Wednesday and Pay-the-Bills Day has rolled around for the first time in September. I didn’t sleep all that great, but don’t feel groggy at all this morning. However, if I had to I could easily go back to bed and fall asleep all over again. I am slowly starting to lift myself out of the abyss and pull my life back together. Yesterday was a pretty good day, actually. I felt great all day, not tired at all, and was able to get a lot done at the office. I wasn’t even tired when I got home after work, either! Huzzah and hurray! I spent some time getting caught up on the news when I got home, and then read for a while before Paul got home and I went to bed. I don’t know if this is all because of the injection on Monday, but whatever caused it, I am delighted and thrilled it happened. I suspect I’ll be a bit more tired this evening than I was yesterday, but I will happily take it, you know? The fatigue over the weekend was so intense and brutal–I’ve never been so tired it hurt, you know?–and I hope I never experience that again.
I am a bit tired this morning (mostly because of restless sleep and waking up several times during the night), but it’s not that horrible fatigue, which I fucking despise. I feel a little off, but nothing terrible that I can’t deal with, but no promises for this afternoon, you know? I was thinking about ordering groceries to be delivered this evening, but am not sure I shouldn’t just wait until Saturday. I am going to barbecue for the LSU-Florida game–burgers and cheese dogs, the regular tailgating action–and there are an awful lot of great games Saturday–Georgia-Tennessee, Wisconsin-Alabama, and two other games at the same time as LSU, Vanderbilt-South Carolina and Texas A&M-Notre Dame. I do love football season, even as it takes away from my productivity.
At least I enjoy cleaning while the games are on.
The world and country continue to burn to the ground, and social media continues to be filled with bots, grifters, rage baiters, and sad, broken people lashing out in a pathetic attempt to somehow feel better about themselves as American mediocrities and failures. I have very little hope for the future of this country, now that the small-minded hateful bigots who don’t understand the first thing about freedom and liberty are in control. It’s also interesting to see how many Americans are into the whole fascism thing. Sinclair Lewis was very prescient with It Can’t Happen Here, wasn’t he? I also saw some insane shit-posting about To Kill a Mockingbird being racist1, but not for the reasons most people do. No, this empty-minded moron was bitching about the book being racist because it showed an all-white jury wrongfully convicting a Black man for a crime they knew he didn’t committhus making white people look bad.
Excuse the fuck out of me?
As I replied, you’re right–it would have never gotten to trial. He would have been lynched the same night he was accused.
Because that was how it was done in Alabama in the 1930s, and to suggest anything else is a blatant lie.
I also love the MAGA bitch from Georgia who got the proposed Hyundai plant shut down completely, dealing a harsh blow to her own state’s economy and that of the district she is running to represent. If this were an episode of Law & Order, her body would be found and they’d work their way back around to her ignorance and stupidity. I am so tired of the rampant stupidity as the American empire crumbles and dies…this is going to be one of those times future history students will look back on and think but why were they so stupid? Couldn’t they SEE?
I was once that child reading history.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely, lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back tomorrow.
Artist’s rendering of the Temple at Edfu, Egypt
My feelings about To Kill a Mockingbird are very conflicted, as I don’t see it as a great American novel about race the way most white people see it, and that may become an essay at some point. ↩︎
Ah, Wednesday and it’s all downhill for the rest of the week, isn’t it? Huzzah! I feel good this morning, too, more rested and alert than I have been for most of the week. So, this week feels back to normal in that weird way of feeling better later in the week as my body again resets to getting up early every day. I was fatigued again last night when I got home from work, but I wrote for a little while once I was home, and did some chores (the kitchen looks presentable again) before zoning out with The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and the news last night. I also ran an errand after work, picking up my copy of Christa Faust’s The Get Off, the third and probably final book of the Angel Dare series. I loved the first two (Money Shot and Choke Hold), and nobody writes like Christa. If you’ve not read Christa, and love noir, you really can’t go wrong with reading this trilogy. It really is fantastic.
As a general rule, I simply watch the antics of “”book social media” from a removed, slightly bemused distance and don’t get involved, other than a comment about how jaw-droppingly insane the latest controversy on those sites are, and these controversies usually involve the actions of a problematic author and/or publisher. I have my thoughts and opinions about each and every topic in those hashtags and posts that grow heated (remember the fun days of American Dirt? Good times!) but I don’t contribute to them because I don’t see any point. Are there authors that write bigoted, uninformed work that is questionable at best and horrifying at its worst? Are there readers who will embrace those works because said stories confirm their prejudices and values? 100%. Are they all, authors and readers, awful people? Certainly. Will arguing with them on social media do anything other than raise my blood pressure and wreck my day? Not likely. Personally? I don’t want to ever unintentionally offend anyone (unless you’re MAGA, in which case you shouldn’t be reading my work in the first place because you are not my intended audience but if you are reading it, suck it up snowflakes, and fuck your feelings); and I constantly question my choices in my work. My go-to is always if I question it, best to remove it. (Sidebar: I bet the American Dirt author–Jeanine Cummins?– was really happy about the pandemic because it made everyone forget about her and her shitty racist book.) There have been some tempests in this week’s (and last’s) social media teapots1, haven’t there? Sheesh. There was an explosion (again) of homophobia in the m/m writing community, which got people riled up (I love when cishet straight white women inform gay men that books with two men falling in love aren’t for us.) There was another kerfuffle where a romance writer gave her main male character an HEA–just not with the female lead, but another man. Horrors! Needless to say, that also triggered an on-line meltdown, and I am reminded again why I never want to write romance…just like I eschew the y/a publishing community, which is also a snake pit.
I’d rather jump into a piranha-infested river, to be honest. Or be forced to be on a Kardashian television show.2
And yesterday, the “Tori Woods” groomer romance situation blew up on the Internet–and her book, about a “romance” that begins when an adult male is attracted to a three-year-old “but waits for her to grow-up so it’s not child sexual abuse”, is from the same publisher as the last author who wrote racist books and was “canceled” (whatever the fuck that means) deservedly for being a racist piece of shit. Sounds like a publisher issue to me, doesn’t it? I think the publisher has also published problematically racist books before, too. There was some historical romance writer who also outed herself as a racist pos–apparently, people of color only existed in the past to be enslaved or rescued by noble white people–and seriously, how did RWA take so long to burn to the ground in the first place?3
Don’t get me wrong; I still want to write a gay romance novel at some point–and maybe even more than one, honestly. But I’d really rather not get dragged into that on-line community, if I can. (I saw yesterday that someone is publishing a grooming romance–and the grooming started when the girl was THREE. Um…yeah, no thanks.) Did not trying to be a part of the on-line y/a community probably, possibly have cost me some sales? For sure, but at the same time I am really grateful to have my peace of mind.
Peace of mind is priceless.
I also got my assignments for Saints and Sinners/Tennessee Williams Fests, and I am going to be hopping all weekend, it looks like–panels, a tribute reading, the anthology launch–and I will have LOTS of friends in town, too. But this year I took Monday off, too, so I can recover from the weekend and get things done around the house. I’ll also be commuting back and forth so Sparky’s not alone for the whole weekend, and someone needs to feed him, anyway. He is not going to be happy. Paul went to the office yesterday and wasn’t home when I arrived, so Sparky was especially cuddly and needy. I don’t mind, but clearly he doesn’t like being left alone–or puts on a good show after he has been.
My Youtube algorithms, always an interesting mystery, have recently started showing me videos about the classic scifi television program V. I loved V when it originally aired, but when it became a regular weekly series in the 1980s, I stopped watching because I lost interest. I did love the rebooted series, which was fantastic and again ended on a great cliff-hanger. And of course, once I watched one video, it started showing me more. This of course is because I’ve been watching videos about the rise of fascism in Europe between 1918-1939, World War II, and the “America First” movement of that period (newsflash: conservatives were Nazi-adjacent until Pearl Harbor)…and that’s the allegory at play in the series–the Visitors are stand-ins for Nazis, etc. I had grown up believing that it could never happen here…but watching this show made me realize how incredibly easy it is for people to side with their oppressors. It’s something, sadly, that is very human. I also remember a school did a social experiment with fascism, which was made into a TV movie called The Wave, which was again the same thing–the way we can so easily slide into being “good Germans.” I read Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here during the reign of Bush II: Electric Boogaloo, which cemented it even further into my head. I’ve talked before about writing a book that I originally got the idea for in the 1990s, where the queers fill in for the scapegoated minority…interesting, though, that my video research into fascism triggered the algorithm to remind me of V, which was also probably, along with Red Dawn, the biggest influences on that idea.
And on that grim note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a wonderful midweek Wednesday, and I’ll probably be back later or tomorrow.
Although I am really hoping the move to cancel Kim Kardashian and her odious family really takes this time. ↩︎
Please, God, let this be the end of all things Kardashian. Haven’t we suffered enough? ↩︎
Racists working with a gay white man (racist) brought RWA down, remember? ↩︎
I love Stephen King, and have since I first read Carrie when I was thirteen.
I will also go out on a limb and say that while he has written some amazing fiction and novels in the last forty years, the run of novels between (and including) Carrie and Misery in the 1970s and 1980’s was probably one of the greatest runs of incomparable work ever accomplished by any writer in any sub-genre or genre of fiction, period. There wasn’t a single stinker in that run, and even the one I personally dislike ( Pet Sematary) isn’t bad–it’s actually a testament to King’s skill that I’ve refused to reread it since that first time; it made me incredibly uncomfortable in so many ways viscerally that I’ve really never wanted to read it again.
And isn’t that the real point behind horror?
I also saw something recently about how people who suffer from anxiety often rewatch movies/television shows and reread books when they are anxious because there’s comfort in knowing how something ends. It had never occurred to me that this was a thing, but I used to reread books all the time when I was younger, often picking one up and just opening it at random and diving into the story again. I reread most of the earlier Stephen King novels countless times, as I have also reread books like Gone with the Wind and kids’ series books and other particular favorites. I still reread some periodically, like Rebecca and The Haunting of Hill House. When I picked up The Dead Zone to reread it–I realized that I don’t really reread the way I used to when I was younger. On the rare occasions when I thought about it, I figured it was because I don’t have the time and there are so many unread books around the house that I shouldn’t revisit something when I have unread books collecting dust and moldering on the shelves. But reading that about people with anxiety made me recognize myself and I also realized that I don’t reread as much as I used to (or rewatch) because I don’t have as much anxiety as I did when I was younger. (Don’t get me wrong, I still have too much of it for me to be comfortable going forward without doing something for it, you know.)
I’d thought about rereading The Dead Zone in the wake of the 2016 election; I had posted on social media early on during that campaign season, “Is anyone else reminded of Greg Stillson?” But I couldn’t, just as I couldn’t go back and revisit Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here or The Handmaid’s Tale or any of the other great collapse of American democracy novels. But this reread…made me truly appreciate all over again what a literary genius Stephen King actually is–and an American treasure.
By the time he graduated from college, John Smith had forgotten all about the bad fall he took on the ice that January day in 1953. In fact, he would have been hard put to remember it by the time he graduated from grammar school. And his mother and father never knew about it at all.
They were skating on a cleared patch of Runaround Pond in Durham. The bigger boys were playing hockey with old taped sticks and using a couple of potato baskets for goals/ The little kids were just farting around the way little kids had done since time immemorial–their ankles bowing comically in and out, their breath puffing in the frosty twenty degree air. At one corner of the cleared ice two rubber tires burned sootily, and a few parents sat nearby, watching their children. The age of the snowmobile ws still distant and winter fun still consisted of exercising your body rather than a gasoline engine.
Johnny had walked down from his house, just over the Pownal line, with his skates hung over his shoulder. AT six, he was a pretty fair skater. Not good enough to join in the big kids’ hockey gamesyet, but able to skate rings around most of the other first-graders, who were always pinwheeling their arms for balance or sprawling on their butts.
Now he skated slowly aruond the outer edge of the clear patch, wishing he could go backward like Timmy Benedix, listening to the ice thud and crackle mysteriously under the snow cover farther out, also listening to the shouts of the hockey players, the rumble of a pulp truck crossing the bridges on its way to U. S. Gypsum in Lisbon Falls, the murmur of conversation from the adults. He was very glad to be alive on this fair, winter day. Nothing was wrong with him, nothing troubled his mind, he wanted nothing…except to be able to skate backward, like Timmy Benedix.
So begins the prologue to The Dead Zone, a King classic that doesn’t get nearly the respect it probably should–especially in wake of the 2016 election. Johnny does, in fact, learn how to skate backwards, but is so excited about it he doesn’t notice he is heading right into the hockey game, where he gets hit broadside by a teenager and sent sprawling, hitting his head on the ice and knocking himself out. As he slowly comes back to consciousness, he starts muttering things that make no sense to the worried kids and adults gathered around him, including saying to “stop charging it’ll blow up”. But then he wakes up, is fine, goes home and doesn’t even tell his parents what happened (imagine a child knocking himself out and the parents not even being told today–never happen). A few days later one of the men’s car battery is dead, he jumps it–and it blows up in his face; only no one remembers the things Johnny was muttering; everyone’s forgotten about it.
The second part of the prologue introduces us to the other main character of the book, or the person who is fated to have the biggest impact on John’s existence, which also begs the question of fate and destiny; these two men’s lives are going to intersect, and the rest of the book follows their lives–primarily focused on Johnny’s, with the occasional swing over to see what’s going on with Greg Stillson and his climb to power and success. That prologue introduction to the traveling Bible salesman in Oklahoma who kicks a dog to death lets us know who he is right from the very start–he’s the bad guy, the reason all these things are happening to Johnny so their lives will cross.
Johnny’s story has three acts: first, the car accident that leaves him in a coma for five years (and introduces us to him, his love interest Sarah, and his parents) and inevitably ends with him catching the Castle Rock Strangler, using the abilities that he woke up from the coma with; the second, which concludes with the vision about the graduation party ending in fire and mass death; and the third, where he realizes he is the only person who can stop Stillson’s political rise, the country’s descent into fascism and a final cataclysmic nuclear war (which was an every day reality for us all back when this book was written, by the way).
The most interesting character to me, always, from the story of The Trojan War (I loved mythology and ancient history as a child) was Cassandra, the princess who was given the gift of prophecy accidentally (her ears were licked by one of Apollo’s temple snakes; he cursed her by having no one believe her and this frustration drove her mad); I always wanted to write from her perspective. John Smith is a modern-day Cassandra, a young man who unwillingly was given the gift to see the future as well as have psychic visions, and his story plays out very similarly to Cassandra’s, and asks the big question: if you had the knowledge and foresight to stop Hitler in 1932, even if it meant killing him, would you do it? The personal good vs. the collective good?
I thoroughly enjoyed this reread, and it definitely holds up, even if it is a time capsule of the 1970s, which also made it a big more fun.
(Oh, and that fall he took as a child? While it is never really explained where his abilities come from, King implies that that first head injury awakened the talent in him; the later head injury and coma woke it up again and gave it more power.)
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.
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.
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.
Queer and Loathing in America 