6, and certainly 7 and 8, I was pretty much out of the loop,” Martin told The New York Times. When asked by The NYT why Benioff and Weiss iced out the man responsible for creating “GoT,” he responded with, “I don’t know — you have to ask Dan and David.”

A rep for the two men didn’t give a comment to the Times.

For those of you who might not remember, there was serious outrage about the ending of “Game of Thrones.” Fans had invested nearly a decade of time into the series expecting some kind of epic conclusion. Instead, we got a mini-UN meeting, Bran became king, Arya became Dora the Explorer, Jon went north and Sansa became queen in the north. The only part of the conclusion that made sense was Sansa’s storyline.

The rest of it was laughably bad, and the backlash was immediate and brutal.

Strange. He wasn’t so hot on giving all the credit to Dan and David back when the show was well-regarded. If he didn’t like the ending – which he reportedly gave them – perhaps he should have just, you know, finished writing the books.

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Beyond Cringe

Whenever anyone, most probably though not necessarily a Boomer, waxes on about how cool the literary mediocrities known as the Beat Generation were, note that this is what passed for the epitome of cool to their twisted little minds. It’s apparently the most exciting and most dramatic moment of ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac, which is to say, Neal Cassady’s big night out on Folsom Street in San Francisco.

«Come on, Galatea, Marie, let’s go hit the jazz joints and forget it. Dean will be dead someday.
Then what can you say to him?»

«The sooner he’s dead the better,» said Galatea, and she spoke officially for almost everyone in the room.

«Very well, then,» I said, «but now he’s alive and I’ll bet you want to know what he does next and that’s because he’s got the secret that we’re all busting to find and it’s splitting his head wide open and if he goes mad don’t worry, it won’t be your fault but the fault of God.» They objected to this; they said I really didn’t know Dean; they said he was the worst scoundrel that ever lived and I’d find out someday to my regret. I was amused to hear them protest so much.

Roy Johnson rose to the defense of the ladies and said he knew Dean better than anybody, and all Dean was, was just a very interesting and even amusing con-man. I went out to find Dean and we had a brief talk about it. «Ah, man, don’t worry, everything is perfect and fine.» He was rubbing his belly and licking his lips.

The girls came down and we started out on our big night, once more pushing the car down the street. «Wheeoo! let’s go!» cried Dean, and we jumped in the back seat and clanked to the little Harlem on Folsom Street.

Out we jumped in the warm, mad night, hearing a wild tenorman bawling horn across the way, going «EE-YAH! EE-YAH! EE-YAH!» and hands clapping to the beat and folks yelling, «Go, go, go!» Dean was already racing across the street with his thumb in the air, yelling, «Blow, man, blow!» A bunch of colored men in Saturday-night suits were whooping it up in front. It was a sawdust saloon with a small bandstand on which the fellows huddled with their hats on, blowing over people’s heads, a crazy place; crazy floppy sponren wandered around sometimes in their bathrobes, bottles clanked in alleys. In back of the joint in a dark corridor beyond the splattered toilets scores of men and women stood against the wall drinking wine-spodiodi and spitting at the stars – wine and whisky.

The behatted tenorman was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling riff that went from «EE-yah!» to a crazier «EE-de-lee-yah!» and blasted along to the rolling crash of butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bullneck who didn’t give a damn about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash. Uproars of music and the tenorman had it and everybody knew he had it. Dean was clutching his head in the crowd, and it was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenorman to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor. A six-foot skinny Negro woman was rolling her bones at the man’s hornbell, and he just jabbed it at her, «Ee! ee! ee!»

Everybody was rocking and roaring. Galatea and Marie with beer in their hands were standing on their chairs, shaking and jumping. Groups of colored guys stumbled in from the street, falling over one another to get there. «Stay with it, man!» roared a man with a foghorn voice, and let out a big groan that must have been heard clear out in Sacramento, ah-haa! «Whoo!» said Dean. He was rubbing his chest, his belly; the sweat splashed from his face. Boom, kick, that drummer was kicking his drums down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattlety-boom! A big fat man was jumping on the platform, making it sag and creak. «Yoo!» The pianist was only pounding the keys with spread-eagled fingers, chords, at intervals when the great tenorman was drawing breath for another blast – Chinese chords, shuddering the piano in every timber, chink, and wire, boing! The tenorman jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around; his hat was over his eyes; somebody pushed it back for him. He just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high, wide, and screaming in the air. Dean was directly in front of him with his face lowered to the bell of the horn, clapping his hands, pouring sweat on the man’s keys, and the man noticed and laughed in his horn a long quivering crazy laugh, and everybody else laughed and they rocked and rocked; and finally the tenorman decided to blow his top and crouched down and held a note in high C for a long time as everything else crashed along and the cries increased and I thought the cops would come swarming from the nearest precinct. Dean was in a trance. The tenorman’s eyes were fixed straight on him; he had a madman who not only understood but cared and wanted to understand more and much more than there was, and they began dueling for this; everything came out of the horn, no more phrases, just cries, cries, «Baugh» and down to «Beep!» and up to «EEEEE!» and down to clinkers and over to sideways-echoing horn-sounds. He tried everything, up, down, sideways, upside down, horizontal, thirty degrees, forty degrees, and finally he fell back in somebody’s arms and gave up and everybody pushed around and yelled, «Yes! Yes! He blowed that one!» Dean wiped himself with his handkerchief.

How very incredibly exciting. Note that the intrepid duo followed up this fascinating public performance by abandoning the girls and running off with the black saxophonist, then getting picked up and spending the night in a hotel room with “a tall, thin fag who was on his way home to Kansas.”

Anyone who praises the work of the Beat Generation is either a) lying or b) hasn’t ever actually read any of it. It doesn’t even rise to the level of mediocre, it’s downright awful in terms of style, story, and characters, and that’s without even getting into the degeneracy and malignant narcissism of the subjects. There is nothing of the Good, the Beautiful, or the True in it. Their works are considerably closer to case studies in mental illness than anything approaching either fiction or biography.

And let’s not get started on the gay Jewish pedophile who tried to pass off his juvenile odes to mental illness and degeneracy as poetry. The self-styled greatest minds of his generation sure look a lot more like Dumb and Dumber, don’t you think? From an artistic perspective, Ginsberg was nothing more than the male Lena Dunham of his day, although we are fortunate that, unlike Dunham, he did not have access to Hollywood budgets or video production equipment in his youth.

I’m not a big fan of the Generation Z habit of labeling everything “cringe”, but if the concept applies to anything on this planet, it applies to the fake, gay Beats and the Boomers who idolized them.

UPDATE: I think this very positive review of Kerouac’s book sums up both its quality and its appeal very well.

One The Road is the best book i have ever read.

Indeed.

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Interview with Susan Cooper

An illuminating 1999 interview with the author of THE DARK IS RISING series.

RT: The books comprise a series. Did you find that what you had written in the earlier books committed you to directions that you subsequently regretted, or wished you had more freedom to change?

SC: No. It was wonderful. It was like writing a symphony, in which each movement is different and yet they all link together. I wish my imagination would give me another shape like that because there are all kinds of satisfactions inside it. Things link together, an early book leads to something in a later book. When I wrote the first book, of course, I didn’t envision a series, but later, when I first had the idea of writing, not just the second book, but the whole sequence, I drew up a plan on a piece of paper. I had little notes written down: I had the four times of the year–focused upon the solstices, Beltane, and such festivals–I had places, and, very roughly, the characters who were in each book. I remember that under The Grey King there was a boy called Bran, but I didn’t know who he was. So that was the only thing that limited me.

There were things I had to remember from early books that had to be either resolved or referred to in later books. Once in a great while some particularly bright child will write me a letter saying, you never said what happened to . . . . But I didn’t find it restricting. No.

RT: Are there any particular details you would like to change, looking back in retrospect?

SC: I would like to have developed the three Drew children more fully in the first book. They develop as the series progresses, but they’re very corny kids’ book characters in Over Sea, Under Stone, it seems to me. I hadn’t gotten to know them.

RT: As the series progresses, Jane in particular grows more interesting, doesn’t she?

SC: Yes. Jane is someone I always wanted to write about again. Silver on the Tree suffered from being the last book where I was tying up all the ends. It has too much in it. My head was going off in all directions. Its structure is not terrific. There was even more in it, but I took some out. Of course when you’re dealing with the substance of myth, which is the fight between good and evil, I suppose, you have to provide the ultimate, terrific, enormous climax. It’s almost impossible.

I’m not promising anything, not yet, but I am optimistic that we may eventually be able to release a Castalia Library edition of the series. And if so, the bar will be a fairly high one to clear, as the Easton Press edition is arguably the most beautiful set that Easton has ever produced.

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A Fascinating Observation

How much literary “assistance” was being provided to GRR Martin by his assistants?

One of the assistants to George R. Martin left him to write the sci-fi series The Expanse. When he left was when George R Martin began spinning his wheels in terms of getting stuff done and/or quality. Is there a connection? I don’t know. I do like how in this interview, the assistant says Martin was a great mentor not in writing but in getting deals with Hollywood and other studios.

It wouldn’t be a massive surprise to learn that Martin, rather like FW Dixon and JK Rowling, eventually turns out to have been a committee effort. Although it must be admitted that his complete inability to finish his once-popular series tends to support the idea that it was solely his own work.

Then again, the fact that he has multiple “assistants” raises the question of what, precisely, those assistants were doing? While there’s nothing wrong with having co-writers and collaborators, a dependence on them tends to significantly reduce an author’s ability to write on his own.

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The Four Eras of Villainy

Alexander Macris provides a typically astute analysis of the evolution of the concept of the villain from ancient to postmodern:

In the introduction to his magisterial opus After Virtue, Alasdair Macintyre describes postmodern society as having fallen into a dark age, a post-apocalyptic state. But this is not the apocalypse of Mad Max. The apocalypse has destroyed, not our technology, but our morality: “We possess simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have… lost our comprehension of morality,” he explains. Postmodern society does not know what good is.

Being unable to understand good leaves society unable to understand evil; and so instead society pathologizes it. Evil becomes a psychological state that results from personal trauma, from some crucial moment when the world failed to show someone compassion, empathy, or trust, or left them exposed to the world’s cruelty. Every postmodern villain is a victim. Behind every figure of terror we find a terrorized figure.

Darth Vader appears as a towering tyrant in Star Wars IV. But the prequels reveal that Anakin Skywalker was a victim: enslaved as a child, separated from his mother, forbidden to marry the woman he loved, rejected in his aspirations by the Jedi council, dismembered by his former mentor, and then involuntarily made into a cyborg by his new one.

Hannibal Lechter appears in Silence of the Lambs as the quintessence of villainy, brilliant, cold, manipulative, remorseless. In the sequel Hannibal, we learn that he’s a victim: During World War II, the kind and gentle young Hannibal was forced to eat his sister by cannibal soldiers.

Lord Voldemort appears in Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone as the most powerful and evil sorcerer in the Wizarding World. But later we learn Tom Riddle was a victim, the product of abandonment by his mother. J.K. Rowling even says “everything would have changed if Merope [his mother] had survived and raised him herself and loved him.”

Kylo Ren enters Star Wars VII as a dark Jedi so powerful that he can halt a blaster bolt in mid-air. But Star Wars VIII reveals Ben Solo was a victim who felt abandoned by his father and betrayed by the paranoia of his mentor, Jake Skywalker.

The Joker, most infamous and vile of all of Batman’s foes, is revealed in his eponymous 2019 movie to have been a victim, too. Arthur Fleck is a mentally ill bastard rejected by his birth-father and humiliated by his coworkers.

Postmodern culture stops at nothing in its relentless transformation of villain into victim. Cruella de Vil is the most recent example. She appears in One Hundred and One Dalmations as a wealthy socialite whose life goal is to murder puppies so she can wear their skins. But the 2021 movie Cruella reveals that she, too, is a victim: Her birth-mother abandoned her and her adopted mother was killed by a pack of vicious dalmations. (I’m not making this up.)

The postmodern villain, then, is just a moral cripple. Psychological trauma has ruined the villain’s ethical system just as spinal trauma might ruin a person’s nervous system. We are meant to feel bad that they do bad. It’s not their fault.

I have to admit, I’m naturally prone to writing medieval villains, although I tend to put a modern spin on their self-perception. Anyhow, read the whole thing, it’s an interesting piece that will provide you with a useful analytical reading tool.

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We Are Wizards

Or we might as well be, insofar as the denizens of the Hellmouth are concerned. Vox’s First Law meets Arthur C. Clark’s First Law on the chans.

Were Sherlock Holmes to kill a hotel room full of three people, he’d enter using a secret door in the hotel that he read about in a book ten years ago. He’d throw peanuts at one guy causing him to go into anaphylactic shock, as he had deduced from a dartboard with a picture of George Washington Carver on it pinned to the wall that the man had a severe peanut allergy. The second man would then kill himself just according to plan as Sherlock had earlier deduced that him and the first man were homosexual lovers who couldn’t live without each other due to a faint scent of penis on each man’s breath and a slight dilation of their pupils whenever they looked at each other.

As for the third man, why, Sherlock doesn’t kill him at all. The third man removes his sunglasses and wig to reveal he actually WAS Sherlock the entire time. But Sherlock just entered through the Secret door and killed two people, how can there be two of him? The first Sherlock removes his mask to reveal he’s actually Moriarty attempting to frame Sherlock for two murders. Sherlock, however, anticipated this, the two dead men stand up. They’re undercover police officers, it was all a ruse.

“But Sherlock!” Moriarty cries “That police officer blew his own head off. look at it. There’s skull fragments on the wall, how is he fine now? How did you fake that?”

Sherlock just winks at the screen, the end.

This is retarded because Sherlock is a smart person written by a stupid person to whom smart people are indistinguishable from wizards.

Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from wizardry.

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The Revolution Eats Its Own

Norman Mailer has been posthumously cancelled:

Norman Mailer’s long-time publisher has recently informed the Mailer family that it has canceled plans to publish a collection of his political writings to mark the centennial of his birth in 2023, confirms the film producer Michael Mailer, the author’s oldest son. The back-door apologies at Random House include as the proximate cause — you hardly have to look hard in Mailer’s work to find offenses against contemporary doctrine and respectability — a junior staffer’s objection to the title of Mailer’s 1957 essay, “The White Negro”, a psycho-sexual-druggie precursor and model for much of the psycho-sexual-druggie literature that became popular in the 1960s.

Mailer’s work will not be any great loss; he is part of the Boomer-era literary decline that saw the elevation of mediocre writers like Bellow, Kerouac, Roth, and Mailer himself at the expense of people who could a) actually write and b) had something to say about the human condition that didn’t revolve around narcissism and sex with mediocre women. But his cancellation is not without significance, as it demonstrates that evil will always cast even its most celebrated servants aside as soon as they cease to be useful.

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Honest Liberal, Successful Gamma

I have long believed that Garrison Keillor was one of the greatest writers of the Boomer generation, both in terms of style and substance. One of the reasons for my belief is that as a native-born Minnesotan raised in a deeply Christian family, he is too honest and accurate an observer to fail to report even that which directly contradicts his personal preferences, which, as a Scots-Scandinavian hybrid, are unfailingly progressive and liberal. And Keillor himself is refreshingly aware of the contradictions that complete him.

I am all in favor of diversity and inclusivity in theory, but when the pilot comes on the horn and welcomes us from the cockpit, I want to feel that he or she is a Republican. I want to hear authority in the voice, a growliness that comes from having shouted orders at people. I do not want my pilot to come on singing “Off we go into the wild blue yonder” and if he does, I’m off the plane. If it’s a woman pilot, I want her to be crisp and chill, not warm and caring. If she mentions turbulent conditions ahead, I don’t want to hear concern in her voice. I do not want her to thank us for flying — that’s for the flight attendants. I prefer my pilot to be a Republican with military service, preferably at the rank of captain or higher, preferably as an aviator, not in the Quartermaster Corps. I’m a Democrat and I’d be leery of a progressive Democrat pilot whose concern about air pollution might make him reluctant to use full power on takeoff. I don’t want anyone like me up front. No deep thinkers. A high-flier, please.

You might ask, not unreasonably, how a man raised in a good Christian home, with a strong inclination toward honesty and a deep familiarity with Scripture, could fall so completely into error. Part of the answer is his genetics; the Scandinavians are the innocent lambs of the world, psychologically shaped by their need for mutual cooperation to survive in the icy North, as evidenced by his grandmother’s belief in the native superiority of the coloreds, a belief of the sort that can only be formed in perfect ignorance of the subject.

Grandma whistles under her breath, a tuneless music. She cuts me a slice of warm yeasty bread and pours me a cup of Salada tea. Her fingers are knotted at the knuckles. She is a woman of firm beliefs. If you leave your windows open at night, you won’t get sick. Chew your food thirty times before you swallow. There’s no need for herbs if the ingredients are good. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. And once I heard her say, “The colored are better looking, more intelligent, more talented, harder working, more honest, and more loving toward their families than Caucasians.” I was impressed. Her grandfather had been a federal administrator in the South after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, and she got her ideas about people of color from him.

That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life, Garrison Keillor

You could still hear Minnesotans say things like that in the early 1980s. I rather doubt they are so inclined to do so any more, now that they have actual experience living in the vicinity of those hypothetical paragons of intelligence, honesty, and hard work. Now they blame LBJ and the Federal government for ruining them with welfare. They’re still entirely ignorant of the history of Africa and its various peoples, but they are a little less clueless about color now.

The other reason is that he was doomed by nurture as well as nature to gamma status that no amount of height, money, or worldly success could ever balance. His 2018 firing by Minnesota Public Radio for purported “sexually inappropriate incidents” is only remarkable in how long it took for his SSH rank to catch up to him; it was all but inevitable from the start.

  • I took an eye test and had to get glasses, and after that I stayed clear of organized sports and stuck to the disorganized; instead of the respect of my peers, I sought the approval of teachers and aunts.
  • I didn’t shine in high school. I was a B-minus student, thanks to my perfect pitch on multiple choice tests. The correct answer tended to be C. If you went with C, you could probably get a B and B was good enough. And I found a path in life there. I shied away from competition—speech contests, sports, honor roll—I didn’t care if I were 3.0 or 3.6—I wanted to be unique and so turned to writing.
  • I became Garrison. Eventually it wound up on my driver’s license and tax return— my girlfriend Mary married me as Garrison. In my heart, however, I still am Gary: Garrison feels like a fake mustache.
  • I started out playing with ambiguity, a fine way to disguise ignorance. “To be great is to be misunderstood,” said Emerson, so, in search of greatness, I wrote poems that couldn’t be understood because they made no sense.
  • I trace my heterosexuality to the offer of a seat on the bus at the age of thirteen. Boys defended territory. Girls were civilized and shared.

And yet, it is through the ruthless exploitation and chronicling of Gary’s weaknesses, failures, and secret shames that Garrison Keillor became a legitimate and substantial success as a writer. He even, after several failed attempts, managed to establish a lasting marriage with an attractive woman. And there is a lesson in that for the gamma, which is that relentless honesty and systematic perseverance can provide even the deepest double-dyed gamma a means of surmounting his natural patterns of behavior.

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