Tag: Elmer Gantry

Red Roses for a Blue Lady

Here we are on a cold Sunday morning and I hope everyone is doing as well as they can this morning. I went to bed early and slept well–I really do think adding another to the pile of blankets, and its additional weight, is making a difference. Today I have to do some reading and some writing, go to the gym and make groceries. I feel rested and awake this morning, so as I slurp down my coffee and wake up while Sparky wants my lap in the easy chair I have to admit I feel pretty good this morning. Maybe I shouldn’t let myself sleep so late on Saturdays? I don’t know, but the coffee is hitting the spot and I do feel more rested than I did yesterday, so your guess is as good as mine. It’s kind of gray outside this morning, and it’s forty degrees–yikes–but it’ll get warmer later once the sun is higher in the sky.

We watched LSU Gymnastics compete against three of the best teams in the country yesterday, and with half of their usual competitors out with an injury, they only came in second by three tenths of a point; and Haleigh Bryant can make that difference up all by herself, not to mention the other two powerhouses who sat this meet out–which bodes well for the rest of the season. It’s so cool knowing they are the defending national champions! We also watched some of the Australian Open last night, and I went to bed early. I also managed to get some chores done around here, and overall, it was a pretty good day. I don’t think I even went outside yesterday, to be honest–which is always a good day for me.

I spent some time yesterday morning with Ode to Billy Joe, and while Raucher is a very good writer, he doesn’t really know how to write for teenagers, I think. Just because the story is set in the early 1950s and people were more innocent (?) back then in theory, it’s almost like reading something from a past civilization, and in some ways it kind of is. Raucher tries very hard not to condescend to rural Southerners, but there is a touch of that “zoo animal” thing to the story, if that makes any sense? It doesn’t quite seem real, and Bobbie Lee, the female lead, seems so child-like it’s hard to believe she’s supposed to be fourteen, and “receiving callers”–did Southern girls still say that in the 1950’s? It’s like something from The Glass Menagerie, and I don’t know if that archaic social phrase was in use, if at all. But there’s definitely more depth to the book than there was to the movie, and I think I’m going to end up enjoying the book more than I did the movie–despite the beautiful presence of Robby Benson and his amazing blue eyes and surprisingly deep voice.

Thinking of Ode to Billy Joe being a historical now made me realize that my own 70s book is kind of an artifact of another time, too. Researching and remembering things from that time of my life is always a bit of a surprise; things that had been locked away in a corner of my brain coming back to the front of the memory banks. Television shows and commercials, the looming Bicentennial (which was, at the time, shockingly commercialized; although the Tricentennial–which I won’t make it to, but hopefully the country will–will be even worse), the gas shortages and economic fears, the ever-present threat of nuclear war and annihilation, the never-ending conflicts in the Middle East, and the massive clean-up of the country’s air, water and litter. Top Forty radio was a weird mishmash of all kinds of music, from the bubblegum of the Osmonds to the Rolling Stones, Queen, and the Who to horrible novelty songs that were incredibly popular and were overplayed to death to the point I never want to hear any of them ever again, and everyone watched American Bandstand on Saturdays to hear music and see the latest dance moves. I am really looking forward to writing it. I also have two short stories to complete sooner rather than later, and of course as always I have too much to do in too little time–but I can make it work.

I’ve also, since the election, been thinking about how to resist the new regime and the inherent hatreds, cruelties, and horrors that are coming with them. Our only hope as a country depends on the Republican-controlled Senate (well, Republicans plus the bootlicking traitor John Fetterman) actually standing up for the Constitution, and looking for a spine on the Right is as fruitless as a snipe hunt. I am not getting involved with the Democratic Party, because it feels like I’ve been throwing my time, money and energy on them while they just roll over and play dead since the 1990s; and nowadays seems to be no different. Here’s the thing about our system; the only difference between the two parties since World War II has primarily been on domestic and interior policy; the foreign policy has always been the same, and a lot of bad things have been done by our government in the name of “national security” and our endless thirst for oil. This changed a bit under the MAGA monarchy the last time around–turning our backs on traditional allies while cozying up to Russia, North Korea, and China (Ivanka needs her trademarks!). I also love how the MAGAts are so quick to whine and complain against the forever wars they fully supported, and does anyone else remember their toxic patriotism on the eves of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq? How questioning the invasion decisions was basically treason and not supporting the military and pissing on the graves of the 9/11 dead? Because I sure the fuck do, and I also remember how the Right created cancel culture for the Dixie Chicks, as country music began to swing from being about the working class and resisting the rich? It’s also amusing to me that they complain about “forever wars” without remembering that the same people they are supporting today are the exact same people who lied to them and whipped them up into a disgusting “patriotic” frenzy?

I spent some time this weekend thinking about writing as activism, and that it used to be just that; my very existence and my career are made political by evangelicals and others of their ilk, and I had no say in that at all. Would I prefer to be left alone to live my life and make my own decisions without government interference? Absolutely. Is that ever going to happen? Not as long as trash and liars and false prophets continue to abuse the faith and the faithful for money, power, and control. How can anyone actually be a Christian and believe that the Prosperity Gospel of wolves in sheep’s clothing like Joel Osteen and other con artists of his ilk? Sinclair Lewis exposed all of this horror with Elmer Gantry, which is still as current as it was when first published in the early 20th century. Maybe Elmer Gantry, along with All the King’s Men, should be required reading in high school–but high schoolers won’t care anymore now than they did when I was one. (Also, back to the 1970s–there wasn’t an expectation that everyone would go to college, either. Only five kids from my graduating class went to college, I think, I could be off by one or two, out of forty-eight.) I’ve not thought of my writing as a way to make political statements–or at least I haven’t in a long time, at any rate, but someone pointed out to me several years ago (or longer, who knows anymore?) that my work was a lot more important than I’ve ever thought or believed; I did document what gay life was like in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina changed everything. I also documented life in New Orleans in general, before , during and after a hurricane. I’ve written about gay con artists and corrupt hateful politicians and the far right and evangelicals and race and homophobia and misogyny. I often explore something that I find interesting in my books so I can learn more about the topic I am writing about as well as process my own complicated feelings about sensitive subjects. I even wrote a throuple into the Scotty series long before that ever became a subject for conversation in the community. It’s weird to think that my first two novels were released before Lawrence overturned sodomy laws nationally. My sex-life was against the law until I was forty-two. Forty fucking two.

I was filling out the pre-production form for Hurricane Season Hustle Friday, and I went to Amazon to look at the page for Mississippi River Mischief to see if information I needed was there–it wasn’t–but I also noticed I have forty-seven reviews and an average ranking of four and a half stars, which was kind of a surprise, albeit a pleasant one. That meant that overall there had to be more five star reviews than any other kind, else the average wouldn’t be over four, you know? This was a very pleasant surprise, in all honesty; I never look at Amazon pages for my books and especially never at the reviews; likewise, I will never go wading in the fetid swamp that is Goodreads. Who needs that aggravation? But as I said, it was a pleasant surprise, one that almost tempted me to look at the others, but I resisted the urge. I am more emotionally stable now than I’ve ever been in my life before, but why borrow trouble? And sure, it could be another ego boost but it could also be a blow.

And the last thing I need right now is something to rock my already shaky foundations.

California continues to burn, and people continue to expose how dark and twisted their souls and psyches are. It’s beginning to sound like most of these fires were started as arson–which would definitely count as a terrorist attack on Los Angeles, in my opinion; if Luigi shooting that fucking piece of shit counts as terrorism, burning down billions of dollars of property and destroying people’s lives as well as killing some of them definitely is an act if terror. Please don’t be a dick about the fires on-line, people. I’ve lived through a different kind of “act of God” that basically destroyed my city and generational wealth with it. Angelenos are still in shock and are going to be for a long time. This is a serious trauma, and believe me when I say a lot of Angelenos are going to be medicated for years to come. I’m still not entirely sure I’ve gotten over Katrina, in all honesty. So, for God’s sake, show some empathy and compassion for their suffering. Playing the blame game or bringing politics into this is fucking bullshit, so can you not do that? There’s no place in this country that is safe from an unexpected natural disaster.

And trust me, when it happens to you–you will hate those people. I’ve never forgiven any of them, including Chicago Bears fans. I had hoped that disgusting child rapist Dennis Hastert would die in prison, but he remains proof that only the good die young. Henry Kissinger and Anita Bryant is more evidence of that as well.

So, think before you post or comment. I hate Florida and Texas and their politics, but I also worry about them and try to do what I can whenever a hurricane devastates them.

And if you’re feeling smug and judgy–I’m looking at you in particular, Louisiana MAGA racists, remember that when a hurricane comes crashing through your home town.

And on that note, I am going to my chair to read my book for a bit before I get to work. I worked on the book yesterday and it went very well; I am feeling good about writing again and think I am going to be able to hit my stride again sometime soon. Huzzah! Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll talk to you again later at some point.

Oh, those wacky ballerinos!

We Didn’t Start the Fire

As Banned Books Week comes to a close, it was exponentially more important and timely this year than before–given the Right Wing’s vicious, well-organized and ultimately doomed to failure attempts to control what people are allowed to fucking read in this country (for the record, you shrewish harpy lying “Moms4Liberty”–the First Amendment exists because the Founding Fathers foresaw the rise of people like you, and amended the Constitution to stop your skank, anti-American asses).

I’ve participated in Banned Books Week in the past; I’ve certainly done readings during it (the ones I remember reading from are Annie on My Mind by the late Nancy Garden–which was not only burned but tried for obscenity--and Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis; I should have read from Peyton Place at least once). I’ve not participated in a long time–haven’t been asked, to be honest–and so I don’t know if anything is going on in New Orleans for it, or whether it’s something we no longer do here, or what; but I never get offended when I’m not included. Life’s too short for that–and yes, I am well aware that such a thing used to offend me, which was incredibly stupid. I’m really sorry I spent so much of my life and my time allowing negativity such free rein in my head.

The first time I did Banned Books Night, it was after Hurricane Katrina (at least the first one I remember) and it was at the House of Blues; Poppy Z. Brite also read, and I gave him a ride home afterwards; it was in that car and on that ride that he convinced me I could write another Scotty book despite everything that had happened to New Orleans since I’d written the last one; that’s why Vieux Carré Voodoo was dedicated to him.

He gave me Scotty back after a very difficult time, and I will always be grateful for that,

Above are the covers of my seven of my first books. They all look pretty racy, don’t they? But only two of them are actually erotica–Full Body Contact and FRATSEX. Those were the only two erotica anthologies I edited under my own name before switching to Todd Gregory.

The reason I am sharing the covers is because the covers is what the Concerned Women for America, Virginia Chapter, used to get me banned personally (not just my books!) from a high school in suburban Richmond. They used the covers to try to get the Gay-Straight Alliance at a high school shut down, and they used those covers in the House of Burgesses to try to get GSA’s banned at every state-supported school in the state of Virginia.

They came for me based on the covers, not the content–because they had not read the content.

And please, bear in mind, they did not include the erotica anthology covers in their attempts.

In other words, they called me a gay pornographer but didn’t use the actual pornography I actually had done to try to get me banned.

There’s a book in the entire experience at some point for me; I’ve always intended to write a book about the experience called Gay Porn Writer–because that was how they branded me, and the news media, in their attempts to be fair and unbiased, gladly picked up that branding without question or thought or without even looking into me and my writing career in the slightest bit. It was also my first experience with learning that the media cannot be trusted; they are not driven by a desire to print and report the truth; they’re looking for clickbait headlines that drive clicks or people to pick up the paper (print was still very much a thing back then) and which headline would you click on:

Gay author banned from local high school; First Amendment questions raised

or

Gay porn writer’s high school appearance cancelled.

The second one is a lot more enticing, as well as concerning, don’t you think?

That, to me, was the most interesting thing of the entire experience; the perceptions, smears, slanders, and how no one was even the slightest bit interested in the truth. The question that was at the heart of the entire thing is precisely what is driving the bans and book removals and so forth now: how old is old enough to know that queer people exist, that literature and art about us exists, and that we’ve always been here despite being regularly erased from history. It also begged the question we are fighting yet again today: does merely the mention of an alternate sexuality automatically make the book adult content–which really means pornography. We can’t have kids thinking about sex, can we? And we certainly can’t have kids reading a book, recognizing the struggle a character is going through as similar, and feeling less alone, now can we? We’ve got to keep those queer kid suicide rates high!

You see, even the homophobes know the truth that they cannot eradicate our existence, and they also know the truth that the only difference between queer people and straight people is who we are sexually attracted to; ergo, even if you don’t talk about what it means but you have a character who identifies as queer–the “queer” difference means kids will either know that queer people exist (THE HORROR!!!) or think about sex.

And certainly, we cannot have anyone under the age of eighteen thinking about sex, can we? Just because most people become obsessed with it after going through puberty doesn’t mean we should educate them properly. Proper education for teenagers about sex and sexuality would mean a drop in teen pregnancies, teen STI infections, and the need for teen abortions. The spurious argument against sex education for teens has always been we’re just encouraging them to have sex. But that’s stupid; their fucking hormones are encouraging them to have sex, no matter what we teach them, and the more we teach them that sex is bad and wrong will only encourage them to do it more–and once they realize it’s actually a lot of fun and nothing bad immediately happened–they will have more of it.

It’s just basic human psychology. Deny someone something and they will want it all the more even if they weren’t interested in it to begin with. Nothing is more desirable than the forbidden.

The smart thing to do is educate them properly about safety, the risks and hazards of having sex at a young age–and this kind of education will also help teach them about finding the language to get help for sexual abuse they may be experiencing.

But oh no! We don’t want them to have sex! Because not educating them about sex and sexuality has worked so well so far, right? Better they find out by looking stuff up on-line or going to porn sites, right? As a sexual health counselor, I am constantly amazed at the things my clients do not know, or how wrong what they think they know is. Every day I see how our educational system fails to prepare us for one of the most important aspects of our lives.

And learning that queer people exist, can live and love and have happy and fulfilling lives, well, that isn’t what these people want for kids. No, if you’re queer, they want you to be miserable and unhappy and suicidal. What could be more Judeo-Christian than that? The rise in people identifying outside the gender/sexuality binary doesn’t mean that prior generations didn’t have those same people existing in them; just that the world and society wasn’t as accepting and understanding then so they had more to lose by coming out, by talking realistically about who they are and what they feel–and it’s scary, very scary. People who do fall into those binaries, who don’t have to worry about what other people will think about who they are and how they identify, shouldn’t be the ones deciding what is real and what isn’t.

And the sad truth is these people are simply terrified of having a queer child, period. So, they figure if they take away anything that might tell their child it’s okay to be queer and to be yourself, their child will instead choose to live in a closet for the rest of their lives and be completely miserable.

Which tells me all I need to know about what kind of parents these people are.

Their love has conditions, which means it isn’t love at all.

I was always under the impression that parents, first and foremost, want their children to be healthy and happy….which is apparently another myth I’ve been gaslit into believing since childhood. #notallparents

When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes

As I mentioned yesterday–these blog post titles taken from the Supremes discography sometimes feel a bit off as I do some Blatant Self-Promotion about my new soon-to-be-released novel #shedeservedit.

I got my first ignorant comment on one of those blog posts yesterday; someone posted a link to a video about “toxic femininity” and how it’s “as bad if not worse” than “toxic masculinity.” Needless to say, I not only didn’t approve the comment but marked it as spam and blocked the user from commenting/reading my blog. For those of you who are new here–I don’t engage with trolls, not do I permit them the energy or the oxygen of allowing their ignorance to be seen by anyone here. This is my blog and I pay for it; therefore I will curate the content here and if you want to troll me, well, it’s just going to earn you a comment marked as spam and get you blocked, so don’t waste your time or energy on me. You may, of course–I cannot stop you, but I won’t engage with you nor will I allow Constant Reader to see your ignorance, so there you have it.

I wrote yesterday, and it felt good to get another chapter down. I only have two more to go and the revisions, and I have to say, pantsing this thing on a tight deadline hasn’t been the easiest way to write this book, but it’s working. I’ve got the plot all worked out now, who the killer is and why, and now all I have to do is cram the resolution into the last two chapters and we are finished, done, ready to go off to the editor with prayers that she likes what I’ve done and doesn’t require a complete overhaul, which is also entirely possible and within the realm of probability–one of the reasons, frankly, that I’ve not signed. a contract to dive straight away into another book when this one is finished; I thought it best to leave my time free just in case. (I am going to start working on Chlorine and Mississsippi River Mischief while waiting for my edits; there’s always something to write, after all–I can also work on the revisions of the novellas in the meantime as well.)

There’s always something…

Today’s BSP is going to focus on writing about small towns, rather than what I’ve been covering (toxic masculinity). The first book I remember reading about a small town that really stands out to me–as an examination of small town dynamics, rather than merely a setting for the story–was Ellery Queen’s Calamity Town, which was, if you are an Ellery Queen fan, the first Wrightsville story. There were several of these novels–the second, I believe, was The Murderer is a Fox–and I enjoyed them all; Queen clearly loved writing about Wrightsville, since he kept returning to the scene of the crimes, as it were, but the best, the true standout for me, was the first: Calamity Town. This book–published well over a decade before Grace Metalious scandalized the world with Peyton Place–also covers the same territory as Peyton Place: scandal and hypocrisy and the paralyzing power of gossip in small town America. Calamity Town remains a favorite mystery novel of mine to this day; I should reread it. It’s plot is ingenious and entirely rooted in human psychology, and it also contains one of the best and most clever misdirections in crime fiction history. It was Calamity Town that made me first start thinking about how small town society is actually a microcosm of American society as a whole, all encapsulated in a small package, and also that made me realize, for the first time, how claustrophobic small towns can be; where everyone knows everyone and you can’t really do anything without someone knowing; and how secrets kept can become very damaging over time. Queen is, at first, struck by the apple-pie Americana of Wrightville…and then he begins peeling back the layers.

Peyton Place, which I found to be far less scandalous than either General Hospital or All My Children by the time I got a copy at a secondhand bookstore in Emporia when I was seventeen or eighteen, also showed me again how claustrophobic small town life could be. Sure, there’s some bad to the point of laughable writing in the book (“your nipples are hard as diamonds”, anyone?) but other than those brief moments, overall it’s a very well-constructed book and a damning indictment on the hypocrisy of American small towns. I also read Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street around the same time for an American Literature class (I still think we should have read Elmer Gantry instead, or It Can’t Happen Here, but I was not in charge of the syllabus), which is also about the falseness of keeping up appearances and worrying what the neighbors think. I find it interesting that “small town American values” are frequently–particularly by conservatives–pointed out as what is the backbone of our country and so on and so forth (part of the entire “cities are BAD” thing we have had going on culturally for decades, if not centuries), but when that veil is peeled back, there is just as much rot and decay as in any “wicked” city. As I pointed out on Susan Larson’s radio show the other day, the vast majority of the soaps were originally set in very small towns, rather than urban centers.

Nobody does small towns quite like Stephen King, and the first time he really addressed small town life was in ‘salem’s Lot–although it can be argued he did a masterwork on small town life with Needful Things–and it was in his tale of small town Maine being overrun by vampires, he also did an incredible job of painting the town, it’s working class citizens and the minutiae of their lives; how circumstances trapped some of them and killed their dreams–and how others never had any dreams to be killed in the first place. The way he interweaves the lives of his small town characters, their relationships and histories and how everything is interconnected is masterful; has anyone ever done a critical analysis of King’s work with small towns? It also falls into this group; what King does with Derry is just as exceptional as his work on Castle Rock and Jerusalem’s Lot in the other works.

I based Liberty Center on Emporia, Kansas, geographically; my town is loosely laid out the same way Emporia is; there’s a small college there, as in Emporia, and there’s a meat packing plant on one side of town that reeks of death and stale blood on the south side of town, and of course, the waterfall on the river on the way out of town heading south and the park that goes with it. Other than that, it’s memory and invention; I’ve not set foot in Emporia in nearly forty years and have no plans to ever do so again. (Likewise, when I write about my fictionalized county in Alabama–it’s loosely based on where my family is from, but I haven’t been there in thirty years and will most likely never go visit again, so it’s all memory and invention for me.) I don’t know if I will write another novel about Kansas–I have some other ideas, of course, don’t I always–but it seems weird to create another fictional small city so similar to Liberty Center, but at the same time it seems even weirder to set another book there after having already done so (although i should probably revisit Sara sometime and see how I did it–and what I called the towns in Kahola County–before deciding one way or the other).

Heavy sigh.

Today I need to write another chapter, and I also need to work on revising a short story as well as writing a promotional article–and of course, there’s the horror that is my email inbox which needs to be dealt with this week once and for all (it’s all relative; answering everything and emptying it out inevitably means generating more emails there; my email responses will trigger emails in response which turns it into a Sisyphean task without end), and today is the men’s US figure skating championships, which naturally I plan to watch so I need to get my writing done before then, don’t I?

So on that note, I head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader.

King of My Heart

I went down a wormhole thought pattern of sorts this morning, triggered by reading a Crimereads essay about spy novels, and their genesis; it mentioned that Rudyard Kipling’s Kim was one of the first spy novels, and I also realized that only had I not read Kim, I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever read Kipling; however, a quick Internet search just not has reminded me that I have, indeed, read Kipling: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, The Jungle Book, Captains Courageous, but I really don’t remember anything about them (let’s be honest, all my memories of The Jungle Book are naturally from the Disney animated film). I may have also even read Just So Stories, but am not entirely sure. I’m sure Kipling’s work does not stand the test of time–just the title of the poem “The White Man’s Burden” made my eyes almost pop out of my head when I came across it this morning–as they undoubtedly reflect the white supremacist view of Imperialism and the need for the British Empire.

On that same note, I feel relatively certain that the M. M. Kaye novels I once enjoyed (Shadow of the Moon and The Far Pavilions) probably wouldn’t hold up well, either.

I always read for pleasure and for enjoyment; to escape the world in which I found myself inhabiting and feeling like a changeling for the most part; I still do, for the most part. I haven’t been paid to write a book review in over a decade; I’ve always felt that as an author myself, there was a conflict of interest in accepting pay to read and critique another author’s work, and there was always, inevitably, the possibility that an honest view on something that didn’t work for me as a reader would be seen as a vindictive move on my part to torpedo another author, out of jealousy or spite or both. There are any number of these reviewers being employed, and paid quite handsomely, by major newspapers, and I don’t want to be one of them. I don’t like writing negative reviews, and if I am reading something I don’t care for, having to finish reading it because I am being paid to write about would inevitably make me resent the book and its author and would thus color the review.

I generally read things I think fall under my purview as a writer–mostly crime novels, some horror now and then, and maybe something every once in a great while, that would be considered literary. Often these are books by writers I already have discovered, or new ones recommended to me by others whose tastes I respect–The Coyotes of Carthage came to me in this way; Lisa Unger was recommended to me by numerous friends; and yes, Paul Tremblay came to me as a recommendation from a friend. I know I need to expand my horizons to improve as a writer, which is why I am not only committed to the Diversity Project (books by marginalized writers) but also to the Short Story Project. The Diversity Project has been a terrific learning experience, and the Short Story Project has helped me become a better short story writer. I’ve been trying to read New Orleans history lately–with a dash of Louisiana thrown in for flavor–in order to get a better sense of the city and state, so that I can write about them both more knowledgeably; plus there is so much inspiration in reading about the past of both city and state! It’s also incredibly humbling to know how little of that actual history I did know, and even though I knew how rich that history was, I had no idea just how much of a gold mine of inspiration and ideas it would prove to be.

Like I said, I tend to read things I think I will enjoy, and if I am not enjoying the experience, I inevitably stop reading. I have started things and put them aside, only to go back to them again and greatly enjoy them; Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts being the best and most recent example of this I can remember; I started it, got several chapters in, and wasn’t feeling it. I went back to it months later and couldn’t put it down, and frankly, after The Cabin at the End of the World, Tremblay is becoming one of my current favorite authors.

So, I’ve been wrong about books before, and I’ve also been wrong about authors before. Hence the dilemma in being a book reviewer, and why I have chosen for many years now to seek extra income by reading for reviews. I enjoy writing about books I enjoyed on here, my blog; that’s part of its reason for existence, and I also curate what I read and write about here. No one chooses for me what I read or what I write about; and I will only review something negatively if the writer is, frankly, long dead; and even then, it’s simply an explanation of why the book didn’t work for me (an example of this latter type was Night Has a Thousand Eyes by Cornell Woolrich; I appreciated the book but there were things about it I didn’t like, that I felt didn’t “play”, but since he is long dead–over fifty years–I wasn’t overly concerned about hurting his feelings….and I have enjoyed other works of his).

I often talk about how my education in what the Academy considers to be classic American literature (British, too, for that matter) is sorely lacking. It’s something that I occasionally wonder about; should I go back and read these so-called classics as decided by a group of people whose opinion I generally don’t respect very much? It’s entirely possible, I know, that books I was forced to read as a teenager in high school and college were actually better than I thought at the time because I loathed being forced to read anything and I despised the way they were taught by pompous pseudo-intellectuals with tenure (I really enjoyed mocking that world in my story “Lightning Bugs in a Jar”, and will probably mine it again at some point as story fodder).

But I can honestly say I went back twice to reread The Great Gatsby only to discover that I loathed it even more than I remembered loathing it the first time; I also spent some time in my twenties trying to read other works by the writers I was forced to read and found that I did, in fact, enjoy some of them. I hated Sinclair Lewis when I was forced to read Main Street in college; I later went back and enjoyed both Elmer Gantry and It Can’t Happen Here very much. I disliked Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise very much, and I loathed the Hemingways I was forced to read (The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms) so much that I just can’t bring myself to read anything else of his. I was very surprised, actually, to find myself enjoying Faulkner quite a bit, and I keep meaning to go back and reread both The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary–but there are also a lot of other Faulkner novels I’ve not read, and probably should. I also despised Tom Sawyer and the other, celebrated Mark Twain short stories I was forced to read; but as an adult greatly enjoyed Puddinhead Wilson, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Life on the Mississippi.

But I am not someone who became a writer because I wanted to have a legacy, or be lionized; I became a writer because I wanted to tell stories, and I wanted to tell the stories that I wanted to tell. I never had any desire to have my work be taught in colleges, or for students to be forced to write papers about my work. I always say that sort of thing isn’t up to me to decide, and it’s never been my aim. If I’m forgotten after I die, well, I won’t be the first.

I justify to myself not reading a lot of literary fiction by saying there simply isn’t enough time for me to read everything that I actually want to read, let alone find the time things people think I should read. But I also have this sense in my mind that perhaps I am missing out on something; I know I’ve read books that have gotten critical acclaim that were more on the literary side and liked them very much and learned from reading them. Colson Whitehead, for example, is simply brilliant while also writing genre fiction–The Nickel Boys and Underground Railroad were stunningly brilliant; I really need to read more of his work–and thinking about Colson Whitehead led me to thinking about, of all people, Cormac McCarthy. I’ve not read McCarthy, but from what I have gathered from what I have heard about his work is it technically is also genre fiction; The Road is a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, after all–a friend whose opinion I respect read and hated the book, so I’m probably not going to go there–so I started going through his canon on the web and I finally settled on one to add to my TBR pile at some point, Outer Dark, because it too sounds like genre fiction. We shall see how that goes, shan’t we?

Laura Lippman often says that genre fiction is literature, and by claiming literary classics as genre (the most common is, of course, Crime and Punishment) we are demeaning the great genre work, which stands on its own without the necessity of claiming Dostoevsky or Faulkner’s Sanctuary as crime fiction (although I do believe Sanctuary is pulpy noir of the best kind). I do agree with her to some degree; as I said, I do think Sanctuary is noir, and an argument could be made that An American Tragedy by Dreiser is as well. (I’ve also pointed out numerous times that The Great Gatsby is really a murder mystery told in reverse) But her point is spot on: genre fiction doesn’t need to claim classics from the Academy in order to be recognized as literature, and claiming those books does make it seem like trying to make fetch happen.

I also like to believe that my best work is still ahead of me.

Of course, that means I actually need to do it.

And on that note, tis back to the spice mines.

Casting a Shadow

And it’s Friday again! Cue the dancing horses.

I have a lot that I want to get done this weekend. I need to get those stories pulled together, and I want to get started on finishing off the Secret Project. Stupidly, I also started writing another short story yesterday, “The Flagellants,” which I am not really sure what it’s going to be about, or how to even finish the stupid thing. (An\d because I am twelve years old, sometimes when I think the title quickly it sounds like flatulence, which is a joke I may make in the story because I am twelve years old.) And yes, I got the idea from the bubonic plague chapter in Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror; during the fourteenth century’s bubonic plague outbreak, the church was already in disrepute and many felt that the plague was God’s judgment on a sinful mankind, so there were some religious cults that sprang up; the flagellants movement was one of these, and it was enormously popular and spread throughout central Europe, primarily Germany. These penitents would march through town and flagellate themselves with whips and cat o’nine tails and knotted ropes, trying to take on the sins of all mankind.

Naturally, I found this interesting, and I really liked “The Flagellants” as a title, and we’re kind of in the midst of a pandemic…granted, we’re not that far into it as of yet, but we’ve already seen ridiculous behavior in the name of Jesus–so far, nothing I’m aware of from other faiths–but I began to think about it some more and wondered, what if this becomes more lethal and lasts longer than anyone is even considering now? The second wave of the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 was much worse than the first, and in the wake of the Great War (aka World War I) and said pandemic there was a huge religious revival in the US during the 20’s–we tend to only think of that decade as flappers and bathtub gin, but that wasn’t all that was going on during that decade (it was also the decade that inspired Sinclair Lewis to write Elmer Gantry, and the decade of Aimee Semple McPherson)…and the old “what if” questions started running through my head, and I remembered the religious fanatics who always protest at Mardi Gras and Southern Decadence…and yeah, that’s kind of how stories get born. I’m not sure where this story is going to go or what it’s going to become–it’s kind of fun and different than anything I’ve written before–and I’m not entirely sure it’s going to end up as a crime story, which makes it even more fun.

I slept really long and well last night, and didn’t want to get up this morning, which was lovely–and a long time coming. It’s been a while since I’ve had such a great night’s sleep, and it was absolutely wonderful. I feel rested and ready to go mine some spice this morning.

As expected, Joey Burrow was the Number One draft pick last night, taken by the Cincinnati Bengals–and I said to Paul, “it’s going to be weird rooting for the Bengals now”–one of the many reasons I don’t get so far into the NFL is it is impossible for me to not root for former LSU players and their new teams to do well; and I really can’t devote more time to the NFL than I already give to the Saints. But after last night, I feel it’s pretty safe to say the Saints are Louisiana’s favorite team, and now the Bengals are our second favorite. I also never pay attention to the NFL draft, but I did last night because I wanted to see how the LSU players would do in it. Five players in the first round, I believe–Joey Burrow, K’Lavon Chaisson, Patrick Queen,  Justin Jefferson, and Clyde Edwards-Helaire (which is a record, I believe, for LSU and one short of the overall record)–and now I need to go read the Advocate to see how the rest of the team did, and where they wound up.

Obviously, I will always love this 2019 team and everyone on it. It’s kind of hard not to, after the dream season they just gifted us with–and it’s going to be a very hard act to follow; every LSU team going forward is going to be compared to this one.

This weekend, I hope to get some more writing done. I didn’t get hardly anything written this week (after having such a great writing weekend last weekend), but I do need to finish revising and polishing these stories that are due, and maybe even work some more on some of these ones that are in progress–I may just keep writing “The Flagellants” and see where it goes, just letting it develop as it goes–and I need to start getting some other stuff prepared to get back to work on. I also want to do some reading this weekend; I’ve really fallen behind on that, and I want to make reading more of a priority; it certainly is a better thing to do with my time than falling into Youtube rabbit holes.

And now back to the spice mines.

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Shame on the Moon

I have, as an almost fifty-six year old gay man, witnessed some history throughout the course of my over half a century on this planet. When I was young, I used to hear about the great wisdom you acquire with age; I’m still waiting for that to happen. I remember when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were shot; I remember the Tet offensive and when the first man walked on the moon. I remember the Watergate break-in, the scandal that followed, and how a newspaper toppled a corrupt presidency that was abusing its power. I remember the Iranian revolution and the taking of American hostage in the embassy in Teheran; I remember the slaughter of Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village in Munich. I remember watching my gay brethren die from AIDS while the political establishment laughed and made jokes about the right people dying; and I remember the Towers falling that beautiful September day in 2001. I watched CNN non-stop while a military coalition liberated Kuwait,  when the Berlin Wall fell,  when Communism in eastern Europe collapsed.

There have been times in my life when I’ve shaken my head over the actions of my government, the ruling of our courts, and at legislation debated and passed by Congress.

But never did I imagine, in my wildest dreams, that I would bear witness to Nazis marching with torches in a college town in support of white supremacy, bigotry, anti-semitism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia in the United States of America in 2017–or that scores of people would be defending them.

Have I been a good ally to the oppressed people of this nation? I don’t know, but I tend to doubt it. I tend to focus, as most people do, on my own rights and that of my community; I’ve spent most of my adult life fighting for my rights as a gay man but have always advocated for people of color and women, because I do recognize that the oppression of one is the oppression of all; that none of us are truly equal until we are all equal. I’ve studied history; I’ve studied civics; I’ve studied the Constitution. The entire point of learning and studying is history is to learn from the mistakes of the past so as not to repeat them.

Sinclair Lewis was an extraordinary social critic and fiction writer who probably isn’t remembered, and studied, as much as he should be in this modern day.  I’ve not read enough of Lewis; most of his canon remains, sadly, unread by me. But I did read Elmer Gantry about ten years ago, and was stunned by how true it was; and how it still applied in so many ways today. Shortly after that I read It Can’t Happen Here, which is one of his lesser known works and considered to be highly flawed in terms of being a novel. The point of the book, written and published in the 1930’s, was that so many Americans of the time didn’t believe what was going on in Italy and Germany could happen in the United States; Lewis, ever the social critic and commentarian, took that as a challenge and titled his book that, and wrote a novel detailing exactly how fascism could rise in the US and take over our government. It was chilling reading it, in the wake of some of the laws and executive orders passed in the wake of 9/11. I don’t really remember much of the story, frankly; the days when I could remember plots and characters and quotations from every book I read have long passed. But it is, I think, due for a reread.

We often wonder how the good German people allowed what happened there to happen. It is easy  for evil to persuade basically decent people to take its side, and how, when things are going well, incredibly easy it is for people to only look at the good and turn their heads away from the bad. The towns near the concentration camps, who claimed they didn’t know what was going on? Bitch, please. You never noticed the smell? You never wondered what that smell was? But, hey, I’m prospering and we don’t have to worry about where our next meal is coming from and how to keep the lights on, and aren’t the streets clean and the trains running on time? I don’t believe those stories we’re hearing about what’s happening to the Jews! And since they’ve been oppressed, look at how much better things are!

That’s how it happens, people.

I will do better. We all must do better. No one is free and equal until we are all free and equal.

In 2006 I was invited to speak at the Virginia Book Festival in Charlottesville. I was given a tour of the town and a tour of the University of Virginia campus; I was shown where Edgar Allan Poe lived when he was a student there and other landmarks. I was not only impressed with how beautiful the town and campus were, by how friendly and welcoming the people who lived there were. I always meant to go back again, to spend more time there–I didn’t get to see Monticello–and it was with horror that I watched the news over the weekend, seeing what was going on in the lovely little town I remembered, appalled and ashamed that this was being broadcast to the entire world.

This is unacceptable. The state of the union is unacceptable.

I have to do better. We all have to do better. As a nation we can do better by our most vulnerable citizens, and we must.

The eyes of history are on us.

Have you ever wondered what you would do if you’d been a German in the 1930’s? What you would do during the Civil Rights era of the 1950’s and 1960’s?

This is your chance to find out who you are as a human being and as an American.

This is Heather Heyer, who gave her life on Saturday to oppose evil. May she never be forgotten.

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