I bought and own

            the very definition

                        of chagrin.

Like Marsyas skinned

my pride is stripped.

Denuded before you

I stand shivering and thin.

I cannot be who I am.

Once flayed with God’s flensing knife

we are so frail.

But under all the blood and strife

we have the need for love.

SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!

OK. I finally finished watching the Watchmen series on HBO. Not to sound too Celtic about it, but it’s a big bunch of Yes and No for me. Veidt can catch a bullet in his bar hands and punch a horseshoe into a man’s heart but Wade Till aka Looking Glass can whack him on the head with a wrench? And Laurie Blake can outsmart the smartest man on the planet? Alright. Here’s how I would have ended this show: Doctor Manhattan survives. Why? Well, for sentimental reasons, clearly. His relationship with Angela should be allowed some space to exist. I think the real surprise for an HBO series would be a happy ending.

Beyond that there is the issue of Doctor Manhattan himself being a real problem. The fact that a human being could attain such power is a real kink. I mean that it is a moral hornets’ nest, a giant philosophical wrinkle. For the same reason that I don’t think Dracula should have been killed off like a rabid dog in Bram Stoker’s novel, I think Doctor Manhattan should be almost impossible to kill. The threat of omnipotence should remain. That’s right, I said threat. Gods can’t be dealt with so easily. Humanity can’t create a super being and then just hit reset. Jesus didn’t get rid of Satan. Zeus can’t go against Moira. In the best science fiction, science doesn’t solve all of humanity’s problems. Science creates new, inexorable, ineradicable problems. The goal of technology, of the first tools, is power. Remember the first section of 2001: A Space Odyssey (it wasn’t terribly like Homer’s Odyssey, was it?). The end of power can only be divinity, immortality, omnipotence.

Back to the show. The teaser of whether or not Angela can or cannot walk on water? That’s typical HBO, Sopranos-esque BS. Come on, man. Commit to a narrative!

Scott Fitzgerald over at ROC Vox Recording and Productions will be doing more pod casts in the style of radio dramas. The stories are mine, taken from Roland Nake’s adventures.

Imagine if Harry Potter fell into Raymond Chandlers world. Imagine if Fletch had a double major in English and philosophy. Imagine if Terry Pratchett had Dashiell Hammett’s baby. It looks like 1937, but it ain’t! Not unless mugawomp’s caused the Great Depression, which these clowns refer to as the Grand Embarrassment. Oh, and it’s been going on for forty years!

I’m excited because I think this is a great way to get to know the green dick. People will see that it’s not just a bunch of penis jokes… even if they do call buildings erections. Hey, English is a really strange language and these people are very strange. Maybe weirder than us! Although, I doubt it. They at least have working public transit in the state of Kaliphornia!

I’m hoping this will draw some attention to Nake. I really want to bring out the completed novel: The Unbreakable Roland Nake.

Did you know, in German his name is pronounced Nock? I’m thinking there’s a story in there!

There will be spoilers. I finished watching Game of Thrones, this week. I was slow to get on board. First, there was the problem of not having HBO. Then there was the way people talked about it. It sounded like it was as kill-happy as The Walking Dead, where the showrunners were happy to kill off a good and interesting character each week. For no real reason. Remember the death of Beth? Randomness is part of horror and it’s a part that that show enthusiastically embraced.

Second, there was the issue of misogyny. Everyone, it seemed was sure that GOT was promoting violence against women, that it desensitized viewers. This is a really fraught topic. I will say right from the start that I don’t think there is any one answer to this question. Responses will vary. I’m sure it will disappoint some that I don’t think the violence against women depicted in the show was either excessive, gratuitous, or misogynistic. That doesn’t mean that I don’t understand how some people could find it excessive, gratuitous, or misogynistic. Good people will disagree on matters such as these and we need to allow each other to disagree.

The third thing that kept me tepid on the whole thing was that it was on HBO. The Sopranos’ infamous ending wasn’t inspiring confidence. People whose views I respect were of the opinion that Westworld also went off the rails pretty earlier on. When the finale of GOT elicited such an outcry, I felt my suspicions were confirmed. Here’s what I think: the ending of Game of Thrones was perfectly anticipated. All of the foreshadowing pointed that way. That Jon Snow did what he did was not only where the plot had been going all along, it was overdetermined. It was within his character to do what he knew was both right and hard — to the point of it being tragedy. He had in fact done it before. And if he hadn’t stopped the Dragon Queen, his sisters and Winterfell would have been destroyed. He took the only action that made sense for him. Failure to do the hard necessary thing would have been an act of cowardice, and Jon was never a coward. That Daenerys was destroyed, was perfectly in keeping with the theme and plot of the show. She may not have wanted to become her father, but it was her fate. That we didn’t want it makes it tragedy.

As for the brutality, I can’t be an arbiter of taste for anyone, but I can say that the violence, for me, rings true of the world of GOT, and also our own world. There was violence against women, yes, but there was equal violence against men. Women were raped. Theon Greyjoy and Varys were painfully neutered. One of the most shocking deaths was how one of my favorite characters, Prince Oberyn, met his end. It doesn’t seem to me that the showrunners were ever interested in celebrating violence against women. But again, judgments will diverge. There were plenty of strong women. And one of the most evil characters I’ve encountered in film, Cersei, was never made into a caricature. She was never a “motiveless malignity.” There were, however, plenty of women who figured elsewhere on the continuum of good to bad. Brienne of Tarth was almost wholly good. Arya Stark was a very complex character. We can imagine her becoming another Daenerys Targeryan. The main and crucial difference being that Arya never showed any desire to hold power. The brutality also stands in for our own world. It’s not just that Daenerys reduces King’s Landing to smoking rubble. It’s that it calls to mind Dresden in WW2. It also calls to mind what we fear will be the fate of women and children at the hands of the Taliban. The world of GOT is savage and cruel. So is ours.

Where is this place? On the west coast of The American Colonial Republic. Hell’s Half ACRe, to some. The Republic, for short. The Rip, for even shorter.

Hyopolis is the fastest growing city in the country, and the third largest after New York and Philadelphia, the nation’s capital. Why is it spelled wrong? you ask them. “It ain’t,” they’ll tell you. “The goddamn Meckers can’t spell.” The educated might tell you that the name comes from the Greek and refers to the bringer of beauty. Others will let you know just how much horseshit they think that is. Those people are generally of Spanish descent and not wrong. The aboriginal peoples will just look at you with patient perplexity, wondering how anyone could be so stupid.

And now Hyopolis is home of the Warthogs Football Association. That’s soccer, to some. It’s also home to magical monsters and beasts, ghosts, wizards, wolf people, manticores, trolls, hell-badgers, yales, krokottas, mugawomps, and giant rats. Garden City is well known for its gnome enclave. But that doesn’t really give you the flavor of the place — rotten. Fetid. Toxic. Corrupt. All of the cops are crooked. All of the crooks are twisted, filthy, and murderous. The subways are functional. It’s not like they’re completely incompetent.

I have revised and expanded The Green Detective Volume One by TW Ladd. This time there’s a story starring my purple PI, Ingrid Nielsen. It’s available at Amazon — follow the hyperlink above.

Currently, I’m working on setting up a Patreon account. The goal is to hire a really great cover artist for a novel-length murder mystery, set in Hyopolis, Kaliphornia. Ingrid Nielsen fights for her life to find the truth about who killed her new employer. Was she the real target? This plot has a lot of great action, humor, and heart. I’m sure fans will love it.

The Damaged Angel should be out this fall.

Why I hate movie critics part 1 zillion and whatever. Luc Besson’s Anna (2019) was actually good. I believe Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 38%. Anyway, I had fun and it makes you feel. It also connects with Sophocles’ Antigone, which I will return to, in that it has a protagonist who is defiant. Matthew Arnold didn’t care for Antigone because the Victorians weren’t into defiance. They wanted compliance. I mean, strap yourself onto this dynamo. It will take us into unending progress, right? We don’t trust systems anymore. That’s part of our problem. It’s interesting how there’s a very strong paradox in our times: people so desperately needing to belong. They will even die in order to get in the group. The liberals won’t fool them with their vaccines. “You can’t take away my freedom!” They commit their lives to an anti-system that cannot work. Build a wall. Let the viruses in. Give everything to the super rich because we aren’t lazy and we won’t be the suckers who give handouts to the greedy moochers. Yep. We all love defiance, now.

If we aren’t all postmodernists now, we are still in the Postwar period. That was when there was the final shift away from the Victorians. It didn’t all die with Edward on the throne and Modernism in the air. It took a while for the tide to truly go out, for faith in progress to die off. The positivists were happy throughout the 50s. Hippies were always idealists. Maybe it was the Dadaists who got there first. We were all for progress but Auschwitz and the Bomb killed something. Not everything. Even into the ’70s and ’80s we were thinking that the Year 2000 would usher in a utopia with hotels on the Moon. Cooperation and resistance coexisted. And it wasn’t just that one group held with duty and the other went with desire. Michel Foucault with his clubby male soirees was in his own way conservative. He thought AIDS was an invented disease because, well, so many are invented diseases. What can be more conservative then a rejection of science and what new data can do to our view of the world? Maybe because language came so easily to him and mathematics with much greater difficulty, he shied away from areas where he didn’t excel. I don’t know but Foucault had a lifelong desire to strip away the façade and get to the stable truth beneath, while rejecting the importance of science, a realm of dizzying changes of theory and evidence. Science was created in the 18th century. Freedom is timeless. Looking at Foucault’s writings on “biopolitics” doesn’t make it much of stretch to say he wouldn’t be a fan of Dr. Fauci or the CDC. You can’t trust the government to quarantine the right people. They’ll just use the opportunity to eradicate the enemies of the state…

However this change came about from Matthew Arnold’s day, transgression became the highest value of the postmodernist age, to paraphrase the scholar David Coward. We have a warm place in our hearts for the outlaw. Even those with signs in the yards proclaiming that they Back the Badge have no problem rooting for the rulebreaker — not in a movie or TV show. Why not? We can defy logic too. These are unreasonable times.

You can’t be too careful what you wish for.

It has probably been a decade now since a guy unfriended and then blocked me. That’s not the interesting part. We weren’t what you would call close friends. We were barely acquainted. The interesting part has to do with who he is professionally, and what seems to have been the source of his animus. I believe he’s a law professor. I know he certainly got his law degree from an Ivy League school. We had had few interactions on Facebook up until the day he blocked me. Those interactions had always been positive. Then one day I started a thread about mortality. Try as I might, I can’t remember if this was before or after my wife was diagnosed with cancer. I have no idea what prompted this online discussion. Was it the death of a famous person? My grandfather’s passing? My mother-in-law’s? Was it a reflection on my mentor’s sudden and freak death by drowning in 1999? I don’t know.

            What I do remember is that I had said something about my own desire to live forever. Immortality – nice work if you can get it. This wish was expressed half as a joke. I also recall the substance of my acquaintance’s reaction: Grow up. I don’t remember the exact words but I think it in part did include the phrase, “That’s what being an adult is all about.” You aren’t really an adult until you rid yourself of your foolish desire to live forever – that was the general thrust.

            I may have responded to his comment. I’m not sure. I think I said that this was only a wish that I have. This is not a belief. I don’t have a plan on how to achieve everlasting life. I’m not trying to convert anyone. I don’t have a religious agenda.

            A few days or even weeks after that, I discovered that the man had blocked me subsequent to this exchange when someone on another person’s thread tagged him in a comment. I could see his name, but not any of his comments. I entered his name in the search field. Sure enough, he was gone.

            This man’s reaction isn’t theoretically surprising. I’ve encountered a lot of people who are what you might call militant atheists. Some of my friends even call them atheist fundamentalists. They have this simmering rage toward religion. Like Richard Dawkins, they are on a mission to push humanity past all foolish desires, to wake us all from our dogmatic slumber. What our species needs is to live by reason alone.

            Now, I don’t know about other writers, but I feel it’s my job to put into words as much as I possibly can about human experience. Can everything be expressed? Of course not. Sometimes it won’t be the naming but the attempt to name that is important. This strange interaction I had with the Law Guy suggests something to me: some of us wish we could surgically remove irrationality from our brains. AT some point, this school of thought goes, human beings will beyond the need for religion or fantasy. This strikes me as very Puritanical. I am aware that many people see Puritanism as excessively focused on sex. I tend to use the term more metaphorically. I know people will say that Puritans didn’t or don’t like sex. Such people have never met Baptists. Puritans love sex. They are often obsessed with it. They don’t want YOU to enjoy sex. But purity tests are common to many systems. Stalinism demanded it. Democrats are plagued with in-fighting due to it. Show me a club or a sect and I’ll find the purists. For them everything is simple. Everything is black and white. Everything is categorical. Have you yourself fallen into this trap? I know I have. More frequently than I would care to admit.

            What role can purity play for the fiction-writer? I think s/he needs to confront it at every turn. Whenever there is some Stoic telling us that self-abnegation is the better part of valor, we need to make that a focus of the drama. Someone telling us “Thou shalt not feel x” should be the cynosure of our art. In the case of Law Guy’s rationalism, it doesn’t matter if you agree with him or me, the writer will have to agree that the Big Fight should be all about this desire and the rule that would stamp it out.

            Let’s assume that we all see the intrinsic drama in someone being told they MUST not dream of immortality. Let’s assume that we all agree that death is the last enemy. Let’s assume we see the point of Achilles in the Underworld saying, “I’d rather serve as another man’s servant, as a poor peasant without land, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead.” Let’s assume we don’t scoff at the Egyptian kings’ mania for immortality. We’ll set aside Plato and Dante and William Wordsworth’s intimations, of Dostoevsky’s cris de coeur. We’ll shelf whatever Dorian Gray is. We’ll discard T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. Why do this? In order to ask this: Can we live without a wish to be spared dying? To have our friends be spared as well? Is it even possible? Or will it always be in there? What is the point of all technology if not to finally have power over death? But maybe that should not be the point of all technology. Maybe we should reject that goal on moral grounds. Can we? Are we capable of doing that? Go ahead, try not to desire too much.

            I will even attempt to build some sort of framework for how we might effect this denial. We could become, to borrow from Keats, almost half in love with death. How might that affect policy? Would we care so much about kids in cages at our borders if we were truly half in love with death. Or how do we feel about deaths that arose because of the use (or abuse?) of opioids? Were not those people simply eased into the inevitable? Would being half in love with death mean that responded differently to the covid epidemic?             Well, the rationalist says, we don’t have to go too far in any one direction. Really? We don’t? It is humanly possible to ensure that not just America, but that the whole planet doesn’t go too far in any one direction? No. Not now. But it will be. One day. When the human being is no longer in its irrational infancy.
            I don’t think we’ll ever live that long.
            All of that is really not my theme for today, it’s not the real reason that I write this. I write this as a note to myself that not only do I still see this argument as the one I am most interested in having as a writer of fiction, but that I have discovered a means of dramatizing this argument.
            I have found a character into whose mouth I will put certain words. I’ve found a situation that is perfect for this discussion. It has taken many years longer than I had expected, but I’ve finally found a means of expressing the very deepest human yearning I know of. And I’m damn glad I did.

            It seems to me that the theme of books like Foucault’s Pendulum is be careful what you wish for. Don’t get carried away by your dreams and fantasies. The imagination is dangerous ground. As Milton said of Adam and Eve in the Garden, “O yet happiest if ye seek / No happier state and know to know no more.” But can the genie be put back in the bottle? Can human beings really suppress their wildest desires? Can the rational mind hold the passions in check forever?