March 2009 Archives

Home is where the heart is. It's a cliché, but it's a cliché with good reason. Home is never a place, it is a feeling, it's the people that you are with. "Hell is other people." It's nihilism most pure, but its inversion is beauty. Hell might be other people, but so is heaven.

We're a strange group of jumped up monkeys. We prize individuality above all else, but the worst and most damaging torture imaginable is sensory deprivation. Cutting off a person from other people entirely. We lock people in cages to punish them. Without community, even the nominal "hello", "goodbye" of polite social stricture, we go insane. This strange spark of consciousness buried in our skulls sputters in a vacuum. "Cogito ergo sum", I think therefore I am, it's a logical defense against an unknowable reality: if my senses all lie to me then I can still infer that I exist based on my capacity for thought. But while we may be black boxes of thought, we are not made to survive while the whole plane burns around us. Without connection, without community, we wither quickly.

We define ourselves by others, whether by comparison or differentiation. Isolation cells by any logical measure should enhance our identity, they remove all other people, strip down the universe to just ourselves. But the opposite happens, we lose all focus and definition, our consciousness disintegrates. As the distinction becomes sharper between others and ourselves we become more brittle.

The road trip is one of the standbys of any genre, people go from point A to point B, but the magic is all in the journey. Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Lord of the Rings, even the original Star Trek are all about those journeys, those wanderings. We miss home when we are on the road, but we miss the road when we are at home. Some people never manage to find their way home again after long enough on the road. They realize that if you carry your home with you, your family by your side, home as a place rapidly becomes a deprecated concept.

That's why you never can go home again, because although you left a place, you carried your notion of home with you where you went. The place of your old home diverges from your path, you become distinct entities, with distinct histories. You can sometimes bring some fire back to your old place, a measure of salvation in return for memories, though you can never stay. It's why Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings failed in the end. The Scouring of the Shire is the entire point of the story. You grow, you change, you stagger through the fires of hell, which burn away the parts of you that cannot survive. You come out stronger, harder, a different shape than that which came before. You're now a square peg trying to go back to your round hole. But for a story to be complete, the attempt must be made. You don't come full circle until you return home, changed, right wrongs with your newfound strength, leave again melancholy but somehow content.

The last few generations have broken something in America. We scatter across the nation generation by generation, moving nearly constantly. The world is a tiny place compared to even half a century ago. No one is born, lives, and dies all in the same town, not in these latter days. The nation used to be a metaphor for family: motherland, fatherland, homeland. They're all metaphors for a certain way of seeing the state. That's faded now like an old saying that's lost any literal meaning. The nation has become a place, not a family.

It would be one thing if in our internal diaspora we really did carry our homes and families with us. If we carried community on the road. But we don't. We slide from town to town, job to job, an entire nation slipping between the cracks. Community seemed to die with the churches, and for the most part we haven't replaced it with another conduit for connections. Robert Putnam wrote an interesting book a few years back called Bowling Alone. He noticed a trend, one of those curiosities that mean nothing on their own but everything once implications are traced. He noticed that participation in amateur bowling leagues has plummeted even while individuals go bowling by themselves in record numbers.

Our worlds have collapsed to little bubbles, individual isolation cells that we carry everywhere we go. Everyone alone in a crowd. And we are drowning.

We're going to try something a bit new. As some of you may know, I have five completed novels, one of which (Katorga) is up for sale on the Kindle right now, and should be available in paperback within the month. I've decided to try to get a little bit of traction and draw in some readers by publishing one of my other novels on this site.

We'll start it out by publishing 500 word chunks, on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. That comes out to about 10 pages per week, or about a year for the entire novel to work it's way up on to the site. I hope to have it ready for you to order in paperback by the end of summer, if you get engrossed in the story and don't want to wait for the few pages per day. In any case, I'll post the first two chunks today since it's already Tuesday and look forward to any feedback.

I'm not going to promise that I won't do something totally underhanded like post everything except the very last chapter in order to get you to buy the book, because, well, I'm a bastard.

Well, all you Kindle owners out there can now be the proud owner of my first novel Katorga, published today digitally on Amazon. I'm still looking into the paper publication route, but as soon as I can get something rigged for print on demand, I'll post a link for that as well.

Link is here:

Katorga

You can also find it via your kindle directly by searching the store for "Katorga". At the moment, it is the only book on whispernet with that keyword.

It's a very dark and very funny cross between The Gulag Archipelago and Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky. It's not a terrifically long book, but I think that it's a good read, and being the author, who would know better than I? Besides, my mom said it was a beautiful story, and she's utterly objective. When I finished the first draft of my first attempt at a novel and let my mom read it, her response was "well it's okay, but it just doesn't seem like a real book." After years of drinking and darkness, and several more manuscripts, this one gets her seal of approval.

Enjoy.

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord

I couldn't hear rhythm until I was 20 years old. Dancing utterly mystified me. It wasn't so much that I danced badly (though I did), it's that I had no concept of what dancing was. I could not see any correlation between the movement of dance and the sound of the music. It was just gibberish. I couldn't even tap my foot along to a song. I almost failed wave mechanics my sophomore year because the professor explained everything using musical metaphors, which is actually very helpful, if you have the slightest fucking clue about music. For me it was like explaining colors to Helen Keller using jazz as a reference point. I had assumed I was simply musically retarded and that would be the end of it. I didn't know I was missing anything.

Vodka and spandex changed that one delightful evening.

The girl I was seeing at the time was going through a major swing music phase (this was around the time of that six month swing resurgence led by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, etc.). I went to some swing dance classes with her. After a couple of sessions, the teacher just asked me to sit and observe because I ruined the class for whomever I was partnered with. So said girl decided that she'd get me to understand rhythm. The key was listening to part of the music, not all of the music. Just listen to the drums, ignore the rest, the drums are the beat. And with that almost stupidly simple insight that no one had ever seen fit to mention, rhythm entered my world in the form of the purple spandexed ass. It moved as the drums moved. Thank you purple spandexed ass, you and seven screwdrivers changed my perspective of the world.

But you don't really care for music, do you?

I describe this personal musical retardation as an explanation for my own shortcomings: music reviews might as well be written in Greek for how well their descriptions penetrate my musically addled mind. This is not intended as a criticism of the wonderful music reviews of TK and others, but rather an attempt to feel out where my comprehension falls short. I am accustomed to understanding, and so a blind spot is terrifically frustrating. I feel compelled to poke and prod at it until I figure out why it is a blind spot.

Lyrics drive music for me. A paragraph describing how music sounds is almost meaningless to my mind. I know what the adjectives mean, what a "fast," "angry," "energetic," "aggressive" song should sound like, but I don't feel that translate into any sort of visceral reaction. On the other hand, "It's about being too late to tell your estranged father you love him" ("4 A.M."), "Some people say it's about sex, but I think it's a fuck you to god" ("Hallelujah"), "It's a set of letters back and forth between a singer and a fan slowly going insane," ("Stan"). Those are the sort of descriptions that drag me to hunt down a song, regardless of genre.

It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth

I think the highest form of music, the songs that really stick in my soul, are poetry set to music. I heard Leonard Cohen the first time on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack and was hooked. My introduction to Bob Dylan was the U2 cover of "All Along the Watchtower" on Rattle and Hum. These two have been the twin pillars, the poet laureates, piecing together words that draw other artists like sirens on the rocks. Other bands cover their songs, add layers of harmony and melody, flesh out the bones, but the soul still lives in the words.

Meaning is not always easy to wring from the words, but it is there. Good poetry unravels slowly, over the decades of your life, so what seemed triumphant doggerel at fifteen reveals a sad and melancholy heart when you're thirty.

Half the time these type of songs don't even have choruses, because hammering the same verse home again and again just gets in the way of drawing more words. Repetition can be an effective lyrical tool, but lesser artists tend to use it as a crutch, so that they can stretch the four good lines of a song into decent radio length. That's why Nickelback and Creed can manage to sound good in short bursts of 30 seconds, but tally up the non-repeating parts of their albums and you'd be lucky to gleen a unique three minutes out of any of their albums.

The minor fall, the major lift

Some bands aren't poets so much as storytellers, delivering complete narratives packed into a few lines of verse. Other bands spend entire careers writing album after album filled with variations on the same couple of songs about love. Love is a rather boring subject when decoupled from all the myriad context of the rest of living. Ballads seem a poor substitute for songs about the other ninety percent of life.

Flogging Molly is a particular favorite of mine, along with Social Distortion and Pulp. Their songs are difficult to succinctly summarize but always seem to tell the story of something, whether it's reminiscing over the disaster of your twenties ("Ball and Chain"), or telling your son why he shouldn't look up to you ("Little Soul"), or even just the life and times of the craziest pirate to ever haunt the seas ("Salty Dog").

Maybe it's because I've always been a writer first, but it's those stories that draw me to a band. It's amazing how much story can be distilled down into a few well crafted words. Poke around the internet and you can find micro-fiction boards, contests. Complete stories in fifty words or less. Such compressed stories leave all the non-critical details to the reader, they just sweep broad brushstrokes onto the canvas that the mind renders into something complete. Songs about stories work the same way.

The baffled king composing Hallelujah

"The last person on earth sits in a locked room. A knock rattles the door." They say that is the shortest horror story in the world, because of the invisible monster that must lurk beyond the door. It may be the shortest story, but it is only a horror story by dint of the reader. An old time bible-thumper thinks it's a beautiful story because it's Jesus come knockin'. The optimist thinks the knock is proof that someone else survives. The cynic thinks the same thing. The nihilist thinks that the door will open to reveal nothing but a petrified tumbleweed thunking against the door in the forlorn wind blowing across the blasted plains. It's a matter of perspective. It's why Dickens wrote that it was both the best of times and the worst of times. It's why we can peel back so many layers from so few words in poetry and song.

My particular affliction has led to the appearance of an eclectic taste in music, but that's like saying a blind person has an eclectic taste of color palettes. I don't mind twang in country, volume in metal, or the quiet spaces in acoustic folk, not because I musically appreciate all those things, but because I'm not really listening to the music. It's why techno, jazz and classical music more or less baffle me. A song without lyrics is like a novel without words.

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.

In the interests of etymological peace, translation of the title is left as an exercise for the reader in this edition.

"Yes, it's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after." --

Giles, "Lie to Me"

There is an old saying that it is possible to see all of Rome in a day, some of it in a week, and none of it in a month. Writing about heroes feels that way. You can sum them up in a few words quite easily: "The good guys," but people have spent entire careers composing treatises on the nuances of the hero. We'll try to find a sweet spot a bit shorter than a book, but a bit more introspective than three words. That may be an elaborate cop-out avoiding comprehensiveness, and may or not be a round-about preemptive fuck off to accusations of leaving out important elements. But it's midnight in Indiana, my body thinks it's eight pm, I've been running on fumes since I got up at four am my time, and my shuttle leaves for the airport in four hours. So let's talk about heroes.

Our society is free and loose with the term heroes, using it as a superlative for anyone who does the slightest positive thing. Reporters sniff out heroic human interest stories the way a randy dog hunts down a cheesy crotch. The mailman who stops delivering junk mail? Hero. The angry centenarian who chases armed robbers out of 7/11 with naught but her umbrella and her fury? Total hero. That kid with AIDs who faced down adversity and discrimination to make a real difference? See, I totally made you think the third one was going to be something ludicrous like a monkey who could suck his own balls, and you almost caught yourself before laughing automatically, but not quite, so you were laughing at a kid with AIDs. Asshole.

"The real heroes are the guys who didn't make it back." It's repeated often enough in one form or another, but it hints at our awareness of a deeper understanding of heroism. Heroes are more than just the good guys, more than protagonists, more than common people who manage something extraordinary like rescuing babies from burning buildings or storming nightmarish beaches of steel and smoke. Heroes are the ones who stare into the abyss so that the rest of us don't have to.

Joseph Campbell- - no one seriously thought we'd make it through this without dropping some serious Hero's Journey references did they? -- identified the common metaphor that we use for heroes. We talked about the metaphor of monsters, this is the metaphor of their counter. He identified the symbolic journey that our conception of the hero follows. The hero suffers, succeeds, and ultimately is so changed that he can never truly return home. In saving the village, he destroys his own place in it. At the end of stories, heroes must disappear, they cannot linger. It's true in our real life interpretation of heroes as well. Alexander dies of malaria a thousand miles from Macedonia, Gandhi and Martin Luther King never see the futures for which they fought. When it's not true, we deny it, we ignore the rest of the hero's life. Napoleon dies without a whimper in his final exile, McArthur fades away. We cling to our metaphors even when they don't precisely reflect the reality.

"Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." It's not just a cute turn of phrase. The martyrs are to some degree the lucky heroes, because they don't live long enough to take on the taint of the monsters that they fight. Die young, stay pure. Fight monsters long enough and you become a monster. The metaphor of the monster is wrapped around the metaphor of the hero. One does not exist without the other. But that works both ways. The monster causes the world to create heroes, but the hero causes the world to create monsters.

"All progress depends on the unreasonable man. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself."

-- George Bernard Shaw

Senior year of high school, I took a literature elective on Science Fiction. The centerpiece of the class was the final two weeks of the semester when an elaborate trial took place, students playing jury, attorneys, and characters from the novel. We put Paul Atreides on trial for being harmful to society. Frank Herbert has said that he wrote Dune in part as a cautionary tale against the role of heroes, that they are not an absolute good.

In well written stories, every character thinks that he is the protagonist. That's what real life is: everyone, including Hitler, thinks that he is the protagonist of his own story. They think that they are the good guys. But that's also what makes heroes problematic; they cast things into black and white, into fundamentalism. You can't have heroes without villains, and in the real world where everyone thinks they are the hero of their own piece, that means that the villains are the opposite side of the same coin. Villains are just the other guy's hero.

In shitty stories this isn't the case, the hero is distinct from the villain. Reality (and good stories) just doesn't work that way. This doesn't mean that there aren't good and evil, that everything is just a gray moral relativism where nothing is wrong and nothing is right. It's more to say that heroes and villains are the same fundamental force acting on society, differentiated only by whether we agree with the direction it pushes.

Without heroes, we don't progress. We don't build better things without breaking down the old. Heroes are the societal equivalent of DNA mutation. The right mutation, the right little misinterpretation of a few base pairs can create a wonder. Ninety times out of a hundred it does nothing meaningful, all sound and fury. Nine times out of a hundred it causes some variety of cancer that rips apart the entire body politic unless excised. But that one time out of a hundred it can create something beautiful, something that shatters societal inertia and drives evolution. We can't have one without the other. We can't have a society that produces heroes without the wreckage of failed attempts.

Heroes aren't all saints, they have elements of horror bred into their bones, else they couldn't fight monsters in the first place. It is so tempting to insist that this doesn't have to be so, that we could conceive of a hero without the flaws, that flaws are just literary devices not inherent qualities. But the flaws don't just make a hero more interesting, or more human, they are intrinsic to heroism itself. You can't take away Ender's sympathy for those who abused him without destroying the empathy that made him a leader and commander. You can't take away Batman's capacity for brutal violence without eliminating the will to stalk the streets in the first place. The qualities that make them heroes are the exact same qualities that make them monsters.

Morality isn't a zero sum game. The good you do never offsets the evil you do or vice versa. Good and evil don't cancel each other out on a balance sheet so that you can beat Ma'at's feather. It was one of Angel's epiphanies. You don't get a free pass on doing something evil just because you're still ahead in the bigger score, and no amount of good deeds can ever make up for an act of evil. The duality of man and heroes is that that they are both simultaneously good and evil.

The banality of evil derives from this duality. It shouldn't be a wonder that a man exterminates Jews by day and goes home to read his son stories before bed. Only in bad stories is evil ever anything but banal. There is always something human and redeemable about every villain, because there are no villains.

"Answer me this - just one question, that's all. If the Doctor had never visited us, if he'd never chosen this place... on a whim... would anybody here have died?"

-- Joan Redfern

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.

"This can only mean that the Republic has fallen." -Lucius Vorenus
"And yet, the sky is still above us and the earth still below. Strange." - Titus Pullo

This is a story of how democracy dies.

Rome is the mother of nations. The legend lurking at the dawn of history. The altar at which our laws and governments still worship. Every courthouse and capital echoes the ruins of that ancient city we still haunt. Legalese is still half Latin a millennium since the last native speakers died. Our senators and theirs would hardly notice the difference between each other, besides the togas and Italian suits.

Rome was a young state in an old world. Just old enough to feel confident and experienced, young enough to think it would last forever. For two thousand years, Egyptian slaves had built desert mountains for god kings. Italy was such a backwater for so long that Alexander overran the world from Greece to India, but didn't bother hopping the Adriatic. Less than three centuries later, Caesar thought he was special. Ozymandias and all that. Empires always believe they're eternal because men never believe they're mortal.

They conquered through ingenuity, through a granite faith that their law was the only law. Anything outside of Roman law was barbarian. Order was their one true god, immortalized in all the identical temples and standardized roads. Rational repetition fueled the legions: men trained to fight as a single machine, gears and clockwork carved from flesh, individuality burned off in the smelter. They tamed ancient Egypt, yoked Spain and France, pillaged Greece for fertile minds. They destroyed Carthage so utterly that atomic weapons could not have improved on the job. Who now remembers the American Indians?

They were the first combination of that most potent meme of state: the imperial republic. They always insist that they rule by force for the good of the people. "For the republic!" Say it enough and you believe your own press. They were the embodiment of that ancient dichotomy of war and peace. Pax Romana. Pax Britannica. Pax Americana. It's lightning in a bottle, catching the fever for empire along with the spasmodic beauty of freedom. An unstable equilibrium cannot last: either the empire exhausts itself or it devours its own children. The British did the former, the Romans the latter, America's decision is pending. Rome is the story of that devouring.

"The Roman people are not crying out for clean elections. They are crying out for jobs. They are crying out for clean water, for food, for stability and peace." -Posca

Rome presents a senate of aristocrats, bickering about rules and propriety while the mob owns the street and legions push out the frontiers. It is a state under constant siege both from within and without. This is not representative democracy, but some ancestral relation. There are is an essential freedom, at least for citizens: you may speak your mind and do as you will. And that is the heart of democracy, self governance rather than state governance.

Caesar conquers his own country while the citizens cheer. The gulf between democracy and populism is the distinction between the people as an actor and the people as a tool. Caesar wields the population as a sword. Here's the real catch though: democracy can never be taken away, it can only be given away. One of the great tragedies of history is how the people are constantly unaware of their own power, even as rulers harness it. De Tocqueville said "The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money." Caesar buys the Roman people with their own money, just as Octavian later does. And they love him for it.

"So this is how liberty dies: to thunderous applause." George Lucas wrote at least one true thing.

The senators can only destroy Caesar by becoming exactly the horror they hate in him: knives in the senate, blood on their hands.

In another story, Brutus would be the hero. Shakespeare saw it: "This was the noblest Roman of them all." What matters more? Freedom or security? Dante placed three men in the innermost sanctum of the ninth circle of hell, three men eternally trapped in the jaws of Satan himself: Judas, Brutus and Cassius. In the wake of the dark ages, the supreme sin was betraying order to chaos.

But without the support of the masses, the senate must trade one enemy for another. They invite Octavian in, give him the legitimacy he lacks.

A trick of Latin: male and female noun endings. Bellator/bellatrix: warrior/amazon. Male and female sides of the same coin. Senator/senatrix: senator/whore. Male and female sides of the same coin. Words lie, languages don't.

"Cut off his hands and nail them to the Senate doors." -Mark Antony

Before modern times, it was a given that the body of the state was analogous to the body of the ruler. The ruler was the state. It is the antithesis of our "by the people, for the people" conception of the state. Likewise, the psychology of the ruler became the psychology of the state. Octavian's sexual repression inevitably becomes codified. The grand orgies are outlawed, the state regulates promiscuous behavior. The superego binds sex with shame. I didn't bring Freud into this; Octavian did that himself whilst screwing his sister and making war upon his mother's lover.

Id, ego, superego. It's a cliche, but models become cliches because they fit so well. Pullo and Antony are all id: violence, wine and sex. Vorenus and Brutus are all ego: agonizing compromise between the id and reality. Caesar and Octavian are all superego: moral superiority and calculating control.

Civil wars are always about psychology because if the state is a body, then a war within must be a spiritual one. Ego holds a tenuous balance between id and superego, but by the end of this particular story, every ego-character is dead, every id-character dead or vanquished. Without balance, the system is unsustainable in the long run. You cannot kill part of your own soul without losing it all.

And so Pullo lives, vanishing into the masses with his stolen son. The Republic dies, the Empire is born.

"The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the Northern forests who were." - Thoreau

This article was originally published on the mighty Pajiba.